Box set chronicles

Janie

In April I decided to put together an uploadable and downloadable version of a box set. It seemed like a good way to pass the time during a pandemic.

It makes sense to start with the contents of the box set. It’s a pretty good representation of my life from the ages of 14 through 39. I just turned 40 in September.

One big part of the box set is my awful years between 14 and 24. The main reason why I wrote hundreds of songs then is that I expected to destroy myself, so I was trying to leave a record of my life behind.

Another part of the set is my post-rehab songwriting era from 25 through 35. I still had the same mental problems, but some great therapists told me that I was normal for my circumstances. I didn't solve my problems, but I learned ways to cope with them without being self-destructive. During the last few years I've barely written any songs.

There are more than 400 complete songs in the box set, but counting the different versions of the songs there are more than 1000 tracks for customers to sort through.

I also added a section for incomplete sort-of-songs. If a fragment had something worthwhile, then I was OK with adding it to that section of the box set. I just chose a few hundred of the best fragments.

There are hundreds of hours of video in the box set. Most of the video is based to the songs, but there are some short films included that are only marginally connected to music.

I added a lot of art and photography and writing to the box set. During the past decade I’ve traveled hundreds of thousands of miles around the U.S. The writing and photography is my record of that.

Now I’ll explain the sales part of the project. Bill Hicks used to do a vicious rant about marketing, so I’ve always considered his opinions when I’ve sold anything, but I still have to sell in order to sell.

Ray Wylie Hubbard says that there are day people and night people, and the job of the night people is to get the day people’s money. That’s a pretty good summary of my attitudes toward sales.

My box set would probably make zero dollars on Amazon or Spotify. I’m extremely obscure so I have to be extremely specific about sales. My sales strategy is based on geography.

Experimentation is my specialty, and when running experiments I shoot for big goals. I don’t see much point to running small-scale experiments that can’t make much money.

For the box set I went with a $25 price. To some extent I’m competing against an unlimited amount of free music online, but some people will pay $25 for just one vinyl album. I thought I could get the $25.

I went with the goal of selling 200 box sets per town in 200 different towns. If you do the math then you can see that the equation amounts to a nice even $1,000,000.

I’m not saying that I necessarily expected to make a million bucks from the box set. My attitude was just that it would be a lot of fun to try. There didn’t seem to be any risk involved, except maybe to my ego.

It helped that I had a crew of teenagers who wanted to help. We made 200 websites so we could put up a customized website for each town. We also made one separate website to host the box set.

Each town has its own social-media ecosystem. We contacted people in each town who already had a lot of local followers. In each town we found someone, or several people, who agreed to help.

There’s not a lot of work involved with the help. The people just post stuff for us, including a link, and the people are already posting a wide range of stuff anyway, so they’re just doing what they do anyway.

The most important thing that I’ve learned in my self-produced music career is that a lot of people love to help me. Many people almost jump out of their shoes in their eagerness to help.

Once we had the websites in place, and once we had local people on board, the fun and games began. That’s when we had to find out if we could really make 200 sales per town in 200 different towns.

There are two main advantages to having 200 websites. For one thing we were able to test out a lot of options in different places. We learned fast that way. Certain options worked much better than the rest.

The most interesting part of the 200 websites is that each one of them is customized for a specific town, so the people in the town naturally wonder if the box set is from someone local. I never address that.

The people in one town have no way to know that we’re doing the same in 199 other towns. They might know about a few of the other towns, but those towns are most likely near them anyway.

I don’t mind admitting that there is a lot of psychological trickery within sales. Some of the manipulation is intentional, but a lot of it is just an incidental side-effect of testing lots of options.

The strangest thing about sales to me is that I frequently have no idea why certain things work. When I say something one way then people buy, and when I use different words then nobody buys.

It’s obvious to me that when people buy the box set they are buying more than the contents of the set. They’re buying an overall picture of the world that’s contained within my background story.

To some extent it’s accurate to say that the people are buying me for the bargain price of $25, but really they are just buying one version of my life story. I have one of the stranger background stories around.

So far I haven’t made $1,000,000 from my strategy to make $1,000,000, but the goal hasn’t changed, and I’m pretty sure that I’ll get to it. There is a lot of power in having an extremely specific goal.

This post is just an overview of the project. For now I’m still focused on the original 200 towns, but the same thing will work in other towns too, so I might keep adding more towns for several decades.

One last issue to explain is that my mental issues are still significant. One of them is something called avoidant personality disorder. I avoid people as much as possible because I know that I’m inferior. So far I've never met anyone who I haven't felt inferior to.

Another one of my issues is called depersonalization disorder. I’ll just say that I’m not at all comfortable with my self-identity. I have a hard time being me. It’s all an offshoot of extreme PTSD.

When playing live I learned early on that I could partition a part of myself and send that person out to do my job in public for me. Selling a box set from home is so much easier on my personality.

With that said I will add that I’m definitely not interested in answering any questions, but there’s a good chance that later on I will update certain angles of my sales adventures.

For now I'll just say that I would buy a box set from certain people here. You might want to think about putting your entire life into a package that can be sold. It's really scary, but it's also fun.

The internet is a giant business playground. I'm a big fan of a business concept that I call easily-multiplied-profit. I just focus on what works in one town, and then I multiply that by 200.

CracklePot

Damn, this is a very interesting post.
I need to take some time to digest the different stuff you are talking about, sales vs. bio.

Poppadocrock

Cool ideas.

JohnnyGoodyear

I actually hope (in some ways) that this is a short story and I wish (if it is) that I'd written it.

Poppadocrock

I was a salesman for many years, there is a definite art, maybe a somewhat cold and calculated art, but art none the less, of linguistics involved. The way everything is worded and comes across, is very important. I could probably write a novel on sales but there are a million sales resources available. It also all depends on the product/service you have as well as the image/vibe of the company behind that. sales can be very interesting in terms of understanding the human mind, the psyche, behaviors, motivations, etc... especially in a place like the US where consumerism is big part of our culture.