Krister Axel

Quarterly.

It ain’t much, but it is something. Now if I could just grow this by a factor of 100 or so, I should be able to retire comfortably in Thailand somewhere.

I’ve been playing with Codea, a Lua-based iPad app that allows you to make your own iPad games. My game currently takes about 8 seconds to win, which is not much, but really I’m just messing around with things until I get the hang of it. I like Codea because Lua is a really simple scripting language with decidedly few curly brackets – thumbs up for that – and it ships with a bunch of sprites you can use. It’s also pretty easy to get the Lua files off your iPad (using iExplore) for backup, and you can add your own png sprites by just putting them in a directory with a pinfo file and uploading them to your iPad. Sweet!

It’s fascinating, the way you can target the presentation of your music these days. Granted, it is a small segment because I can’t afford to bankroll a huge promotion but the results are pretty telling.

As long as I target correctly, I can achieve above 95% approval from my audience. Why does that matter? It means every marketing dollar I spend can be like a laser pinpointed on the listeners that will care the most.

98 Users listened to the whole track, and of those Users, 2 Loved the track

98 of 103 listened to the whole song. That is 95.15 percent of people who have never even heard of me will listen to a whole song of mine and accept me into their playlist.

Here are the similar artists:

Iron & Wine
Damien Rice
Elliott Smith
Nick Drake
David Gray
Ryan Adams
Mike Doughty
Joe Henry
Chris Whitley

with the top 6 (in bold) responsible for almost all of the matches.

Not a single person banned the track, which just means that the few who did not listen to the whole thing were still not averse to hearing it again.

I have seen this kind of success with a few of my songs, in terms of fitting into a certain genre well enough to have such great possibilities for a targeted audience. These results are from lastfm, but I think they could easily be reproduced anywhere that keeps track of listener preferences – places like Spotify, Pandora, and even iTunes.

So that previous link for East of Hollywood got messed up by Feedburner, so here it is again! To all my friends. Awesome guitar solo by Bart Ryan. High quality mp3 (at over 256k I believe).

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Thanks Neil and Stella we had an amazing time at your wedding. We look forward to many more adventures. Also, thanks John and Alice for being such great partners in crime.