Selling CD's and Vinyl in 2025?
Physical music sales remain viable with Free + Shipping & Handling campaigns, leveraging sales funnels to increase average cart value and build a loyal customer base beyond initial purchases.
By Andrew Southworth
Hey friends!
Today we’re going to talk about some Meta ad campaigns i’ve run recently for selling CD’s and Vinyl! This is an action packed, detailed edition of Music Marketing Monday so strap in…
If you’ve been around in my ecosystem for a while you might remember a few years ago I did a YouTube series covering my own explorations of selling physical music through sales funnels and ads.
I sold 800+ CD’s in 2022 using a Free + Shipping & Handling (FSH) campaign and actually profited when all was done when factoring in the tail of recurring orders from fans in the year that followed.
Recently i’ve launched a slew of this exact type of FSH campaign and today i’m going to give you a peek behind the curtain!
What is Free + Shipping & Handling?
Free + Shipping & Handling, which we’ll call FSH going forward, is a sales / marketing strategy where you give something away for ‘free’ but you bake the entire cost into the cost of the shipping.
In this case we’re giving away a CD for free, but charging $7.95 for shipping. The CD itself cost less than $2 and the shipping too, in our case it’s about $3 for the CD + Shipping. This means there is about $5 of margin in the shipping so that we don’t lose money.
Keep in mind we also have to pay for packing materials, credit card processing fees etc. So more like $4 per sale of margin.
BUT, if we’re going to run ads to this page we can’t rely on $4 of margin. Our cost per conversion will be higher than this almost all of the time. This is where we get into the concept of a funnel…
The Sales Funnel
A funnel is similar to a store, but instead of letting people go and look at items they want and piece it together themselves, we’re carefully curating their purchase experience and making offers along the way.
Look at this page (for the sake of client anonymity i’m going to use examples from my own catalog, but the data I go over later will be real data!):
This is a cart that offers a free CD if someone pays for the shipping. But we also have something called a bump offer offering them the digital downloads of the instrumental version of the album for $5.
BTW, the funnels shown in this newsletter were all made using FanFunnels. This is my all-in-one sales funnel, website builder, online store, email / sms marketing and more platform.
Everything i’m showing here could also be done in MusicFunnels, my other all-in-one platform. Both have free 14-day trials, so if you need software to do this see which one fits your style best!
You could of course also use Wordpress + FunnelKit, Shopify + Zipify, ClickFunnels, Thrivecart and many other options. But my options are drastically cheaper than all of those ;)
On top of that I also have something called a one-click-upsell on the next page. Meaning, AFTER they check out i’m asking if they want to upgrade their order (do you want fries with that?).
I already know they like CD’s, because they just bought one. So here i’m offering them 3 more CD’s for $17, which is a GREAT deal considering a full price CD is $15.
In my funnel I had another upsell step, and I experimented with other bump offers, downsells etc. But in the interest of time let’s dive into some real world data!
Real World Funnel Data
Time for some real funnel data from something current…
The first funnel we’re going to look at I launched about 1 week ago, and it looks like this:
Free CD for $7.95 shipping
Bump Offer: Pay $5 to support the artist
Upsell: Get 3 more CD’s for $21
Here’s the real stats shown in FanFunnels:
Overall 4% of people we drive to the sales page take us up on our free CD offer. But, 25% of the people that buy the CD get the bump offer as well. This is an amazing number because our bump offer is simply to donate $5 to the artist to support the music.
25% of people are literally donating $5 to support the artist.
That alone tells you a lot. These are people that want to support the music they like. On that note 40% of the people that got the free CD bought the 3 CD bundle upsell offer, this is also a super high rate!
In online marketing there is the concept of an ‘average cart value’, which is just the average amount of sales you get per person. In this case it’s $15.76. Meaning our funnel increased our average cart value from a $7.95 shipping charge up to a $15.76 total cart value.
This is why we use funnels in the first place, to increase average cart value.
Here’s a chart for another funnel with even more data.
This funnel is:
Free CD for $7.95 shipping
Bump: $5 to support the artist
Upsell: $40 for 2 vinyl records
In this case 27% of people donated $5 to support the artist and 8.7% bought a $40 vinyl bundle. So far this funnel has moved 112 CD’s and 22 vinyl records.
How to profit?
Now overall i’m running 5 or 6 of these funnels right now. Some are far away from break even and some are right on the edge. But the part that makes it profitable is what comes after…
You could think of this as a loss leader, and it’d still be worth it. For example, let’s say you lose $4 per customer you acquire. You now have a paying customer who has previously purchased your music on your mailing list. Some people pay $4 per email address on their lead acquisition campaigns with no products for sale, so their leads aren’t even customers.
Many customers place 2nd, 3rd, 4th orders on your funnels to give to friends and family. Back when I did this years ago I had one customer go on my store and buy nearly every product I had listed, he spent like $200. This stuff kept happening for nearly a year after I stopped running ads promoting the funnel.
This tail made the whole thing break even and then slightly profit.
This means the next email that gets sent out for merch or physical media is 100% profit to this list. It’s a list that I own and control, outside the reach of social media or music DSPs.
If you want to learn more about how to do this yourself, check out my course Fan Growth Machine.
New Content
Marketing instrumental music can be quite different from vocal-led music. In this video I show how I promoted a piano project using Meta ads.
Andrew Batey is the founder of Beatdapp, the company that does fraud detection for Spotify and all other DSPs. In this interview we talk about how music fraud works.
How to Promote Your Music on Spotify with Facebook Ads (2025):
Whenever you’re ready, there are 4 ways I can help you:
My courses. Spotify Growth Machine teaches you how to use Facebook ads to promote your music on Spotify. YouTube Growth Machine teaches you how to grow a YouTube channel organically and how to use YouTube ads. Fan Growth Machine teaches you how to build a website, online store and grow your email list.
My ad agency specializes in running Facebook conversion ads to promote your music on Spotify.
Website / Store / Funnels. MusicFunnels and FanFunnels are the best all-in-one platforms for music artists to make a website, online store, sales funnels, build a mailing list and more!
1-on-1 consulting. You can book 1-hour calls with myself or my team here.
My Links:
🌍 MusicFunnels - Best website / store / funnels for music artists (get your 14-day FREE trial!)
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🎬 Get 15% off Melodist music distribution with code ANDREW15 here
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I hope you enjoyed this edition of Music Marketing Monday! Please give your feedback using the poll below.
** There are affiliate links on this site, meaning I may receive a kickback when you purchase a product or service using my links at no extra cost to you. I only recommend products I’d recommend to friends, but i’m obligated to inform you that these affiliate links are present. Overall affiliate income is not my focus and is a relatively small part of my income.
In case you’re curious what platform i’m using to run this newsletter, it’s called beehiiv.
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