seanan_mcguire | Why my music is only available in CD form.

Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Girlyman, "Angel."

Entry tags:

Why my music is only available in CD form.

This question has been coming up a lot recently, so I thought I'd take a moment to address it in a central place that people could be pointed to. Specifically:

"Why can't I buy your music on iTunes/Band Camp/Amazon MP3/whatever?"

Sometimes the question takes the form of "I have gone all-digital, why do I have to buy a physical CD?", but those are basically the same thing, since "Why can't I buy..." is the flip side of "Why do I have to buy...". And here is my answer:

I will never, barring the closure of all the CD manufacturing companies, be selling my music digitally. If you want to own my music, you will need to either buy and rip a physical CD, or pirate it. I would obviously prefer the former, but since some of my CDs are out of print, I'll understand if you go for the latter.

Why?

Two big reasons. These are...

It's a hobby.

I am not a professional musician. Even if I sell every single copy of every single CD at full "retail price," never selling through filk dealers or sites like CD Baby, I won't turn a profit. Breaking even is the most that I can hope for. Because all CDs are nothing but red ink, they don't further complicate my already incredibly complicated taxes. If I started doing digital sales, which many people view as "money for nothing," I might pass that magical line where I make a profit, and then I would have to figure out how to deal with things.

I don't take enough of a loss for my music to be a tax write-off (yet), but I also don't make any money, and that keeps things simple. If I started needing to religiously track receipts and who paid what where to who, I don't know that the carrot would remain worth the stick for me.

The digital divide exists.

I feel as strongly about physical CDs as I do about physical books. The ability to release things digitally is amazing for people who can't afford a print run, or are doing something incredibly focused, or just want to get themselves out there. I can afford a print run; I have an audience; I am as out there as I need to be. And people like my mother, who doesn't own an MP3 player, and who listens to all music via her CD player, still exist.

Because of the costs of production, I can only afford to produce physical CDs when I'm sure that I'll be able to sell them. If 50% of my audience went to digital downloads, I'd wind up with a lot of unsold CDs, and again, would not be able to justify producing more. And for me, that would be the end of it. I'm not going to pay for recording and mixing and mastering and not have something in my hands when I'm done. I can't afford to produce CDs in units of less than 1,000—and with full "to get this, you must buy physical" buy-in, it still took four years for Stars Fall Home to sell out.

Cover songs.

None of my cover song licenses include digital rights. All my albums would be missing pieces if I put them up for digital download.

And so...

I know that this can create bottlenecks. I know that physical disks come with shipping costs, and that sometimes vendors run out. I know that I'm losing business. These are choices that I made, for the reasons listed above, and while they may be wrong choices, they are mine, and I'm sticking with them.

Thank you.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I have to say it makes my life less ambiguous. I listen to music mostly on my iPhone, but also like to listen on my computer at work.

With your work only available on CD. I don't have to worry about whether I should by the CD for the computer and lending purposes, and the itune for phone purposes. I bought the CD unless/until it's out on loan often enough when I'm listening to it that I feel I need a separate copy to keep my copyright conscious clean that's all I need. If it gets there I get another CD.

It's not like it's hard to convert the files from CD.

That's my thought as well!

I, at least, understand your reasons. For myself, I prefer to have the physical CD, even if I then proceed to copy the tracks onto less-physical media for ease of playback, because then I can make another copy when (not if, WHEN) the first copy breaks.

(Now all I need is to scrape up enough spare cash to buy Wicked Girls to complete my collection. And maybe the reissue of SFH to get that one extra song.)

when (not if, WHEN) the first copy breaks.

My first after-college job was tech support for DOS & Windows. This is also why I prefer CDs for non single-track purchases.

That makes total sense to me.

Speaking from an artistic standpoint, I would totally get the reissue, just because the remaster is AMAZING. But it's your call, completely.

This seems an appropriate time to tell you that the remaster IS in fact amazing, and I'm very happy I took the plunge to get it!

Thank you for the explanation. I've been wondering this for a long time. While I prefer my music in a digital form, simply because I am not normally in a position to listen to an actual CD but frequently want music available, this makes perfect sense. So, buying CDs, ripping them, and putting the CD into safe storage it is. :)

That's what I do. It also makes me feel less worried about lending CDs out to have an mp3 copy.

Yep. I have my hardcopy CDs (or I did before I moved twice and got divorced.) I've got my ripped MP3s for my player and my phone. I haven't found a person who needs to have Wicked Girls as their ringtone. Yet.

I have the Girl Genius ringtones on mine, but Wicked Girls would be a good ringtone. It's also a good gateway drug into getting people hooked on Seanan's stuff - I've gotten several friends hooked because of that CD.

Seanan gave permission to play Wicked Girls at my wedding. The DJ got hooked on her music. :)

That is FANTASTIC. If I ever get married/handfasted, I might do the same, though "Red Roses and Dead Things" would probably be my choice. :3 Seanan is really good at writing romantic songs, isn't she?

