The Future Of Music Coalition held a convention in Chicago this week. An attendee and writer for CNET News, Mat Rosoff, penned an article for CNET entitled “Selling CD’s Is No Way To Make A Living.”
Here’s an excerpt from his article:
“According to a report in the Chicago Tribune, a speaker at the Future of Music Coalition gave a breakdown of album numbers that will be particularly shocking to young independent bands who hoped they’d be able to make a living selling discs. More than 115,000 new albums were released in the U.S. last year. Of those, 110 sold more than 250,000 copies in the U.S. last year–that’s not such a surprise, as big stars have always been rare. But only 1,500 titles cracked the 10,000 mark, and fewer than 6,000 sold a paltry 1,000 copies.
To give you some idea what 1,000 copies means, that used to be the standard manufacturing run for self-produced CDs. Indie bands imagined that they would use a hundred or so discs for publicity–sending them to radio stations and reviewers, for instance–and then sell the rest to local fans and on tour. Selling 900 CDs at $12 a pop would gross almost $11,000, which would be enough to cover low-budget recording and manufacturing expenses and perhaps buy some new guitar pedals and drumheads. Nobody makes a living selling 1,000 CDs. (Snip.)
Of the new titles released last year, almost 99 percent of them didn’t sell enough copies to let their creators earn a living from CD sales, and almost 95 percent of them didn’t sell enough copies to cover the most basic expenses involved in their recording.”
Of course, this article is mostly talking about “road sales.” What about retail distribution? Numbers have been released by Nielsen Soundscan for 2008. They look a lot like the past several years–the trend is down:
And how many of those 6,000 that sold over 1,000 units were Southern Gospel CDs?
Fifteen? Twenty-five? I doubt it would be much above that, but I would love to be wrong.
(Oh, and Mickey – I’m just curious about your best guess.)
Used to be a kinda rule of thumb that we (SG) accounted for maybe .3% of total U.S. sales…that would be about 180. I would have little faith in that number. I would be much more curious about how many titles sold over, say, 30k. We used to have a LOT of those.
The main point here is for once SG is NOT BEHIND other genres–no sir, we are descending right along with the rest.
Where we ARE behind is:
1) in the awareness (or admission) that his is happening,
2) the reluctance to learn and use new marketing techniques and concepts that are working in other areas outside ours, and
3) creating music and events that are so compelling that people will choose to purchase our products over other choices they have.
At one time in my life, I bought a large number of CD’s. I had a very large collection, almost all of them SG. But now days, I buy less than one a year. I just do not have the interest. I also do not have the time to listen to them, as I now have 3 kids under the age of 6.
There are many things now days that ask for our attention. Many of us spend many, many hours surfing the net, and for me at least, I do not listen to music while I surf, as my ADD would make it pointless. Also, I suppose in most homes, watching TV has long since replaced listening to music.
I suppose most music today is listened to while driving, and now we have XM and Sirius to make it even less likely for some to make a CD purchase.
One group I used to sing with ordered 1000 copies of a project about a year before I joined. I was with them for 7 months. When I left the group, they still hadn’t sold through 1000 copies, and this was two years after they were ordered. That’s an average of roughly 9 CD’s sold a weekend. If we played two shows a weekend, that’s 4-5 CD’s per show. We also gave away at least 2-3 CD’s per show to the church’s pastor, and the occasional “under-privileged” concert goer, so on average, we sold 2 or 3 CD’s per show.
Now granted, we didn’t work every weekend, so that average goes up, but even if we worked 40 weeks out of the year, that’s still an average of about 6 CD’s either sold or given away per show. At a cost of $15 per CD, that’s $90 total on product sales. As a group member, I was entitled to 5% of product sales, so that means I averaged $4.50 per weekend on CD sales. I can’t even buy a tie on that!!
As for covering costs, in a year, we averaged $7500 from product sales. That’s a little more than half of total production costs. That means it takes roughly two years to recoup the money spent on a project before we ever make a profit. If we are depending on CD sales to help pay for our next project, then we’ll be waiting three years (at least) between projects. Anyone even vaguely familiar with SG knows that a LOT of changes can occur in three years time….