stAllio!'s way

right now i'm listening to true data at 45 instead of 33. don't ask me why i didn't think doing that with the test pressings. so far it sounds pretty fucking good at 45. spamouflage sounds awesome: it's just that much faster & crazier. blue screen of death sounds good, although some of the "terror" or at least the "edge" of some of the tones seems to be lost. it's still really hard, just not quite as creepy at that speed. packet burst also loses a little something (not too much though). open as raw sounds pretty good at this speed too. but i guess you need to acquire the record to find out for yourself. now i will listen to it all backward.

but enough with all my introspective whining & self-pitying from previous posts (or enough for now!)... now that the records are here i need to worry about actually selling the damn things. & the most important decision to make is pricing.

i got a "limited" pressing of 200. the big decision to make in terms of quantity is that the more you order, the lower your unit price. but at the same time, the more you order, the more you have to sell or else you lose a lot of money & have piles of unopened records all over your bedroom floor. i was more concerned about the latter option, so i went with a pretty small pressing of 200 copies.

this sets my unit cost pretty high (in fact, my unit cost is apparently more than a dollar more than keith used to charge for freakshow records wholesale, back in the day!) so when i start talking to distros, apparently some of them might object to the relative high cost my records. but there's not a lot i can do about that, other than sell them myself (patience; i will work out the details of that soon). hopefully tomorrow i'll get started on contacting distros & shops.

i was going to set my retail price at $10 but drbmd suggested that was really high for a domestic 12". he's right; it is (but i'm not sure it's quite as high as he thinks it is, having found a few domestic 12"s in various webshops for $10-up). regardless, right now i'm thinking that $9 for a 12" record (+ s&h) is not that outrageous, considering it's a small pressing on fairly heavy vinyl (it's supposed to be 140-gram vinyl). that is still kind of high, which is partly why i hope to offset the high record price with the t-shirt/record combo deal.

(speaking of which, i have ordered my next batch of t-shirts from screen monkey; they should be done within a few weeks.
special new shirt options and sizes: we will offer men's sizes M-XXL in black and purple. we will also have a limited number of ladie's cut "girlie" shirts [but only in black, because ladie's cut t-shirts have lame colors].)

is $9 a reasonable price for a "limited" 12" record? if the record is $9 the combo package would probably be $15. i'm just trying to make sure i recoup my investment, since i'm a bit skeptical about my ability to sell them all.