I think the most romantic wedding ever was in the third Pirates movie. Getting married while defending your beloved's life? Awesome.

My former husband vetoed anything remotely like that. In retrospect, this should have been a red flag.

Ah. Themed weddings can go either good or bad, it seems. My mom had as close to a Lord of the Rings themed marriage as the Air Force chapel would allow, and well.....Beren and Luthien, they weren't (not for lack of her trying). OTOH, two friends of mine wed at a Ren Faire and are blissfully happy.

Yay!

Since I started promoting conventions in part by having exemplars of the guests go honor's work, having physical CDs helps with promoting Music GoHs.

Agreed.

Makes sense to me.

Yay!

Hard drives die.

And when they do, I grab my CDs and re-rip.

That's how I do it, too.

It's hard to find one these days who still fights against this download-only culture, but the economical reasons seem quite understandable.
As a customer, one argument I often find is: The disk definitely lives longer than your download. It's just as it is.
Well, you should not park your disks in water or let them lie around in the sun and you need some space to put them in, but that's already it.
For mp3s I steadily need to take care of and always need to have a safety copy as a backup.

I don't know, since the spreading of consuming music widely digitally it also seems like music loses a bit its appretiation. Services and the new kind of cell phones make it easy to access some, but in fact it's nothing else than radio a few decades ago in the back of peoples' minds. But you have to pay for it.
If a business man would have suddenly told his potential customers that they needed to pay on for simple radio sound from now, I guess they would have sent him to the bin and his enterprise disappeared.
Radio once used to be the promotion for what's on the market, but this thing now has lost the function. It already is selling the music (by subsciption).
If there's nothing with free access to promote the product and the product is sold as something that is always there around you, then where's the appretiation going to? If music is just nothing more than sound in your environment that accompanies you - and you already have to pay for it?
Wouldn't dare to say it's throw away culture, but since material also gets adjusted to the digital market it's lacking something and also it tends to be exchangable. - And things which are exchangable your don't appretiate.

Also, a thing that should be taken in mind: There still is music out there which you can't buy as mp3s. One may not believe it, but if you listen to the wrong music, you can find yourself with the option left to either purchase data carriers or to live with more or less good rips of vinyl and original CDs you find anywhere round the corners of the inet. It's just as it is, but even the biggest libraries don't cover everything. (And in those cases it will surely remain so since the copyright holder doesn't exist anymore and the artists nowadays do something else.)

I'm glad you understand.

Quite understandable.

Thanks.

I'm the person who asked the question at Norwescon, and I hope I didn't come across as "Wow, are you a dinosaur or something?" because that certainly wasn't my intention. My thought was, "I want to give you money! Why can't I give you all my money for all the things?!" I had never thought of it from the economic standpoint, the cost of printing the CDs, the rights for the cover tunes (I hadn't even realized that there were several covers on the CDs because . . . I didn't have them until the con). I really appreciated your detailed-yet-concise response at the con.

I'm digging the CDs, and have even been inflicting them on my grudgingly-appreciative non-filker wife. I haven't been to Norwescon in six or seven years, despite living only about 20 miles away, but had to go when I saw that both you and Heather Dale would be there. Thanks for coming up here and giving such great performances. Your Q&A had me in tears of laughter (and post-pneumonia coughing fits) all the way through. I hope that I will be able to see you perform live again some time.

(And squee! I just got my book group to choose Rosemary and Rue as our May book - we read War for the Oaks a few years ago, and I said, "Hey, how about we see where urban fantasy has gone these days?")

It didn't! It was just followed by several people asking me the same question online, so I figured I should go ahead and write up something coherent, because I do get tired of answering, y'know? :)

I am really glad you enjoyed the Q&A, and the CDs!

And *thank you* for staying with CDs. I buy my music on CDs and don't use the mp3 players, cell phones, whatever that music gets 'loaded' onto now. I -like- CDs. They are small, compact and travel well. They give my CD players a reason to live and are versatile enough to play what I want, when I want. They allow me to find the songs I want to hear without paging through an index - or remembering the exact spelling of a song [assuming one can find a song that way on an mp3 player].

I just like CDs!

Me, too!

AH-ha!

Thank you for the explanation. While I would totally re-purchase everything from iTunes, even without the cover-songs, splitting your market does sound like a losing proposition and for more Weird Bookkeeping stress. So and thus! I will continue to order from CD Baby whenever I hear a new one's out. O:>

Yay!

Thank you so much, both for continuing to make physical cds (I am like your Mom in wanting to avoid going digital with music) and for giving such a clear look into why.

You are so very welcome.

Not to seem demanding - just excited about the idea...any news on te next CD?

No.

