So, over the weekend we watched the video viewing figures level off at the 250,000 mark. Throughout this project - and especially through the latter stages, our self-belief fuelled by a huge sense of achievement at reaching 1 on various YouTube charts - I was always wondering, in the back of my mind, how many mp3s I might have sold. Well, we got the sales figures through from the OCC (the British official charts company) yesterday, and the exciting news for all concerned is that we sold 58. Fifty Eight. Now, this may put you into the lower reaches of some kind of local chart in the Hungarian town of Medgyesegyhaza, but nationally, in the UK, it puts you some 4,000 places behind Kanye West.

So, what does this tell us? I had a text from Alex, the video director, who commiserated with me and said "Well, nobody buys music any more, do they..." Clearly some people buy music, but only 58 people buy a yacht-rock spectacular with a cute video. Obviously you can't use The Schema's tune as a benchmark as it's a barely contemporary sound made by a fat bloke in his mid 30s, but these unspectacular sales figures probably extrapolate pretty badly for the music business as a whole. I'm guessing. Actually, we don't need to guess, we know the business is in crisis.

Anyway, I wrote about this tale for The Independent, and the piece comes out today. You may draw a conclusion from this that all my expenses were somehow covered by a slush fund at the newspaper, but no - this was meant to be DIY, and when Westminster Council shafted me for £300, it was me who had to bite the bullet. Otherwise, what would have been the point? In fact, the council haven't invoiced yet, although I'm sure they will if they see the finished article, so my total costs: £867.65. Total receipts will be about £28, plus a few quid from sales of the track via the "buy from us" link you see above on the left. I don't have a calculator to hand, but you can probably estimate the net loss.

But what have I gained? Well, a 250,000 audience for a song I knocked up in my bedroom. I don't know what John Peel's listening figures were like in the late 80s and early 90s, but I'd say that this song probably got the largest number of listeners out of any song I've ever written or had a hand in producing. Which has to count for something. The interview in the Argentinian newspaper never materialised, but later today "Those Rules You Made" will be Alternative Pop track of the day at garageband.com. Which, again, is a crumb of comfort. As I'm on the front page of the bloody Independent today, my mouth hanging open like an imbecile, I guess the whole DIY thing is out of the window, and I can ring up MTV2 with my journalist hat on and beg them to play the video so I can claw some money back.

Or maybe I'll just keep it real.

At about 5pm British time yesterday afternoon, the video for "Those Rules You Made" became the most-watched music video on the whole of YouTube - that's worldwide! I captured the moment for posterity:



This morning, we're up to 126,491 views. I'm still a bit flabbergasted. Remember, this video was made for less than £500, in less than 10 days from deciding to do it to getting it up online. Amazing.

So, the video was posted up on YouTube at about 1am yesterday. When I got up at 7am, it had had about 15 views; I was the 16th. I sent an email out to anyone I thought would be remotely interested - maybe about 400 people? - and posted it on my own blog. By lunchtime we were up to around 600 views, and by the end of lunchtime - clearly important YouTube viewing time for the UK's office workers - we were tipping the thousand mark, and, incredibly, had become the 64th most-watched video on YouTubeUK that day.

At which point the editors of YouTube must have noticed the number of hits it was getting. And they put it on the Front Page - at which point things went ballistic. As of this morning, it's had 25,000 views, although as the back-end of the site is down for maintenance, I suspect it might be a lot more. I also can't see where we're sitting in various charts, but someone informed me that it was the 1 viewed video yesterday on YouTube UK. Whether that means I'll sell any MP3s, who knows; but hey. We created something, put it on the internet, and people are looking at it. You can't ask for more than that.

Just a quick note: I've just submitted the mp3 to a handful of online radio stations, namely Kooba, SomaFM and Indiefeed...

We shot the video on Saturday; the results are on YouTube, but I'm going to post a lovely-quality Flash version here later tonight. Alex obviously wanted to do a professional job, but - as with any creative process - it was a question of balancing high quality with meagre resources. She was, very kindly, working for free, so we got the budget down to:

- Film stock: £117.50
- Digibeta cassette: £14.75
- Developing film: £105.75

Which is £208.50. Then I had to buy a couple of bottles of Perrier as props, making £211.50. Then we had to cover the costs of some of the actors, which added another £200, making £411.50. There's a couple more expenses still to come, one of them small, the other stupidly colossal; Westminster Council want £300 for letting us film On Their Land. But let's see if they bother invoicing us. For the moment, the Total cost: £540.04.

So the single has been out for a couple of days. Impossible at the moment to know whether it's sold anything, nothing or something, but Emubands can prise sales figures next Monday of some organisation or other for about £27.50, so I'll probably end up forking out that sum, because I'm impatient and vain. I'm also prepared for disappointment, obviously.

The number of stores that the single is on is extensive and colossal, but in fact iTunes accounts for around 80% of online music sales, so that's the biggie. And it's up there, and it's already got one review, but that is from my friend Karla, so does it count?

