Album release: Advice needed

[MrTAteMyBalls]

Hey folks. I wanted to get the "brain trust" opinion on my upcoming CD release. One of my college buds and myself decided to put out a record together since we hadn't done any music together in 5 years or so. He lives in Dallas, and I live in Denver. We e-mailed/file shared/snail mailed to get the record done. I'm now up to recording vocals and editing.

My question is this: Do I even need to bother with pressing a physical CD? This was mostly done for the fun of it, but I do want to put it out there for people to find and listen to. It seems many local bands I know order a few hundred CD's and sell hardly any. Pretty much everyone I know gets ALL thier music online, so it seems that maybe an I-tunes/amazon/napster release may be good enough.

I just LOVE having a physical product. Will and I are both in other bands and this is an outlet for unused material, but it's just nice when I'm talking up my music to someone to be able to give them something. Maybe download cards??? Plus I am WAY broke and a couple hundred bucks to print CD's is a lot of money to me right now.

Pros, Cons?


http://saintsatsundown.blogspot.com for our production blog.

 

[Scott Whigham]

What's the purpose of the release? Is it "to make money" or "just because"? There's nothing wrong with "just because" BTW - that's a valid reason to me (and why I do it!). Just curious.

 

[MrTAteMyBalls]

just because.

 

[MrTAteMyBalls]

i do want to put it out there for the general public to hear, though. I think it's really good and could find an audience. I'm leaning towards a primarily online release.

BTW through your posts i found the dallas music board, and through that board found a great engineer to track the drums for us at a reasonable price. Tom at Tmix studios did a fantastic job. The drums are sounding huge.

 

[74vibrolux]

CDs can be a real waste of resources unless you do a very inexpensive sleeve type packaging. My band was only going to do vinyl and digital download, but when we ran that by fans the ones who weren't into vinyl seemed disappointed and shocked there weren't going to be cds. So we did an inexpensive run. Honestly ... we had to reorder. When you do them so cheaply (a bit over $1 apiece), it feels like something you can give away if need be or sell for not a lot of dough because they don't feel quite so valuable. So that's a great route to take. Another cool option would be digital downloads and then do a small run of some really cool handmade cds (if you're not a graphic designer, get a friend who is to help). People have their choice of a digital download for $5 or a work of art for 8 or 10. I've seen bands do that and sell them like crazy. But the days of doing several hundred jewel cased cds is pretty much over, I think. Plus ... they look lame.

 

[MrTAteMyBalls]

thanks for the input guys. it's much appreciated.

 

[Scott Whigham]

BTW through your posts i found the dallas music board, and through that board found a great engineer to track the drums for us at a reasonable price. Tom at Tmix studios did a fantastic job. The drums are sounding huge.

Cool! Tom is good people

I'd do a CD release of a few though, for my own enjoyment and family/friends. You can print those yourself!

 

[teleking36]

We had 250 CDs pressed for our album release show, all while the EP was available online to listen to and download on our sites. We figured the 250 would last a while. Boy were we wrong. We went through the full 250 in a month and now we're rushing to order more. This time we'll UPC them so we can sell 'em, since the first one was primarily promotional just to get our name out there.

We do download cards and e-promotions as well as the physical CD. People still want them. We'll likely do some limited edition vinyl for our full length LP when we get it done. We're on iTunes, amazon, cdbaby, etc. It's relatively easy to do and an invaluable tool for marketing your band and your product.