It's kind of funny - just as I was reading this last night, S came up the walkway lugging an old boombox, triumphant that after a week we'd finally found a CD player between the various households that are involved in running the zendo. (Someone had sent her a CD with a talk we wanted to play.) I'm not entirely sure how the digital divide argument works in this case - in the case of a physical book, it's its own player/reader. CDs... not so much.

(I'm not in any way disagreeing with your decision. Particular the combination of taxes and all the weird rights issues around digital media - I have really mixed feelings about having gone almost exclusively to ebooks, and my "buy legal copies of everything and then crack or pirate them as well so I have version that I control that will work the way I want them to" is far from ideal.)

Okay, that is funny.

(It's not ideal, but I still support it.)

I remember that question coming up on the Q&A panel at Norwescon. I thought you were very eloquent in addressing it in a concise manner. The longer explanation is awesome, and covers some things I hadn't realized (like that you didn't make a profit... considering that I do want to thank you for making them available because some of your songs have had a very positive impact on my life; I believe I mentioned to you briefly I intend to get tattoos of my favorite of the Wicked Girl lyrics, one on each side of my neck; I didn't want to take up your time but the lyrics I want done are "You have to break rules if you want to break free" and "Be wicked and lovely and don't live in fear"... mostly now it's deciding font!).

Somewhat amusingly, it was actually at a Vixy & Tony concert where they covered Wicked Girls that I had to buy your CDs. I then proceeded to rip them. I actually need to find where they wandered off to now, because we "inherited" a nearly-pristine luxury car from my parents that had the awesome new tech of the day -- a CD changer and absolutely no place on the front panel to replace with a modern stereo. So, for the first time in years, I'm digging up CDs (... I'd be burning them but I'm having issues with my optical drive and my laptop does not have one) for my car.

Also, I was able to get copies of the earlier albums in mp3 format from a friend who had bought them (with the caveat that she would only do this because they were out of print). I know you occasionally have the Tip Jar up but since that is for a specific purpose... is there a PayPal address or something so I could send you the cost of the CDs? I have been meaning to ask this for a bit but keep forgetting. Or something else you'd prefer? I love the music and would like to compensate, since I wasn't able to buy legally.

I was actually going to ask something similar right before the Stars Fall Home re-release was announced - like, one day I emailed a friend who had the CD and asked her, if I contacted Seanan, asked permission and sent moneys directly, would Friend be willing to make me a copy of the disc as it was out of print, and the very next day the re-release of the album was announced (so I just bought it straight off) - what timing, right?

Somehow, I managed to miss that there was a re-release for Stars Fall Home. Eee! I will have to pick that up... but I still want to pay for the earlier out of print version I have, as I tend to collect multiple versions. :)

You can absolutely send me the cost of the CDs, to delirium@xocolatl.com. And thank you so much for asking.

I can't wait to see your tattoo.

Yay! I missed somehow that there was a re-release of Stars Fall Home, so I'll be heading on to buy that too. I really, really try to compensate artists, but... well, lots of personal life suckage for a long period of time that we are just starting to come out of, so I finally remembered to ask for once. Augh brain. -_-

Ty! I'm getting my first done relatively soon... the Kushiel's Rose I have been meaning to get done for about ten years. Hopefully I will be able to talk my artist into doing this one without having to start on my other heavier ink first (lovely shop, but they mention they don't tend to do more "extreme" ink on people who aren't as heavily tattooed... as I have many, many, many tattoo plans I hope explaining that will let me get this one done sooner! *crosses fingers*).

I rarely buy physical cd's any more. And when I do, I usually try to buy as directly from the artist as possible, so that they get as much of the profits as possible. I also went something like 5 years with a laptop with a broken cd drive.

That said, I totally respect your desire to produce and sell only physical cd's. Your work, your music, your decision. I feel that it's the height of arrogance to demand that an artist, any kind of artist, do things in ways they don't want, for a matter of sheer personal convenience on my part. I have gained so much from your arts, in varying forms.

Also, I have sneakily bought a copy of Discount Armageddon just tonight to gift a friend who adores the Toby books, but whom I haven't been able to lure into your other books. Hopefully, this will get her reading more of your things.

Awesome!

I hadn't actually thought about the taxes angle. Now that I have, I wish I could stop. *whimper*

The only reason I dislike physical only things is that getting physical things is more expensive, since materials cost and also shipping, and my budget has only so much stretch.

Then I remind myself that I don't actually need to have ALL THE THINGS, and that making decisions is good for me. :P So far, your music has always been something I decide for, and I don't see that changing.

Thanks, honey.

Man, if I were a musician and I had to do a thing where I put albums up online except tracks 2, 6, and 11 that would totally drive me nuts, so I hear where you're coming from. Keep putting out music in whatever form pleases you, you've got an audience here. :)

I, for one, am glad you produce CDs. It's a tactile thing for me and I also have cruddy luck with hard drives.

Besides, I'm a liner note junkie. :)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Why my music is only available in CD form.

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

In a somewhat related question...

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject