Re: CD SALES DECLINING?

[Travis Hartnett <travishartnett@gmail.com>]

I think it's difficult to get good information in this area.  My
personal anecdotal experience is that my sales are steady or up over
the last seven years, but I exist in realm where I sell between two or
three hundred copies of a self-produced title over the course of a
couple of years.  All of my sales are handled directly at shows.  I
also price my stuff at $5 (these are CD-R's with a hand printed and
assembled cover, so my unit cost is around a dollar), which seems to
stimulate the impluse buy from people who like what they've heard in
the last ten minutes.  When I'm on a multi-artist bill where the other
guy's CD is $10 (which seems more common), it seems that people are
more reluctant to fork out a ten-spot, perhaps because at that point
they start comparing it to "real professional" titles.

A few years ago on this list there was a heated discussion on CD
pricing.  I was in the cheap camp, the opposing view was that you
should price your product at a comparable price to professional, major
label CD's ($15 at the time) since that would indicate that you were
on that level and to do otherwise was to sell yourself short.  This
was before the first big wave of Napster use, which may have
readjusted consumer expectations regarding what music is "worth", in
the same way that recorded music itself proved to be  something of a
death knell for the restaurant/cafe/bar five-set-a-night musician. 
Just providing music in a public setting was no longer enough to get
paid for, and now that recorded music can be had for almost nothing,
it's value in the market place has declined.

If there's been a decline in support on this list for looper's CD's
(certainly a difficult-to-measure metric), then I'd guess it's for the
same reason as anywhere--people aren't hearing something that makes
them say "I must own a copy of that so I can hear it again and again".

TravisH

On 1/8/06, loop.pool <looppool@cruzio.com> wrote:

>
> Do you folks have other information that refutes what I've noticed?   
>Like I
> said,  I don't have stats to back it up  just I've heard a lot of 
>musicians
> talking about it.   What's your experience?
>
>  Why do you think that this list in general is not more supportive of the
> artists who are releasing commercial CDs?
> Is this even your experience?     I'm really curious to hear what 
>everyone
> has to say.
>