Record Economics from Slaid Cleaves

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Mundane Mayhem
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Record Economics from Slaid Cleaves

Post by Mundane Mayhem »

Got an announcement in my email inbox from Slaid Cleaves about his new record, and it contained an interesting little aside.

I've seen this question asked of artists a lot and they usually evade it: "I'm just happy if you buy the record," etc. Slaid actually answered it (at least from the standpoint of what appears to be a self-released record). It hews pretty closely to what we'd expect, but it's interesting nonetheless.
Slaid Cleaves wrote:We get asked from time to time, "Which buying option is best for the artist?"

We did a little research on that and came up with these figures:

Buying a CD directly from slaid.com puts about $14 into our pockets, which will go towards paying off the expense of making and promoting the album: about $38,000. So if we sell 2715 CDs we'll break even. Of course that doesn't count the estimated 1000 hours of work that went into the writing, production, promotion, etc.

Buying a CD from Amazon or your local record store puts about $5 into our pockets. So we'd need to sell 7600 CDs to break even if we only sold through stores. But we appreciate record stores and want to see them survive, so we''re OK with that.

Streaming. It took a considerable amount of figuring, but our estimate is that someone would have to listen to the whole album about 200 times in order to generate $14 in royalties. That's with a Spotify premium subscription. On the Spotify free plan, you'd have to listen to the whole album 500 times (because we get a smaller royalty through the free plan).

We figure people might listen to a CD 25 times. And we're told Spotify will expose us to new fans. So I guess if Spotify generates a 20-fold increase in our free-streaming fan-base we'll break even (20 new fans playing the album 25 times = 500 album spins). We'll be watching our statements to see how that works out . . .
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Clams
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Re: Record Economics from Slaid Cleaves

Post by Clams »

Very interesting and something that I've often wondered about. Thanks for posting it.
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