Digital Sales are Fee-Free for May

We're very happy to announce that for the entire month of May, all digital sales through stores will not be charged our 5% service fee. Sell as much as you want, and your balance won't be affected. Below are a couple of ideas we had for how to utilize this no fee month.

The simple move would be to create a category for your digital products, and promote it at the top of your theme. You can do this by going to Storefront, Pages, New Link To External, and then create a link to the category you created. Make sure you check the box at the bottom so it shows off the link in your navigation.

Another great idea involves livestream recordings. Right now doing livestreams and selling tickets to them is a great way to entertain your fans while they're stuck at home, as well as make up for some of the losses suffered from canceled tours. Well what if you took the recording of that livestream and gave it to a sound engineer? They could create a cleaned up version for you to sell as a digital product. While it won't be recording studio quality, it'll be better than what your fans heard, and I bet a lot of people would love to hear that.

For further explanation of how to post a digital product, please see this help doc. Good luck everyone and stay safe.

Ten Years Later

When Limited Run launched back in November of 2009, we just wanted to put something out there for people to use and hopefully find helpful. For some reason though, everyone who used the platform didn’t say “oh yeah this is helpful.” They said, “This is totally changing the way I sell music and merch to fans.” That definitely gave us some pause. When you start a project for fun, or the love of building something, you just hope you’ll change your own life. You never think it’ll change other people’s lives too. But that’s exactly what happened. We set out to make our own lives better, and millions of people came along for the ride.

Limited Run has grown every single year we’ve been in business. We’ve taken zero investment, and we’ve done it with only 2 people. It’s a feat rarely seen in this industry. But we’re very quiet about it. We don’t post on Twitter, or send out tons of newsletters, or even write many blog posts. We don’t look for the spotlight. We don’t email news sites asking for articles to be run about us. We don’t advertise. We also don’t talk about the hurdles we’ve had to jump, or the people that have tried to hurt us, or the bones that needed to heal. We just do our thing, and users trust that the platform will operate at a higher level each year. That’s an incredible relationship.

What does it take to be in business for over 10 years? You must listen to your customers, look for opportunities, take big risks, and finally, always have a backup plan for when those risks don’t pay off. If you do all that, you’ll have a better than average chance of succeeding. But what does it take to just “be in business”? The desire to put yourself and your product out into the world. Sounds easier than all that other stuff, but it isn’t. This soap box derby only needs a single kick to get going, but that kick seems to take every ounce of strength you have.

Here’s to the next 10 years. Thanks everyone.

ShipStation Integration

It's been a long time coming, but we finally released our ShipStation integration. If you don't know what ShipStation is, it's the best way to manage sales from multiple sources. For instance, if you have products on eBay, Amazon, and Limited Run, ShipStation's will allow you to see all the orders from those sources, in a single dashboard. They also work with packing and postage companies like Endicia, so you can immediately get the package ready to ship.

We highly suggest checking out ShipStation. Especially if you're running stores on multiple platforms.

If you have any specific questions, please get in touch. Thanks Everyone.

How To Report To SoundScan

It’s been nearly 3 years since we released SoundScan reporting, and during those 3 years we’ve reported a whole bunch of amazing releases. A ton of which were Top 200 releases (humble brag). But even though we have so many people using our SoundScan app, and reporting to SoundScan on a daily basis, we still have a lot of people that don’t. This is why we wanted to lay out a comprehensive way to do this. It costs very little, and with our automatic app, it’s incredibly easy to do.

What is SoundScan?

We should probably explain what SoundScan is and how it works, before we dive straight into the weeds. SoundScan is the music sales arm of Nielsen. Nielsen, of course, is a global information and sales tracking company. It’s almost like analytics for product sales. But SoundScan can only track the sales of your release, if you tell them what it is. This is where UPC and ISRC codes, come into play.

UPC = Universal Product Code

ISRC = International Standard Recording Code.

The first thing you must do, if you want to report your sales to SoundScan, is get a code. If you want to report a digital and/or physical album, you need a UPC. You can get this code from a number of different places. The best place is whoever you’re using to get your physical release manufactured from. But there’s a million other places too, just do a Google search.

Let’s Talk About Confusing Things

After you obtain the UPC, you still need to tell SoundScan you have it. This is where a lot of confusion starts to take place. Many people don’t realize you need to register that code with SoundScan. Or sometimes they forget. If you don't do that, they will have no idea that you're releasing an album. Here's the kicker: We don't know that you didn't register it, so we're going to report it anyway. That makes for a very exciting investigation. The code must be registered at least 2 weeks prior to the release date of the album. You can register the code here.

More confusion happens when SoundScans rules for reporting aren’t followed. For instance, you can’t sell an album for less than $3.49. I think you can understand why. Lets say you put your album out for $0.01, and then offered free shipping. You’re probably going to sell a lot more than if you sold them for $3.49 + Shipping. Not many artists could subsidize a release like that, so it’s against SoundScan’s policy to do so. Another important point about this. $3.49 counts discounts. Meaning, you can’t sell an album for $10, and then give out a $9 discount code, and then report those sales to SoundScan. They won’t be counted.

Want to hear about even more confusion? We get a lot of emails from people saying they sold X amount of copies of their new album, but when they received the email from us stating how many of those sales were reported to SoundScan, the amount was significantly less. The reason it’s less is SoundScan only counts sales taking place in the US. Meaning if you sell a copy to someone in Germany, it won’t be reported. Please remember this before you freak out.

Lastly, we want to link you to our help doc on how to report using Limited Run. If you follow our doc, you shouldn’t have an issue. But if you do have an issue, please contact us and we’ll point you in the right direction.

v3 Features Are Now Available

As many have probably noticed, v3 is available and if you head into your dashboard, you'll see an overlay that asks you if you want to enable it.

Thanks for everyone's patience this year. We know it took a while for this to come out, but we didn't want to put anything out there, that wasn't ready. We tested everything extensively, with a whole ton of stores. If someone thought a feature didn't feel right, we went back and changed it. If someone thought a feature didn't work right, we went back and fixed it. We were on a mission to make v3 features perfect.

We have some more great features coming to v3 this year. Maybe even as soon as next week.

If you have any specific questions, please get in touch. Thanks Everyone.