What Factors Could Affect Your First Album Sales?

There are two pieces of information that could possibly help us to determine album sales. They are:

a) Historical figures - what was the level of sales in the previous years.

b) Top sales figures - how many copies did the leading albums record.

The above allows us to determine a realistic projection upon which we can confidently create a plan. The answer to the question can be found if we discuss the factors that should determine the cost of the first album:

Potential Sales - How many albums are you hoping to sell? How can this be known? You can know this by taking orders from the record stores you know and then projecting across the number of shops within the targeted territory.

So if your focus group thinks you can sell 50 copies and there are 1,000 similar stores that you can sell to directly, then potentially you can sell 50,000 copies. (The Billboards count shows there are limits to album sales.) What is a focus group? -A focus group is a group of close friends who work within the industry that can give you unbiased opinions, guidance, and criticism about your recordings. The object of their critique is to provide improvements that will make your recordings sellable and more appealing to your niche. Your focus group must include DJ's, record stores and some promoters who are knowledgeable about your niche.

Number of fans - In October 2007 Radiohead released the acclaimed album that created the music business model. The website is said to have had 1.2million visits and less than half of the visitors paying $6 for the album. The average is just over $2 for each visit.

Unless you are like Radiohead, visits to your website will be a lot less popular with visitors so the only way around this is to ensure you have a process for acquiring more fans into your database. It is especially important that when you play gigs you need to generate as many names, emails, and phone numbers of those who come to tell you how great you are. People lives are so hectic that you cannot rely on them chasing you to find out more about you and your gigs or tracks available. You need to build better relationships with the fans to ensure future sales.

Costs involved -Using the Thriller album concept, the label made $650million (if we assume the label made $5 for every album) Remember this is an astronomical hit record. Only a few will even sell a million copies (10 out of 150,000 in the USA).

The point to consider is that if all you're hoping to sell is 1000 albums at ?5, the total you hope to make from record sales only is ?5,000 then your recording costs would be between ?500 - ?1,000 maximum. This conservative estimate gives you a small room for profit. If on the other hand you can sell 5,000 units at ?5 then the total income you can expect is ?25,000 on record sale and your costs should be between ?2500 - ?5000. This is a rough estimate and you can project other expected sales along the same lines.

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