Of course, lots of those stores require certain operating systems to work, others need you to register as a member first – and, frankly, some people can't be arsed with that. But with our hosting plan from Dreamhost, we get a service called Files Forever, which lets you store files for eternity - and sell them to the public, be they mp3s, pdfs or whatever. So we did the sums...

There's a one-off charge of $0.03 to store the file for ever. Then another $0.03 per sale, along with a $0.50 transaction charge, along with 5% of the value of the file. So... if I sell both songs for $2.79, which is currently about £1.40 - less than iTunes! - then I get back $1.85. Which is 93p. Which is about 47p per track. Which is about what I'd get from iTunes anyway. Hey, it doesn't count towards the chart, but I'm not ripping anyone off, and I'm not losing out. So here you go. DRM free tracks. Should you wish to own them... Total cost: £128.54.

When I misguidedly chose the name "The Schema" for this project, and then my friend Dicky said to me "Oh, The Schemer?" and I said "No, Schema, with an A", I obviously realised that I'd ballsed up by choosing a name which you'd have to spell out to people. Not a problem that The Farm or ABC ever encountered. Then I looked up "Schema" on Google, and of course I get a shitload of sites about javascript programming. For a band attempting to promote itself on the internet, that's a pretty poor showing.

But, to my surprise, searching for "The Schema" on Google does actually bring up this site; 10th in the ranking if you put quotes around the phrase, and 11th if you don't. Perhaps, just perhaps, I might be able to get that up to the top 5 with the help of a few people. Who knows what effect it might have on mp3 sales. None, probably. But it helps to stroke my ego. If you have a website, or a blog with a links bar, could you stick it in? The Schema. www.theschema.co.uk. It doesn't have to be high up. Just there. Somewhere. Let's see what happens. Total spend: A lot more than £126.52, but I'll come to that later.

I'm terrified of getting reviews, actually - I don't response very well to criticism, I tend to curl up into a ball, start blubbing, and then fire off furious ripostes to the person who dared criticise me. I'm not proud of this. Nevertheless, getting some reviews online is part of the process. So this morning I emailed out 13 MP3s along with this press release to writers or editors at 13 online webzines / music sites, namely:

Yahoo, This Is Fake DIY, Subba Cultcha, Room Thirteen, Music News, Last Broadcast, Glasswerk, Gigwise, Drowned In Sound, Contact Music, BBC Collective and PlayLouder. Oh, and PopJustice, making 14.

I'm not expecting this intense PR activity to yield up particularly amazing results, but let's see what happens... Total spend: still £128.52

The harsh reality of publicising music on the internet is that videos are annoyingly useful. However much I might enjoy hiding behind a green square with some cutout men drawn on it, being able to put up something on YouTube - especially if it's half decent - is going to help get people listening to my half-arsed MP3. I'm not a fan of listening to half-arsed MP3s myself, but I'm quite happily to while away whole afternoons watching bizarre self-made videos such as this. So that's that, then. I have to make a video.

Despite being 35 and playing in shite bands for 17 years, I've only been involved in the making of one video, ever. That was in 1990, and it featured a cat moving in time to the music. How ahead of the game was THAT? Who knew that about 50% of the internet would end up being taken up by videos of cats - real or animated - moving in time to the music? (Actually, I've just remembered a couple more, but let's pretend I only ever made one for the purposes of the blog entry.) That was the only video I ever made, because in comparison to releasing tunes, it was bloody expensive. I could make a video using my mobile phone camera right now for nothing, but it would be shit. And I have to maintain some level of, er, quality. So I met up with a friend of a friend called Alex de Campi.

She is phenomenally together, which is just as well, as I'm visually hopeless and had no ideas whatsoever. I've already received treatments and storyboards. We're filming it in a little garden next to Embankment tube station on Saturday morning, he said, anxiously looking at the weather forecast. Sadly, making a video is still expensive compared to releasing tunes, but as I've spent less than £100 so far, it shouldn't be too bad.

My first outlay for the video is for a couple of props: A book called "The Rules" (£6.74), and 3 imitation Perrier bottles made out of sugar (£24.67), which I have to collect from a studio in Shepperton on Thursday morning. I feel that this is just the beginning of a long list of expenses. But it'll be worth it. Won't it? Total spend: £128.52.

MySpace obviously isn't the only social networking site where you can stick your band and make tenuous connections with people who you wouldn't allow in the house. There's also Tagworld - which hasn't really learned from the design nightmare that MySpace is still cold-sweating over - and PureVolume, which is sleek, beautifully sculpted and gorgeous to look at by comparison. I obviously have better things to do than stare at a PureVolume profile, but it's Sunday, it's supposed to be a day of rest, isn't it.

Now I just have to go and do a Bebo one, but I got annoyed as my first choice of URL was already taken by someone called Hayley. How dare she.