As we’ve been discussing, I have a new album out, “The Great Indoors”. It’s really, really excellent, and you should buy it, or stream it, or, hell, smear it all over your naked body. You can buy digital tracks on iTunes or CDBaby for 99 cents each, or you can buy an actual drink coaster for $10 from Kunaki (the company that does my CD reproduction) or you can buy the drink coaster from CDBaby, but you won’t want to, because it’s $15 over there.
Now, I think CDBaby is a great company. I’ve sold my other physical CDs through them, and they’re the reason I’m on iTunes, and Spotify, and Earworm, or whatever all the other cloudy services are called. But I’ve finally realized that it’s crazy for me to sell physical CDs there, at least for the price I want to sell them at. And, dear reader, I’m gonna tell you why.
Really, it all has to do with the price point. I think it’s crazy for someone like me to charge $15 for an album. Sure, I might be first in line to be the next Elvis Costello, but I’m not going to get there by charging the same amount of money for my CD as he does. I want you – hell, I need you – to pick up my CD and think, hey, $10 is kind of a bargain for a CD nowadays, and then drop it into your CD player and think, hey, this is really a bargain, because this guy is fabulous, and I’m going to tell all my friends. (Marketing genius, that’s what it’ll say on my tombstone.) So $10 is what I want to sell my album for, and that’s how much it’ll cost when you order it from Kunaki, and that’s how much it’ll cost when you buy it from me at one of my shows.
So why, you say, is it $15 on CDBaby? Well, here’s the math. Kunaki is a decent-quality, unbelievably cheap CD duplication house. They sent me 150 CDs for about $280, including shipping. (This is much less than CDBaby, or just about any other reproduction house, would charge me.) CDBaby takes $4 from each sale, plus they ask me to restock the CDs in very small quantities, such that it costs me $.75 for the mailer plus $2.50 for postage to send them each CD. So each CD costs me $1.80 to get from Kunaki, and then $3.25 to send it to CDBaby, and then CDBaby takes $4, so it’s, like, $9.50 for me to sell a single CD. And a good chunk of that is just shipping the damn thing around, especially after you pay CDBaby $3.63 to ship it to you. So you pay $13.63, and I get 50 cents.
Now, I’m not in this for the money, as the first track on “The Great Indoors” will tell you (yes, go buy it). But I’ll be damned if I’m going to go to all that trouble for less than a buck, no matter how fond I am of you lovely people. So let’s raise the price, to $15, and now you pay $18.63, and I get $5.50. But now I’m selling the CD for a lot more than I want to. The numbers would be more in my favor if I were selling gobs of CDs, but not a lot more, and I’m never going to sell gobs of CDs.
Fortunately, we can do far better than this. Kunaki has this great deal: if I order a single CD, it’s a buck, plus $4.30 for shipping, so 5 bucks and change. (That’s right, in some cases the cost for larger quantities is higher per unit. Don’t ask me how they make this work.) And the manufacturing cost for that single CD is the same to me, even if I’m not the one who buys it. So if you order a single CD of mine directly from Kunaki, they’ll manufacture it on demand, and you pay $10 plus the $4.30 shipping, and all they deduct for this boon is the manufacturing cost plus 5% of the sales price. So you pay $14.30, and I get, like, 8 bucks. Everybody wins: you get the CD for 4 bucks less than CDBaby, I make an extra 7 bucks, and I’m selling the CD at the price point I want. (Even better for you is to buy it from me at a show, and it costs you $10 and I still get my 8 bucks. Shoe leather: cheaper than airfare.)
What a mess, right? It feels really wrong to me to sell the CD for so much more on CDBaby; but I’m thinking that most people who look for my CD will start on my Web site, and Kunaki’s going to be the only link for physical sales over there. I could just disable physical sales on CDBaby, but then I’ll lose the occasional person who finds me on CDBaby without starting at my Web site, and while that isn’t gonna happen often, I’d rather it didn’t happen at all.
So buy my album. It’s a great album. I’m great, and Dave’s great, and my producer Jeff is great, and Walter Crockett is great, and the songs are great, and it’s just, well, great. Make me a star. But just don’t buy your drink coasters on CDBaby.