I want to tell you the whole story, because I think it's more interesting than a win would have been.
A couple of weeks ago I set myself a goal. I wanted "I Want a Boy Like You, Cowboy" on the Billboard Digital Song Sales chart. Not a vanity thing — a real, measurable, independent-artist-punching-above-her-weight thing. To get there, you need people to actually buy the song. Not stream it. Not save it. Buy it, the old-fashioned way, in a tracking week.
So I asked. And you showed up.
Over 3,000 of you clicked that link
Three thousand. I still don't quite know what to do with that number. That's three thousand people who saw a song by an independent Australian country artist and thought, yeah, I'll back that.
Of those, 390 of you got all the way through and downloaded the track.
Here's where it got messy
Ten percent of clicks turning into paid purchases is genuinely a good conversion rate. Most artists would take it. But I kept getting messages from people saying some version of the same thing: I tried to buy it and I couldn't work out how.
And they were right. The link took people to Apple, and once you're inside Apple's world, buying a song and streaming a song look almost identical. If you've got Apple Music, it just… plays. There's no obvious "purchase" button staring at you. A lot of you wanted to support this and the technology quietly got in the way.
There was a second problem, and this one's on me. To count toward Billboard, your release has to be registered with Luminate — the company that actually collects the sales data — before the sales come in. I got that registration sorted after the fact. Which means those 390 downloads, every one of which I'm grateful for, didn't count toward the chart.
Lesson learned. Expensive one, but learned.
So, no chart. Not this time.
I'm not going to pretend I wasn't disappointed, because I was. I sat with it for a good while.
But here's what I keep coming back to: getting hundreds of people to hand over money for a song is the hard part. That's the part most independent artists never manage. The paperwork is just paperwork — and now I know exactly where the cracks are and exactly how to seal them.
One day I'll have a song on the Billboard charts. It just isn't going to be this one.
Now for the good bit
You can buy "I Want a Boy Like You, Cowboy" right here, right now — below.
No Apple maze. No sign-in wall. No wondering whether you actually bought it or just listened to it. You purchase it straight from my website, and it's yours.
And this time, those sales are reported properly. Every purchase made through this page goes toward the chart count. That's the whole fix — cleaner checkout, correct reporting, no friction between you and the thing you were trying to do in the first place.
If you tried to buy it last time and gave up halfway through: this one's for you. Come back and finish the job.
And mark the date
"I Want a Boy Like You, Cowboy" hits all streaming platforms Friday, 28 August.
Spotify, Apple Music, everywhere else. If streaming's your thing, that's your day — add it, save it, put it on repeat while you're driving.
But if you want to actually own it, and you want it to count for something: it's right here.
Thank you to every single person who joined in and tried to make this happen with me. I feel genuinely blessed that you believe in these songs, and even more that you back me when I go chasing something ambitious and a little bit mad.
The lesson's learned. The next one's coming.
Katrina x
