The secret to the increase in downloads? Better music perhaps? Maybe. But what was even more important was first releasing the album as a free download here. My original goal was 100 downloads. I thought I could annoy my facebook fans just enough to get to 100. To my surprise, I woke up after that first day of posting it and had 275 downloads.
It should also be noted that I have over 1000 downloads on the site that I uploaded too. This does not account for the 100's of sites that now offer it as a free download. Unfortunately, I can not get any analytics on those sites. I'd like to think that there are many downloads coming from those sites as well, but I can't be certain.
So total downloads of my album are a bit of mystery. What is not a mystery is the direct correlation allowing my album for free has had on an increase in traffic on all my other various sites. Here, for example, is a snapshot of my youtube views. 
Can you guess which day I uploaded my new album? on Soundcloud, I went from having 110 song plays and 8 downloads for the month of August, to having 396 song plays and 58 downloads in September. on Last.fm, I went from having 41 listeners, to 137 listeners in 7 days. "Songs scrobbled", went from 500 to over 1900. Last.fm hasn't updated in a week, so I look forward to seeing if those numbers rise even more.
The point of this entry isn't to gloat. Instead it's to offer a compelling argument that giving away your music for free vs. trying to sell it is a much better way for an independent artist to reach a wider audience. The hope (of course) is that the people who download your free music will like it enough to share it with other people and so on and so forth, to the point where you have a decent sized "fanbase" interested in all of your releases.
Trying to sell music can be very disappointing. It may even make you question whether you are truly any good at music when you see the album sales near zero. Even your friends and family won't buy your music and it's not because they don't love you. It's because music has become something people believe should be free. At one point Itunes had a 97% stake of the paid download market. However, Itunes only makes up 2-3% of all music downloads. That means that close to 98% of all music is downloaded for free or "shared".
Now don't get me wrong. I still released my cd on the main download sites (like itunes). It's just that my expectations of how well it will perform are low. In fact, even if all 1000 of those downloads were from itunes, that would still be considered a disappointment for many bands. My point is simply that, to build a fanbase as a relatively unknown musician you need to offer your craft for free.
Moby once told me (5 years ago at a Q+A) that the future of music would be the live show because "people aren't buying music now and it's only going to get worse". He also predicted that rap would start using elements of techno (maybe he is a prophet?) Needless to say, Moby was right. Bands like NIN, Radiohead, Prince and countless others have given their music away for free, or implemented a "pay what you want" type model. You could literally buy the entire album for 1 cent if you wanted. These big name bands aren't giving away music because they have suddenly become so gracious. They are giving it away free because it has become increasingly difficult to sell music. Physical copies of cd's are nearly extinct. it has gotten to the point now where bands sign exclusive release deals with a store like Walmart, and Walmart becomes the only store you can buy a physical copy from.
Cliff Notes: I gave my album away for free, got 10 times more downloads than I did in the last 5 years, and it happened in one week. Music is hard for big acts to sell, so indie musicians need to give it away for free and try to build their fanbase.
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