Also, read a few words from Bob him­self regard­ing his new album:

I felt I should com­ment on the mys­tery of why the album is still not available.

Math

Sales of recorded music are not easy to come by and when an unknown artist releases an album with no pro­mo­tion, label sup­port or tour, you know what happens?

Nada.

I per­son­ally invested $29,000 to make this album (musi­cians, pro­ducer, travel, 3 days in a pre­miere Man­hat­tan record­ing stu­dio, 8 days of mix­ing, mas­ter­ing, etc.) and I had hoped to part­ner with a good record label to release it. That is to say share the addi­tional invest­ment of pro­mo­tional expenses (pub­li­cists reg­u­larly go for $10k for a 3–4 month cam­paign and radio pro­mot­ers are roughly the same).

Record Labels

So far it’s been rejected by:

• Blue Note Records
• Con­cord Records
• Verve Music Group
• E One Music Group
• None­such Records
• Pal­metto Records
• Sun­ny­side Records
• Mack Avenue Records
• Marsalis Music
• to name a few…

Could I put it out tomor­row? Sort of. I own the mas­ter. But there’s still no art­work, pho­tog­ra­phy or design, and I haven’t yet paid for the 3 cover tunes (Radio­head, Bon Iver, Foo Fight­ers). Tech­ni­cally I could put it on iTunes if I did those things. But those things require more money.

iTunes

Then it’s on iTunes. Then what? From the sale of a full album ($9.99) I would see roughly $6.50. So let’s say I put another $3,000 into it to get it ready…oh, and by the way we’re still talk­ing dig­i­tal. Man­u­fac­tur­ing phys­i­cal CDs (you know, those plas­tic things you throw out) would add another $2k or so.

All that would put me in the -$34,000 ball­park. And that’s before hir­ing a pub­li­cist or radio promoter.

So the record would be on iTunes and I would send out an email to the good folks on my newslet­ter, tweet about it and post it on face­book. And that, as they say, would be that.

But it would take 5,230 sales for me to break even. Then I could go hire a pub­li­cist. But of course by then the album would have been released already, so no one would actu­ally be inter­ested in writ­ing about it or review­ing it.

And if sales of my last album are any indi­ca­tion, I could expect any­where from 150–300 peo­ple to go pur­chase the record. It’s a long road from 300 to 5,300.

Sales

Below is a screen­shot of my all-time total down­loads and sales in Band­camp. You can click it to see a larger version:

*Note, this is just Band­camp and does not include iTunes data…cause they don’t make it eas­ily avail­able. I can tell you my all-time dig­i­tal sales via iTunes total ~$5k. That’s for 4 albums since 2007.

A lot of folks assume artists make money from tour­ing and that record­ings are merely a pro­mo­tional tool. I don’t get to tour often as a band leader and when I do it’s always an “invest­ment”. The spring tour Janek Gwiz­dala and I did in Spain and the UK cost us each $1,300 after all expenses were paid.

So, where does this leave things? Not sure. I guess the moral of the story is that just because music is avail­able to be pur­chased does not mean it sells, and, regard­less of sales, it still takes a pile of money to pro­duce a high-quality album (singer-songwriters in their bed­room stu­dios and garage-rock bands don’t count).

I don’t have a solu­tion yet. And that’s OK. The world will not end if this record does not get released. I saved for 6 years since Can’t Wait for Per­fect to make this stu­dio album and I know once it’s out it could be another 6 years til the next.

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