It's human nature. Everyone loves getting something for free. Musicians and record labels can use this behavioral truth to increase traffic to their websites and generate qualified leads.
Not everyone who visits a website is ready to make a purchase. In many cases, people are just browsing. So even if the website is the main portal through which customers buy your music (or other merchandise), an equally important purpose of the website is to generate leads.
Creating an ezine or newsletter is a common "freebie." It certainly works on this site.
Subscribers opt in, which means they provide minimal personal information in order to receive the newsletter. Each new subscriber becomes another lead. The result over time is a large mailing list of qualified prospects. In addition to the newsletter, business owners email announcements of new products or services to this custom-made pool of potential buyers.
But you're a musician or doing something involving the music business, right? If you have music you can give away, that may be even more powerful to get people to sign up for your mailing list.
Another benefit of offering "freebies" is the valuable market information it will provide for you. A significant response to an offer suggests the item is a hot topic among qualified buyers. Such data can be useful in driving new product development for the business. Remixes, live recordings, etc.
Marketing experts have noted one downside of the free offer, the possibility of attracting people who solely want the "freebie" but are not interested in purchasing anything in the future. One way to decrease the likelihood of this is to make the free offer enticing to those in the market for the products and services offered for sale, but unappealing to others. A direct seller, for example, could offer a free item to anyone who buys a t-shirt (or other merchandise).
But it's just a download with no physical cost, so who cares? Give it away and don't worry about it.
A growing internet trend is to offer visitors a free membership to the website's online community. Membership entitles the user to access restricted areas of the site, publish a profile, and interact with other members of the community. Usually only a basic amount of information is required to join, such as name and email address.
This is great for acts with an already established following. Have a section where fans can interact, trade recordings, share photos from gigs, etc.
Industry estimates show that response rates triple when a "freebie" is offered as incentive for prompt action, effectively lowering the business owner's cost per lead substantially. Even if the free gift increases the total expense of the campaign, the higher volume of qualified leads will result in higher sales volume, thus offsetting the additional expense.
But as I said above-- just give away a music download. It's more or less free for you to do that, so don't get caught up with what you're "losing." Think about what you're gaining by getting more people on your mailing list and more people signed up to your online community.
