[BROADTIME LABEL UPDATE ] MAY 22, 2020 - SALES GROWTH + BIG UPDATE!🎙
Greetings to all our Record Industry friends.
Here is hoping that everyone is staying safe, as various places around the country begin to open up. Be careful this holiday weekend. The past couple of months have been so crazy. It's an era for the record books. As far as our platform, Tuneportals, goes, we have seen incredible growth. While stores have struggled with "stay at home orders", we are happy that we are able provide the services to support the incredible growth in online sales and to help everyone to continue selling music.
Broadtime has really been working overtime to evolve and to help as many stores as possible. Our growth during this time, in platform sales and adding in MANY new record store customers takes what we do to new levels. We have also been working towards marketing goals and innovations to better serve labels with modern and creative solutions. Stay safe! Music Matters!
Cheers,
Jon
1. Incredible Growth - Online Sales
2. Incredible Growth - New Store Websites
3. Animation - Splash Pages + Isbell Story
4. Soundscan Reporting
5. Supporting Record Stores - Preorder Management
6. Broadtime Program Changes
7. PlayARt Titles and Update
8. NEW CHARTS FUNCTION- May Week 1 + April 2020 ___________ 1. Incredible Growth - Online Sales 💰💰💰 March, April and our current month have seen a tremendous growth in e-commerce. Of course, with stores and consumers sheltered at home and stores being closed, we would expect an uptick, but we have experienced a much more dramatic growth in sales. We are so happy that we're able to provide a much-needed source of income to stores (and labels) during this unprecedented time. Broadtime stores saw an overall volume of over 15K records sold in the month of April and we are tracking towards a 10K month for May. This was buoyed by incredible sales of, Jason Isbell - Reunions. Having many additional new Records Stores has also been an incredible adventure and help. I'm not sure that anyone knows for sure what a post pandemic economy will look like, but we feel encouraged that music fans passion remains and they are learning to embrace e-commerce with their local independent record store. Fans are learning that ANY record may be preordered or purchased and shipped to their door from the local neighborhood store (and not Amazon). This is good for Indie stores, good for artists + labels, and good for communities.
2. Incredible Growth - New Store Websites With input from AEC and our Record Store Day mailings, many new record stores have become aware of the services we provide. Being able to drop ship during this time has been a life saver for many people. Incredibly, we have added nearly 50 new customers and are currently running nearly 100 record store websites. Here is a list and logos of stores we are working with currently. These folks have been amazing!
3. Animation + PlayARt + Splash Pages + Isbell Story = New Feature One of the things that is BRAND NEW that came into play with Jason Isbell, is the Splash Page. This is a design(ed) page that users encounter when they first go to their site that usually has a CTA (call to action) along with a button to "let me in" to go to your normal home page. You may still view the experience by going to one of websites and /Splash. (i.e. https://plan9music.com/Splash) We had never utilized this feature for all our customers before, as it's a pretty big product placement. Because the story, the sales, and favor that Jason was doing for Indie retail, utilization of this Splash feature made sense. When we deployed, we checked with stores first, as every store has the ability via a checkbox in their admin to turn it off if they wish. We had it live for 48 hours and it didn't go up until after we had started blocking the indie LP, so during that time it drove an additional 500 sales of the Black LP before we needed to block Preorders again. Animation. It is worth noting that the inspiration for this solution came from the "cover art animation" that we created for PlayARt. PlayARt of course is our app for bringing album covers to life. It really shows how the creation of these very dynamic and engaging cover animations may be utilized for multiple digital marketing touchpoints for the album. In addition to utilization in PlayARt, animation of the cover: • May be converted to a Splash page Broadtime is motivated to create these animations for you!
