IndieHQ / Article Detail

December 6th, 2006

Drag the River It’s Crazy hits 1000 scans, a breakdown

Although, most labels would shy away from announcing that it has taken them nearly 5 months to hit 1,000 scans, I consider this a mini-milestone for us at Suburban Home. As I report each week about the weekly indie sales charts, I mention hundreds of releases that sell over a thousand copies in a single week. Unfortunately, we are not that type of label and although we report about tons of releases that are selling tons of copies, it is a really tough time to sell music these days. I figured with this release hitting 1,000 scans, I would share with you the numbers that I find most interesting(READ ON IF YOU ARE A BIG NERD LIKE ME AND FIND NUMBERS INTERESTING):

Let’s start by how many copies we have gotten into the marketplace. Navarre, our main distributor has shipped close to 1,100 copies and in the past 5 months, accounts have returned 114 copies. That is around a 10 percent return rate which is not bad at all. My mom and pop distributors have taken close to 500 copies with close to half that number going to territories outside the United States. The band has taken close to 500 copies although we do not report venue sales of their CDs. I have sold close to 200 copies through mailorder and again, we do not report our mailorder sales to soundscan. For those with calculators, we have gotten rid of 2,200 copies so far. Of those 2,200 copies though, our 1000 soundscanned sales are based off of around 1,350 copies that have been sent to accounts capable of soundscan.
One thing that I want to point out is that Tower, who as all of you know are no longer with us, took 101 copies of It’s Crazy. That number represents around 10 percent of our sales through Navarre or 10 percent of our overall scans. That is really scary to see and will surely affect the smaller labels out there like Suburban Home who need that extra 10 percent in a time when most chains are not likely to carry smaller titles.

A breakdown of the soundscans show that of the 1004 scanned to date, 820 were CD sales and 184 were digital sales. That means that 18 percent of my scans came from digital sales. The thing I take from this is that a large percent of my sales still come from CDs so when you hear of labels like Deep Elm only making only 1,000 copies on CD of future titles, it seems as though they could be selling themselves short if the release is capable of selling more than 1,000 copies. A further breakdown shows that of the 1,004 sold Chains sold 203, Mom and Pop stores sold 542, and Non Traditional marketplaces (like Itunes, Interpunk, Amazon, etc) sold 259 copies. I find this interesting because it shows me that half of my sales are coming from mom and pop stores. I think if you look at some of the bigger releases out there, their sales will show probably 50 or 60 percent of their sales if not more from chains. Does this mean I need to try and get more copies into chains? I would like think that if anything this shows that this release carries some weight as most mom and pops are being more selective about the titles they are picking up. This could show that the band’s fans are just more likely to purchase releases from mom and pops and not venture into chains.

Over the past 4 weeks, the release has averaged 22 copies per week with this past week selling 32 copies. At this average, it will take me another year to scan another 1,000 copies. I really have my heart set on trying to sell at least 5,000 copies of this record. I need to figure out what I can do to get more copies into the marketplace; the band is touring all the time and is currently on tour with Lucero which I have to think is helping the band find more and more fans. Only time will tell, but I will always continue to fight the good fight. If anyone has any suggestions besides putting tons of money into this release, let me know.

I hope some of you found these numbers interesting.

Written by Virgil Dickerson