Keeping costs down
2010/05/24 at 2:00 pm | Posted in Business, Music | Leave a commentTags: distribution, expenses, finances, internet, production
A funny fact of modern capitalism is the way many companies offer all kinds of software and services at no charge, or very inexpensively… as long as you are only using them for your own private purposes. You can easily find ways of sharing your music for free. Yet once you set out to make some money, the costs begin to mount at an astonishing rate.
So the only way to turn a profit is to minimize these costs in every way available to you.
Let’s focus for now on the expenses associated directly with getting a piece of music into a customer’s hands. I’ve concluded that all such costs fall into two broad categories: production and distribution.
Production is the process of transforming a finished composition into a format that can be used by a performer. As I write, it is generally still very much necessary for it to be printed on paper… eventually.
Aside from production, you also have to get the music to the musician somehow. And shipping is deadly expensive.
Computers (and the internet) offer an appropriate solution to both problems for small independents. There is no reason that the printing itself can’t be done by the user, if he or she has the legal permission of the owner—so by making computer files of the music, you can leave this step to them. Distribution can then take the form of a single CD-ROM, an email attachment, or a download.
Thus you use other resources to decrease the cost of each unit.
Traditionally in business, costs that can’t be reduced any further are passed on to the customer. This makes perfect sense: the final price must be higher than the cost of goods sold if there is to be any profit.
For the same reason, the virtual elimination of something like distribution expenses allows you to reduce your price and increase the chances of selling more copies. And if you are handing off physical production directly to your customer, you owe it to them to lower the price even more. They will undoubtedly notice the increased cost to them.
There are numerous considerations to explore in detail in future posts. For now, the crucial point is to remember that you have to deal with some costs no matter what; the best strategy is to anticipate them and build them into the overall business plan.
A few drawbacks to PDFs
2010/05/10 at 8:00 am | Posted in Music, Production | 1 CommentTags: disadvantages, PDF, software
Although PDF files can be very useful in electronic music distribution, I feel that it’s necessary to point out some of their flaws as well. Besides, future topics should be more interesting if I haven’t already claimed that one type of production is completely superior to all others.
- There is very little control. Instead of making it possible only to print directly from a website, perhaps with a cap on the number of copies, a PDF can always be downloaded onto the user’s computer and then printed at will. (Then again, no matter how people get their music, they will have access to a photocopier.)
- What You See Is Usually What You Get. Almost always, I’d say. However, when taking “finished” PDF versions to FedEx Kinko’s to print large scores and booklet formats, I was occasionally irritated by an error in one of the percussion articulations (the center slash of a roll marking was hollow).* This was the one anomalous case I ever noticed that was specific to PDF, but there’s the chance of other bugs.
- The purchaser cannot transpose, etc. If you are writing vocal songs or works for unspecified solo instrument, programs like Sibelius/Scorch can allow people an important degree of customization. A PDF reader just can’t.
- There is no playback. Definitely a liability with music, and it needs to be addressed by other means.
- They look really bad on the screen. Just… print it. It’ll be better then. 600 dpi seems to work well as a print resolution. I used to include warnings about this problem in every email.
Other production techniques overcome many of these issues—to be considered later—but they always mean a substantial increase in cost, which it is crucial to minimize wherever possible in self-publishing.
*MakeMusic has since owned up to the problem and released a patch that, among other things, “updates the Maestro font’s unmeasured tremolo character so that it displays correctly when printed with a PostScript printer.” The same fix was also bundled into the Finale 2007c Updater. It took a fair bit of digging to verify, but this correction corresponds time-wise to a post that describes my problem precisely, here.
PDFs make a very simple option
2010/05/03 at 2:00 pm | Posted in Music, Production | 1 CommentTags: advantages, PDF, software
Although I did attempt to produce quality product on paper for several years, I also found that purely electronic distribution was a viable method, from my earliest experiments with it. And the magic ingredient that made it “go” was putting files into Portable Document Format: PDF.
Here are just a handful of advantages:
- The format is standardized. Literally, “portable”—virtually every computer setup will have a PDF reader these days, and if they don’t, the user will constantly encounter content that urges them to install the latest one. No proprietary music software viewers are required.
- Results are predictable. Next to paper, it is the best option I know of for ensuring that the recipient sees what you sent them. Usually even better than in Finale NotePad or Scorch.
- They are cheap. Or free. A widely-used freeware application called PDFCreator seems to work fine (but if you install it, be sure to disallow the toolbar, or the license says you are agreeing to let it take over your web searches in any browser!). I need a bit more power, and a better-developed interface is nice for making PDFs of lots of parts at a time, so I use Tracker Software’s PDF-XChange. The Pro version has some handy extras, but even the Lite would allow distribution to dozens of clients for just pennies a page.
- Creating them is easy. A PDF generator acts just like a printer in your system. All you have to do is run the “print” command (from any program) and select it as your printer.
- File sizes are small. At least they are if you use a software-based method, as above; then musical scores are comparable to word-processed documents with embedded fonts and limited images. If you scan printouts into a PDF, you lose this benefit, as pure graphic files are always large.
Fair’s fair, so next week I will confess to a few of the disadvantages to be aware of.
The second post
2010/04/26 at 2:00 pm | Posted in Day Jobs, Music | Leave a commentTags: examples, income, re-launch
Today marks the first anniversary of the launch of Countermelody.
And this is its second post.
I made myself prepare two other posts for the next two weeks before adding this one. They are already scheduled, so at least I am guaranteed to do 3 times as well as before. How often can you see 200% improvement in performance?
It has been a phenomenally chaotic year, including my wife’s and my eighth move since 2000, two substantial temporary assignments, a long period of unemployment and mild depression, and the time-consuming retrieval of some things from storage that needed to be transported from Rochester, New York to England.
I haven’t written much music lately, I find it difficult to focus on composing when I sit down to it, and I have an awful time fighting off countless distractions, not least including the necessity of bringing in a reasonable income. A brief on-topic observation here would be: if you want to be a self-published composer, you will need to fund this vocation externally. And your non-musical pursuits will show an insatiable appetite for your time. This is a battle that must be fought, which I’ve been losing a lot lately. (I’ve indulged in ranting about it today on my dark-side “mean reds” blog, if you’re interested.)
But despite everything, I still feel drawn most strongly to music; I am determined to find my way back. And I still believe in this project.
You can see that mine is not exactly an archetypal success story. I am not beaming down directives from an enlightened height; all I can do is spur others on and hope for encouragement in return.
If you want to see a genuine rags-to-riches music self-publishing saga, try Stephen Melillo’s STORMWORKS®. But brace yourself. As popular as he has become, I somehow find the whole STORMWORKS® deal ever so slightly sinister… dare I say “fascist”? And, well, not a lot of it is targeted to composers.
Anyway, Mr. Melillo’s efforts ought to be able to shed some light on effective strategies for the rest of us, and I am certain that one of his pivotal infrastructure choices has been the use of PDFs for distribution. So next week, I will explore some of the things that make this format so great.
Promise.
Jeremy Irish
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