4. Neilsen Soundscan Reporting
In the past, Broadtime has relied upon stores to do their own reporting for Soundscan sales. Many of our stores report their own sales and this seemed to make the most sense. Now that we are moving so much volume through the platform, we are looking to change that. We have built out reporting to Soundscan for online sales for all Broadtime customers. Initially, we started reporting last week which included the Indie early Jason Isbell, which, incidentally, beat out Tool for our all-time record of sales on a single title. One of the challenges for us is understanding that some sales are fulfilled by AEC and some of the online orders are filled by the store directly. For our purposes, we need to report all online sales except where we coordinate with stores that already report online sales for themselves. Stores already reporting their online sales to Soundscan will not be included in our reporting. All of our customers have a reporting ID for sales, and we continue to add and create IDs for new customers. It's interesting to note that our internal sales reporting includes preorders when they happen and the Soundscan counts them the week of street date release. This was taken into account.
5. Supporting Record Stores - Preorder Management Preorder Management. Overall, Sales in general, and Preorders in particular, have been absolutely incredible in volume for everyone. We are thrilled to drive this portion of the business. Preorders are about 1 out of every 4 items ordered on the Tuneportals platform of Broadtime stores. When labels provide the setup info ahead of the public announce, we are able to hide the details programmatically to make them live at the date and time of the announcement. We are able to provide the URL's in advance so that "Buy from an Indie Store" buttons may be part of the initial announcement (to the world) of the record. This drives tremendous success and is rewarded with product placement on recordstoreday.com and the Broadtime Tuneportals powered stores. EXAMPLE: Like Jason Isbell: He links here from his site: https://orcd.co/reunions
Which has an indie storefinder on Recordstoreday here: https://recordstoreday.
If a title is super limited, we are able to manage appropriately disabling preorders. This is achieved through good communication with you and with AEC. We can turn them off globally and pivot to a non-indie version when we know they are sold through or out to prevent allocations. Let's keep driving preorder success for everyone! 6. Broadtime Program Changes
While it's true that we have nearly doubled the number of record stores on our platform in the past couple of months, we are not making any changes at this time to our pricing. Broadtime made changes at the first of the year to reflect growth in stores and the bundling of Level 1 PlayARt with our programs.
What we ARE CHANGING going forward is we are no longer offering Tour Support as we have in the past. This has proved to be too much labor and time for what we were expending to make and place digital assets for every market. Add in the fact that most tours have been drastically altered, it just became too much. HOWEVER, in its place we are offering to run our standard program for an additional two weeks for $200. The two weeks can be chosen at later dates to align with a tour or be applied to extend the program at the time of release. We believe this drives the greatest value for labels and Broadtime resources.
7. PlayARt - Titles and Update 90 Albums and counting As we shared above regarding the Splash page, we continue to see greater adoption of PlayARt for experiencing albums in a whole new way. The animations created for album covers may also be used in new and creative ways for digital marketing on our sites, social media and other platforms. We have activated around 90 titles and they are designated with a PA symbol on all the websites that we operate to let consumers know of the feature.
You may view some of the featured titles at https://playart.ai
WE STRONGLY BELIEVE THAT WITH CUSTOMER EDUCATION THIS WILL HELP SELL MORE RECORDS!
LAUV - PlayARt Preview exerience - https://vimeo.com/user12183833/review/392555800/9c362362ad
The list of titles with Cover art that can be scanned (or virtually placed in your room) using PlayARt can be found in the Genre on store websites and on the PlayARt website. We are partnering with a few stores to explore ways to communicate with customers about the new way to interact with albums.
https://[STORE DOMAIN]/Genre/694857 i.e. https://plan9music.com/Genre/694857
Broadtime is encouraging sharing the list of titles, follow and interact with our social media and generally join in the fun of bring albums to life with bonus content by sharing this experience with your shoppers.
Here is a Video of the Experience of a PlayARt album - Halsey https://vimeo.com/user12183833/review/393753863/70ef006420
Titles: https://playart.ai
8. CHARTS - May Week Ending 5-14-20 + April 2020
In the past, we have only really had listening station preview charts. As part of our extended work on Reporting internally as well as SoundScan. We are now able pull our charts for any reporting period for online sales as well as mobile/kiosk previews. Thanks everyone, happy selling! |
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