06/12/2008

making and selling

a whole bunch of new discs and things to report. it's actually starting to do what i hoped it might do - there's a range of new music by different bits of telafonica and i think it's all quite good. i'm really happy with the christmas cd. the overlapping of voices and instruments between the different 'artists' actually makes a fairly cohesive listen, inspite of the distinct characteristics of each entity - though it's also interesting to be able to note the blurring of the lines between each which wasn't necessarily there at the beginning of the year.

i'll post images and stuff in the next few days, but we'll start trying to sell lessons in time and the telafonica 7" and more of eliza's ep and old telafonica albums and...

on that note, at the last couple of gigs i've had copies of the punches and the lies and morpheme with me. i made some new simple cases using recycled board. a few people at each have come up and asked if we had any cds to sell and i've told them i had these different things. they then look at me a little bemused, wondering what to do with that information and how to choose what to get. they then ask how much each thing is and when i tell the $5 each they say, oh, give me a copy of each then.

bec and i were talking to andy rantzen at the excelsior the other week. even at the height of itch-e & scratch-e's fame in the early 90s, he was only earning about $1500 a year in royalties. i would assume that actual sales income wouldn't have amounted to much once all the various parties took their cuts. so even at that level, which was relatively large at the time, a time where the industry was actually set up to make money from sales, which it no longer is, there's not a whole lot of chance of earning money. som, more and more, i'm thinking that the best idea is to make things as low cost for people to buy as possible, so that more people are just likely to get a copy that not. the $5 thing has worked so far, without actually even telling people that we have it.

to that end, we'll also give the digital download option that bec suggested a run tonight and see how that goes.

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