Selling at Shows
The cheapest, simplest, and most successful CD sales usually come from selling your albums at shows. You're on stage, you're playing live, it's the most natural time that folks would want to buy your music.
You should have someone run a store for you while you're performing. That way, you can announce the CD from on stage and go back to playing. If you can't get anyone to run your store, then you'll have sell them from on stage or after the show.
Don't forget to announce that you have music available for sale!
You should not only announce that you have music for sale, you should do it many times throughout a show. Some people just need that reminder, or that extra push to get them to make the purchase. Effective marketing is based on repetition. Don't repeat it after every song, but definitely remind people in the middle and end of each set. If you feel embarrassed repeating yourself like that, remember that some people might have just walked into the room and need to know where they can buy your music.
Below are a few ideas for making selling at shows more effective:
Credit Card Sales
Normally, sales at shows are cash only. There are ways for independent bands to perform credit card sales. If you'd like the ability to do this at shows, we recommend using CD Baby's credit card program, which we have used. For a little money, they give you a credit card swiper and some receipts to swipe it on. Although, keep in mind that they also take a small cut of every sale to handle the credit card transaction.
A lot of people at bars waste all of their cash drinking beer. We're all for that, of course! The problem is, that leaves them with nothing to buy your CDs. A credit card swiper is a good way to fix this problem.
Digital Music at Concerts
If you have someone to run your store, and can bring a laptop to the concert, you can sell digital music to people at the show. Advertise to your fans on your website or mailing to bring their iPods or MP3 players to the show.
Just rip your music onto MP3 files, and bring a laptop to your show with some standard cables, including a USB cable and an iPod cable. You should also get iTunes and have it ready to go on the laptop so that you can accommodate iPods.
You can probably afford to charge less than the price of a CD to do this, because you don't have to actually duplicate any CDs. Doing something novel like this can get even more people interested in buying your music. And a lot of people bring their players wherever they go, so you might even be able to make sales to walk-ins to your shows.