How Much Do I Charge?

  • Thread starter Thread starter JMT03
  • Start date Start date
J

JMT03

New member
Im gonna put a cd out pretty soon and Im trying to figure out how much to charge. Im gonna make it myself, production/rapping/mixing/etc. And its gonna be a home made project but still have dope content. What is the suggested sale price for a basically unknown debut record? (U.S. Dollars) I wanna sell cds but i also wanna get a little bit of profit. Hit me back.
 
It Depends

If you know how to master sound to a cd and you have the ability to package your product professionally, they will easily bring 10 bucks. If you gig, don't forget cassettes. Yes, you will still sell cassettes. A gig is still the best place to sell your music. 2nd is in a music store that sells equipment, right by the cash register. If your product is put on a blank cd with computerized inserts, look at about $5. Been there, tried that. 3rd is trying to get your music into a small independant cd store. The big chain stores only accept packaged items with barcodes. It's hard, but not impossible, to get your music in there. You will need to hook up with a distributor. Which of course takes a lot of $$$$$$
 
Cassettes? Really?
just curious, in your experience, what is the CD to cassette ratio?

(knowing that would give an idea of how many cassettes to make)
 
cassette to cd ratio

It all depends. When we've played in a big city, like Dallas, we sell almost 10 to 1 more cds than we do cassettes. When we play in Bumfuk, Fort Smith, Arkansas, it seems to be equal. When we've played Fayetteville, AR (college town), we'll move about 80% cds to cassettes. Of course, I know another factor may be the type of music we play, which is pretty heavy. So we are attracting the 20-30 year olds. If we played that country blue grass hillbilly shit around here at the local redneck V.F.W., we would probably have to put it on vinyl or an 8 track(and I ain't talking about an 8 track recorder) Oh and we did play Tulsa, OK once and it seems we moved about 10 cds and about 5 cassettes.
On average if we have a crowd of 70-100 people you may move 10-15 total sales of albums. Smaller crowds, 30-50 you may move 5 total. Now this is saying you only have one album to sell. When we go out this year, we have recorded a live album, plus a new album and we are going to push the hell out of all 3. The ratio should change. Now, always push your shit onstage.......shamelessly. Plug the hell out of it. Sell t-shirts and have a gimmick. This year we are having a condom company manufacture some oversized condoms with our band name on it. Of course our band is called BalloonHed. So it's kind of fits.
 
I personally wouldnt feel right charging too much for cds I put on CDR's.....There are too many cd players out there that wont play them right.

If nobody has heard of you, your arent gonna get much.
 
Have them done professionally

Most of the duplicating and replicating houses will print you a good glass master, sometimes free. Usually only if you order enough cd's from them to pick up the cost. A true CD doesn't leave a burn mark and is in 24 bit 96 k. That is what you use to send off to these duplicators. The duplicators will shrink it back down to a 16 bit without sacrificing much quality. It will play in anything that will play 16/44 cds, which is almost everything. If you buy enough, you can keep your cost around$1.50 per CD. That's packaged with all the inserts, barcode, shrinkwrap, and store ready. It's easy to get 10 bucks for that. Good profit also. I can't burn them and print up the packaging for that. You'll be lucky to get $5 for a home burnt CDR.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top