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jayem 
Forum Senior Member 
Joined: June 21 2006 Location: Switzerland Status: Offline Points: 995 |
 Posted: February 12 2015 at 18:11 |
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Now Dean, you won't keep all of your CDs home as bookends or like a pile of bricks will you ? Even if I don't play it as often as mp3's, I should get a souvenir from this somptous thread, at the core of 201x PA talks. PM to follow...
Edited by jayem - February 13 2015 at 06:11 |
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Dean
Special Collaborator 
Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout Joined: May 13 2007 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 37575 |
Posted: February 13 2015 at 11:19 |
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I've been looking into the "nice to own" factor.
For low-volume runs CDR is the cheaper solution for the self-released artist, (you are looking at something like £200 for 100 CDRs in clear jewel case with 4-page booklet or £2.00 each), but glass-pressed CD and vinyl in low volume isn't as prohibitive as you would at first imagine and there are plenty of businesses out there who offer this service to the aspiring artist. From my perspective vinyl is nicer to own than CD and CDs are nicer to own than downloads. So I have looked into how much it would cost to have a low volume run (100 units) of an album on 12" vinyl and on standard jewel-case CD and the results are surprising...
So once you get into the 200-300 sales bracket everything starts to look more reasonable. Any band that is gigging regularly should be able to sell 250 albums without much difficulty (though perhaps I should say: without too much difficulty, it never ceased to amuse me that it was easier to sell band t-shirts at gigs than albums). If you are not a gigging artist and only sell over the internet then selling that many may be more of a challenge, but Bandcamp is the huge success and "young prog" is doing well so if you can't then it is your fault, right? If bands can sell a download on Bandcamp for £7.00 then selling a glass pressed CD for the same price is going to be a doddle... sure trying to sell a vinyl copy for £14 is not so easy, but if you're a Bandcamp success and have over 250 listeners then you can also sell them at £7.00 and make a tiny profit... Let's be honest and realistic here. These numbers are trifling. Seriously, they are pitiful quantities of albums for piffling amounts of money. Even 1000 copies is a measly amount of sales, no one can make a living from selling 1000 copies of an album, it won't even cover the expense of recording and promoting it. A moderately successful band signed to a small Indie label would be looking to shift 10 or 20 times that number, especially if they were touring regularly. My reverse-engineering of Bandcamp's statistics suggests that very, very few artists sell 1000 copies of their album. My calculations give an estimate of less than 4000 artists out of all those who have signed-up to Bandcamp sell 1000 or more copies of their albums, that's less than 0.4%. Of course as small as the costs are, even for 100-off glass-pressed CDs, it's not chump change, then neither is the cost of a Les Paul Classic, a Marshal head and cab, a Korg PAX3, a Mackie 16-channel mixer, ProTools and all its plug-ins, or studio-quality condenser microphone. For the professional and the aspiring artist alike, this is not a cheap pastime. So these numbers are still essentially vanity-press numbers. Any self-released artist who is only interested in low-volume production of a just few CDs is left with CD-on-demand services being offered by such people as Amazon (CreateSpace). Being a realist and a non-gigging amateur/hobbyist CD-on-demand is the most cost-effective solution for me as it costs me nothing, the problem is it is very expensive for anyone who wants to buy your stuff, and that is off-putting to say the least. Edited by Dean - February 13 2015 at 11:45 |
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Dean
Special Collaborator
Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout Joined: May 13 2007 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 37575 |
Posted: February 16 2015 at 10:13 |
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Heed the doomsayer:
...and your videos, music, blogs, archives... |
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Dean
Special Collaborator
Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout Joined: May 13 2007 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 37575 |
Posted: February 17 2015 at 06:42 |
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More on the "nice to own" factor - vinyl one-offs.
Back in the 1950s you could get one-off record made by going to a studio where they would cut your track direct to blank. There were even fairground-recording booths where you could cut an, admittedly low-quality, disc direct to 7" single to record a message to your loved ones. [ref: A Brief History of the Voice-O-Graph] Now-a-days things are a little more sophisticated, but the prospect of producing one-off vinyl albums is still a realisable aim. Like CD-on-Demand, there are companies who will produce very low-volume (one or more)... at a price. For a 12" 33rpm vinyl featuring two 20-minute tracks in a plain card sleeve that works out at £100 each. Now, obviously £100 is a lot of money for one album compared to the £14 each if you had 100 made, but that £100 would be your total outlay compared to £1,400. Of course, if you want a printed label and a nice gatefold sleeve then the price starts to rise considerably, but for a one-off you could do that yourself on the kitchen table with an A4 printer, some sheet card and a Prit Stick™. (I'd actually recommend a stonger glue than Prit, Uhu makes a stronger stick that will stick wood). If you don't have access to an A3 printer then your local printshop can do that for a few quid. As a one-off vanity product, £100 is not that prohibitive, in fact it's quite attractive, especially if you can convince your nearest-and-dearest that one of my albums cut to vinyl would make a well received and highly treasured gift the next time they ask you what you would like for your impending birthday... ...convincing others to spend five times the price of the latest Steven Wilson album on a copy of your album is another matter, but as our favourite recording artists have shown, put sufficient "value-added" into the packaging and we'll buy practically anything at any price. For the self-released one-off artist this value-added has the advantage of being unique, lovingly handcrafted and even personalised to the person who is prepared to spend that kind of money on buying your album, much better than the cheap, mass-produced old tat that Pink Floyd sold with the Immersion editions... you could even throw in half-a-dozen CDRs of outtakes and live recordings into the box with the vinyl album for very little extra cost to yourself. Just a thought.
