Posted on 16 April 2011

I’m a backer of the local musicians. So I thought I’d let you know about an interesting promotion going on with one of the more popular PG groups, Cera. From their Facebook page:

Hi! For the first time ever, our latest EP, swans, is available for streaming online in its entirety! Incidentally, you can also buy the entire thing online at whatever quality you want (even FLAC!) for a dang ol’ tasty price of $5 RIGHT NOW! Head to http://cera.bandcamp.com/ to get on that!
Don’t wanna spend that much? Well, help yourself — and us! 🙂 — out by inviting all of your friends to be a fan of our page! If we get 650 fans, you will only have to pay $4! For 750 fans, $3! If you guys do some truly wicked stuff and we get 950 fans, everybody can have the album for $1! One freakin’ dollar!
Y’know what, we’ll take it one step further, and say that if we get 950 fans, we’ll just straight up give away ten free downloads.
To sum it up:
650 fans: $4
750 fans: $3
950 fans: $1
Lastly, we’re going to be keeping an eye out, and anybody that has statuses that read something like “yo check out this sick band @cera, the more people that like them, the more of a discount you get on their EP!” will be entered into a draw to win some of our next batch of merch. A few lucky people will win some free swag just for pimping us!

It’s not new to write about how awareness and fans have become the new commodity in the music industry, and the recorded music is less a product than a promotion for the live show. Cera’s a band that I think can benefit from this given their live show experience. They’ve got 566 fans as I write this, be interesting to see how well this plays out. Incidentally, one of the band’s members posted an article from New Music Strategies called “Should I Be Worried About Piracy” recently. From it:

1) People who share your music are recommending you to people who respect their taste and opinion;
2) The vast majority of people who have unauthorised copies of your music would not have ordinarily paid for it anyway;
3) Do you really want for people who cannot afford your music to be prevented from ever hearing it?

Good advice.

Filed under: music, Prince George