Friday, November 05, 2004

More about the pricing, one more try...

Let us consider this briefly as if it were a business exercise, even though I would be messing with music stuff irregardless, it's kind of an intriguing challenge and mark of accomplishment to be somehow regarded as commercially viable as a recording artist.

There are these primary roles and activities:

Artist: composition, performing

Engineering: recording, mixing, mastering, duplication

Producer: guidance of 'the sound' of the music, 'the look' of the packaging

Marketer: involved in package design, placement of the product in front of the right audience, promotional activities

Distributor: storage, order fulfillment, packing/shipping

I'm like the first four, but I really only know something about the first three.

So if you figure my distributor cost is 4.00 bucks a disc, my cost for materials is somewhere between 1.50-2.00 per disc. Times 50 units that's about 300.00.

Ah, and there is a 35.00 initial registration fee for CDBaby.

50 discs going for 14.00, if I can sell them all that's sales of 700.00, minus 335.00 costs, that's 365.00, then I guess there's taxes, maybe half of 365 is left.

182.50

If one was to invest from scratch, figure about 3000.00 for computer and software, then at least 2000.00 for instruments and mics. I have accrued these things over a while, but that's what it would roughly run, and that is pretty bare bones.

5000.00/182.50 = 27.4 lots of 50 units needed to be sold to recoup initial investment.

That is 1370 discs.

Now, if one incorporates, etc, then taxes and expenses are differently accounted for, this is something I know relatively little about, but it can cost a few hundred bucks to get the incorporation thing to happen, and again what I want to cut back on is upfront layout.

Garageband gold membership cost me 99.00 bucks, well worth it as far as the experience, MP3 upload storage, reviewer feedback and the per song statistics.

Utenzil has been extant for about 4 months. Without extensive marketing, I have had a few hundred people, perhaps, exposed to my music via the internet, let's say 300. To sell 50 discs, I would need 16 percent minimum of those people to buy one. Let's say Utenzil achieves that level of niche acceptance consistently. To hit my 1370 recoup level, that would mean exposure to 8220 independent music listeners to sell 27.4 lots of 50.



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