March income totaled $900, which is significantly higher than last month for two reasons. First, after a decade of arm twisting, I finally received $236 from an old distributor, The Orchard. It’s a tiny fraction of what they owe, but I won’t go into the gory details. Secondly (pun intended), I collected $300 in pre-orders for Second Thoughts. Since it’s a limited edition EP and not a true album, I won’t include it in my monthly tracking.
Subtracting out those two income sources, I took in $364 in “regular” sales, which is a 25% drop from February. Two-thirds of those sales were for my latest album, The Thought Chapter. For more details, see my running tally of profit/loss figures for each album. The “glass half full” way to look at it is that, to date, I’ve sold or otherwise parted with 5,208 CDs, and digital sales continue to eclipse CD sales.
Last month we discussed acknowledging my supporters by name, phrasing it as such: “Thank you to Brian H. of Huntington Beach, CA.” Looking over sales for the month, it doesn’t make sense to follow through with it. Most orders are through my mp3 store, which PayPal doesn’t provide me addresses for. Only one person ordered a physical CD from me (thanks Omar!). So the real question is: how do I clear out my garage before the death of physical media?
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How about bundling the CDs with a shirt? Or maybe the other way around, rather.
I appreciate the ideas guys! Now I’ll proceed to shoot them down.
1. Live Shows – I don’t enjoy performing, haven’t done it in a decade, and don’t plan to do it again. In the past, I didn’t sell more than a couple CDs per gig.
2. Deep Discount – The problem with “blowing them out” is that it undercuts my digital sales, which are better than ever. I don’t want to sacrifice a $9 digital sale for a $1 physical sale.
3. Collector’s Item – As you know, Second Thoughts is being released as a signed and numbered limited edition CD-R, limited to 100 copies. We’re talking about brand new and never before available material, and I’ve sold about 50. That won’t make a dent in the garage.
The idea of a contest has my mental wheels turning. Something where a winner would get the entire set. The problem with that is it costs a fortune to send all seven CDs, especially to Europe, or god forbid, Japan ($25!). And again, I wouldn’t want to undercut regular sales.
So I guess what I’m really looking for is a way to use those CDs as promotion to generate more long term “true fans.” Also, keep in mind that I’ve got way more copies of Sketches in Grey, Perfect Tears, and Something Beautiful than the others. The rest may eventually die off of natural causes.
Clear out your garage ?
- gigs – ie tyler king… (ask ten people to come home for a private party if you don’t tour)
- organize a contest … remix ? then give away
- sell them 1 dollar
- send them for promo … blogs, local radios…
- sell your garage and forget the cds there… joke of course…
- paul said it : make unique versions… personal autograph, ask a painter (i’ve got a really good 3 years old one home) to do something special on each record, then put some serial number… collector ? or send them to every people who buy the mp3 version…
see you,
L
Maybe play more live shows and sell them there?
The death of physical media? Ahhhh, say it isn’t so. Won’t there be just two people to justify $1100 worth of printing costs? Maybe we should just sell the one album like a paint artist and then just sell the mp3 lithographs…
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