at night..
March 17th 2008
sometimes at night i lie in bed like a kid who is about to go to disney the next day… restless and excited…. only without the kid part… or the disney part… uhhh…. let’s scratch the excited part too…. HA!
the experiment (PART I)
February 11th 2008
According to the information from Trent Reznor’s post about his experiences with the release of Saul Williams new album, Saul’s last album (self-titled; Saul Williams (2004)) sold 33,897 copies. I bought this album from iTunes, so using how much I paid as a gauge of revenue let’s guess the total sales to be around (9.99*33,897) $338,631.03.
For the new album, the inevitable rise and liberation of niggy tardust, the number of albums sold was $28,322 for a total of $141,610.
It was very difficult to locate an actual number for the sales of the in-rainbows album from radiohead. A number I consistently i found was 1.2million. I don’t want to get into what a joke I thought this ’stunt’ was but at least they started out ok (right?). So they released a few songs you could choose how much to pay for and download and then stopped that, released a physcial disc (and box set) and stopped the download bit. That’s fair… uhh… right? anyway….
So then, I tried to find an avg. price paid per download of the radiohead album. This also proved very difficult. But I found one report stating that the avg price was $8. So based on that we’re looking at roughly $960,000.
Now we know how much the sold. And we know how much they made in sales. But what we don’t know, is what they REALLY made. Like all businesses (YUCK!) it costs something to make something. Reznor sort of mentions this in his blog (”Add to that: we spent too much (correction, I spent too much) making the record utilizing an A-list team and studio, Musicane fees, an old publishing deal, sample clearance fees, paying to give the record away“). But we still don’t know how much. After all those expenses what was the NET (that’s what’s left over after you deduct expenses from your total or gross amount, kids). Did Saul make enough to live (pay rent, utilities, other normal living expenses)? At least make enough that if he toured he could cover himself for a while? ok, I’m sure he did, but… is it possible for someone with limited exposure and expenses to be able to pull this off? Let’s find out.
In my next post (PART II), I’ll publish all of frenjen’s expenses for last year and then we’ll do an experiment of our own…