 Edited by Dean - February 17 2015 at 06:59 |
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Star_Song_Age_Less
Forum Senior Member
Joined: December 08 2014 Location: MA Status: Offline Points: 367 |
Posted: February 19 2015 at 15:16 |
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I've been spending weeks reading up on costs, marketing and sales, and came upon this: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2013/10/16/the-most-important-thing-you-will-read-all-day/ Some staggering statistics in there: “In the recorded music industry in 2011, more than 800,000 unique album titles together sold more than 330 million copies (including both physical and digital copies)… For instance, 513,000 titles – 58% of all unique titles – each sold fewer than 10 copies, accounting for only 0.5 percent of sales. 13 titles selling 1,000,000 copies or more/23,287,000 copies sold/7% 387 titles selling 100,000-999,999 copies/93,992,000 copies sold/28% 4,229 titles selling 10,000-99,999 copies/114,949,000 copies sold/35% 21,042 titles selling 1,000-9,999 copies/61,493,000 copies sold/19% 87,986 titles selling 100-999 copies/27,032,000 copies sold/8% 251,566 titles selling 10-99 copies/8,261,000 copies sold/2% 513,146 titles selling fewer than 10 copies/1,558,000 copies sold/0.5%” I knew the odds of making any money off an album were low, but I did not realize quite how extreme the dichotomy was. But the thing that really astounded me about these numbers is that it appears as if the major labels aren't even doing much of anything for the vast majority of their clients. Only 400 albums even made it past 100,000 copies? I'm not sure I'd want to let a major label take basically all of my royalties in order for them to then not deliver on their end of the bargain. CDBaby, Tunecore, and Bandcamp take a much smaller cut and even if you can sell ten copies on it, apparently you're doing better than more than 500,000 other folks! I'm really still waffling all over the place, but my mind is boggled by these numbers. The "nice to own" factor is something I was considering for Kickstarter rewards - a bunch of bonus tracks for those who pledge a higher amount. |
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https://www.facebook.com/JamieKernMusic
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Dean
Special Collaborator
Retired Admin and Amateur Layabout Joined: May 13 2007 Location: Europe Status: Offline Points: 37575 |
Posted: February 19 2015 at 19:14 |
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Thank you Jamie. Those figures show that the estimates I have been making regarding self-released artists and Bandcamp are grossly conservative. Here we can see that 20% of the albums account for over 95% of the total sales as opposed the 80% used in my calculatons.
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Star_Song_Age_Less
Forum Senior Member
Joined: December 08 2014 Location: MA Status: Offline Points: 367 |
Posted: February 22 2015 at 13:36 |
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Depressing, eh? "We can only grow the way the wind blows.... We can
only bow to the here and now or be broken down blow by blow." Rush
wisdom... I'm not particularly wise, I think I'll end up taking the 2nd
option and eventually run out of steam.
Then again, if Beck can win album of the year over Beyonce maybe we all do still have some hope that someone will listen to our music. I was just at a show last night (Mary Fahl, not prog but what a voice) and heard two different horror stories about working with labels. This was at a place in Cambridge, MA called Club Passim which is a non-profit arts organization. Their entire purpose is to promote the arts, with live shows of some sort every single night, some days, and open mic once a week. Spent some time chatting with people there and I was struck by how intimate the setting was. Looking at the list of performers on their calendar, it's mostly folksy stuff, but there's no limit to what type of music you could do. I'm thinking that the way to get people to hear your stuff is to play it live and actually interact with people to promote the music itself. The down side to that of course is that you have to play live, which is not something I enjoy. Some people seem like they thrive on that, but I don't. It's making the music itself that's rewarding to me. That's partially why more hands-offish things like CDBaby appeal to me. |
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https://www.facebook.com/JamieKernMusic
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Star_Song_Age_Less
Forum Senior Member
Joined: December 08 2014 Location: MA Status: Offline Points: 367 |
Posted: February 24 2015 at 09:57 |
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(I edited the above quote a lot so it wouldn't be so long, I think I got who said what right, but correct me if I am wrong). The nice thing about self-releasing if you still do it through a promoter like Tunecore or CDBaby is that your music really does get out into the internet ether on all platforms without you having to spend ridiculous amounts of time on submissions yourself. I've started thinking of them as first-step-labels. For me, self-release is not intended to be a finishing point but it has to be my starting point. I hold a job, am married, have a kid, don't make a whole lot of money, but if I do manage to make a living wage on music I would much rather do that than what my job is now. Currently, however, I have to spend the time on the job so that I have the money to pay for the studio time, and the CD printing, and promotional materials. Oh, and the cost to have your stuff on Tunecore and CDBaby in the first place. And then there's paying for an artist to actually design your album art, etc. If you self release and manage to be relatively successful with it, it is still possible to be signed to a label. I'm really not sure how anyone manages to cut through the noise and be signed to a label before they've released anything. Live shows? |
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https://www.facebook.com/JamieKernMusic
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Please Self-Release Me, Let Me Go
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Dean wrote: