Gov't Mule Sells One Million Digital Tracks

I wanted to briefly congratulate Gov’t Mule for selling its one-millionth digital download through MuleTracks, its independent online music store (run by MusicToday). As a key player in the live music scene, it’s great to see a band like Gov’t Mule prospering by selling music directly to its fans.

Billboard reports:

Illustrating the ongoing effort by artists to establish direct digital connections with fans, jam band Gov’t Mule recently celebrated the sale of more than 1 million song downloads since October from its own Web site.

The site, operated by MusicToday, makes available every concert the band has performed since October 2004, all in unprotected MP3 format. MusicToday is owned by Live Nation and operates the fan sites and order fulfillment processes-both physical and digital-for a large number of artists.

Gov’t Mule Hits Digital Milestone [Billboard]

Gov’t Mule is one of many bands who continue to see the direct-to-fan approach as a way to succeed. Like many other bands, they’re finding success by offering tracks as MP3 or FLAC files, both file types that are free of DRM. We just saw eMusic hit a big milestone a couple weeks back, when it announced it had hit 300,000 subscribers. It reached this milestone also by selling unprotected MP3s, further exhibiting the larger trend of music being sold without DRM.

Anyone heard of any other bands or online retailers hitting similar digital milestones? I’m sure there are more out there…

(thanks to commenter, Ross, for reminding me that MuleTracks also offers downloads in the lossless FLAC format as well as MP3)