Help me: why am I not making sales?

Hello everybody-

I'm a musician who's been struggling over the last few years to make any money at all in my life. Music hasn't been paying dirt, which shouldn't really surprise anyone... however along the way over the last four years or so I've compiled a GIANT email list of every email I could find related to the industry. It's about 144,000 emails. It was a bit of effort but I did it because I thought it would pay off someday.

So when I finally went to cash in on all my work, I found that I simply wasn't getting ANY sales. I knew since it was a cold list I probably wouldn't get GREAT numbers, but I still expected to get something- not zero. I mean, since they are all musician/music producer/band related, it was a pretty targetted list. I would usually write a letter or blog article selling an affiliate product that was relevant to the niche. I'd use a simple formula, you know try to create an image of how the product could change their life, tackle common objections, but I'd do it all in just one email.

So of course I ran into a couple problems right away- all the gmail addresses would go straight to spam, a lot of the emails were old and bounced, but I still got over 44,000 to go to their inbox. Out of those, usually about 5,800 would open. On my latest attempt, I got over 300 clicks to the affiliate, but zero sales.

Now obviously there's a couple reasons I could not be getting sales. Maybe the offer wasn't that good? Maybe the list being "cold" I'd be seen as spam and not really getting the credibility necessary to make sales. I did try to make sure I was offering value in my emails and not just a sales pitch.

Anyways- I'm obviously not an expert at this. But if there's anyone out there who has experience getting email marketing sales, someone with real world knowledge who knows what will actually work it if they have a list of 144,000 targeted emails in the band/musician/music producer/record label niche and wants to work with me, I'll be more than happy to split profits, and I usually don't have a problem being very generous with it. For me, any money is better than no money.