So after a visit to my Tax Person, I thought I would share how I fared last year in my endeavors of making music for fun and profit.
My biggest expense was upgrading to the new version of my DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) Logic for 200.00. Besides that was GoDaddy for my website and domain name for about 130.00 or so. Then I had to pay for the distribution of my CD’s. That comes out to about 50.00 give or take a few dollars. Other assorted expenses included office supplies for another 50.00. So my total expenses came out to about 430.00.
So how much did I make?
I use two distributors. For my first CD ‘Deep Energy 1′ and my two Folk CD’s I used CD Baby. Almost all of the sales came from the Deep Energy CD. CD Baby Paid me about 200.00, with the bulk of the sales split between Amazon and iTunes as you would imagine. For some reason CD Baby never sent my CD’s to E-Music, even after I e-mailed them and asked them to. This is the main reason that I don’t use CD Baby any more.
All of the other CD’s are distributed by TuneCore. I made about 400.00 from TuneCore.
Broken down it comes out to per unit:
200 full album downloads
75 single song downloads
300 songs streamed
By Dollar By Company:
iTunes Worldwide – 200.00
Amazon – 70.00
E-Music – 125
Assorted – 5
If you are doing the math in your head you are probably wondering how much I make per CD/Song. It all depends on who sells what CD… Sort of confusing. Except for the folk CD’s and Deep Energy 2, all of the CD’s are just one track, and Amazon sells one track CD’s as a single. So 5 of the 7 CD’s sell for only .99 at Amazon, and I make roughly 60-70% of that. The 60-70% is pretty much standard at all of the online retailers for what I receive from them. iTunes prices, pretty much, by the length of the track, so all of my CD’s are priced at 9.99. It’s an interesting system.
Streaming tracks make almost nothing for the artist. According to CD Baby when someone streams my tracks i get paid 0.00091…per track ….
So I made about 600.00 and had about 430.00 in expenses. As they say, ‘Don’t quit your day job’.
What is my outlook for this year? I’ve diversified what and how i’m selling my music which is showing dividends already. The biggest one would be selling my music as royalty free tracks, through www.ambientmusicgarden.com. They are a website that’s lets companies, hotels, spas etc buy music royalty free for one price. The other is my iPhone app, which I make about 1.35 per app, and i’m selling roughly 50 a month. I’ll be sending the new CD ‘Deep Energy 3′ to TuneCore in a few days and I have two more paid music release that should go out this year, including a 10-14 track CD.
So 2010 is looking better than 2009 money wise, depending on expenses. I would like to pick up Omnisphere, which is 500.00 so we will see…but I know I will be making enough to keep this one man music machine rolling ….
