
As most of you know, over the past couple of months I’ve been raising money for the charity Crisis by selling our fabulous Christmas album. Now the season is over people are asking how did we do? The simple answer is - very well, thank you - but the details of our financial situation are still a bit hazy. The easy bit is to count the CD sales and other donations. As things stand today (Friday 10th January) we have sold 238 CDs which, plus sundry donations, amounts to a donation total of £1740.00. There are a couple of events still to go including One Winter’s Night in February so I’m pretty sure we’re going to top £2000.00 in the end so a big hurrah and hats off to everyone!
This is amazing on its own but mystery still surrounds the financial value of our digital sales from streams and downloads. The album is distributed by CD Baby to every streaming and download service provider world wide. As of today the reported totals are pretty low, just 3 downloads and 139 streams making a total of $21 or £17 in real money. But it takes up to 3 months for CD Baby to get reports from all the platforms so this is not the full story. Intriguingly, I get an artist report from Spotify which is far more up to date and it shows we had nearly 4000 streams and that’s just one of the platforms. So if this pans out, there may be several hundred more pounds coming down the digital pipe. I'll believe it when I see it but wouldn't that be great?
It’s interesting to compare the old fashioned with the new fangled. There’s an argument that manufacturing CDs and selling them to your audience is outdated. It’s certainly true that a majority of the public consume music in a digital form and a significant number don’t have access to a CD player but the outcome of our endeavour to raise money for Crisis demonstrates the CDs are still valued among the kind of people you might expect in the audience at your gig. The numbers to date certainly favour the CD. It costs a lot more to manufacture but, as it stands the net profit is £1740 vs £17 so, even if my late reporting prediction is true, digital has a lot to do to catch up.
So that's the story so far but it's not over yet! My thanks to everyone, artists, performers and intrepid fund raisers, not forgetting the lovely people who bought, streamed or downloaded the songs on-line and made donations. I promise you, Crisis will be overjoyed and I also promise to report back when I have the full story.
Jx
Well done, Jim. Great effort. Congrats! Nick 😊
I still try and buy CDs whenever I can. I bought a little external CD player/rewriter for my laptop during lockdown and ripped all my collection to mp3! Loved this Christmas album; well done for all your fundraising.
Congratulations on the fundraising! I hope the digital platforms bring in an unexpectedly generous amount to the kitty.