Interlude

Ugh, i hate it when i don't like a good album. Feels like i failed. 

S: ok, Bottle. I know just randomly wandering the sonic universe is kind of your MO, but even i'm kind of itching to be a real store/label now. 

B: fleas? Finally worn you down, have i? We can't though, it's completely unrealistic. 

E: but you keep implying "how hard could it be?" 

B: oh, no no no, it's not hard at all to run a record store. Anyone can do it for as long as they want, provided making consistent monthly profit isn't your goal. Convincing people to pay you to make new music happen is the hard part. Traditionally, labels push all that financial risk back on the artist. They're just lending firms with the legal mechanism to bar you from doing anything else until they recoup the full expense plus interest. They're literally gatekeepers. I don't want to be that at all. I want to buy your records at standard markup, sell them for my own profit if any, then buy more from you. Bands have to be able to make their own records happen before that can happen. 

S: but say that part is possible, what then? 

B: ok, well, we live in the middle of nowhere and can't set up an actual shop for people to come to, so we have to have a web store of some variety, but remember, i'm not gonna drop ship stuff that may or may not actually exist. I want to put it in a box myself and ship it to whoever buys it. I prefer UPS, so basically i think we can get away with a flat $8 shipping fee. At reasonable retail prices anything over $25 will cover the variable location surcharges inside the country. The problem is selling enough records in general to not lose money. 

I have to have a proper web store first, but that's a continual and ongoing expense. I also need inventory, and so far i have exactly my 1 CD that no one wants to buy, and my personal record collection which no me wants to sell. Even if i did find enough money to buy actual stock of something, i'm at the mercy of who's willing to sell to me. Sony and The Orchard and The Beggars Group aren't going to send me 5 copies at a time no matter how much i promise to never return them. I'm bottom rung of the ladder and i won't pretend like i'm not. I'm completely at the mercy of what i'm allowed to buy from whom, and at the moment it's nothing from nobody. It's a catch-22 thing, you can't buy records to sell unless you sell enough records to convince distributors they're losing money by not selling to you. 

E: why not just offer to buy them from bands who do have records directly? 

B: because there's a high risk that they a) just won't send them to me for some reason, and 2) they have unrealistic expectations in the royalties and future investments department. I have no customers, remember? It's a tornado shaped kind of thingamajig, and you have to have some foundation of regularity. 

Flip it and reverse it to see the problem. I am by most standards a mid level consumer, but we're only talking on average $50 a month. Say we make $7 profit from every record we sell. I'd need 6 Bottles handing me $50 every month just to cover my $2,000/month paycheck, and at least 2 more Bottles to cover overhead. Those numbers seem totally fine, but what you don't see is that's a minimum commitment of 24 titles a year with no opt-out. I need 8 to 10 people fully committed to handing me $50 a month to even make starting a possibility, and 10+ copies of 24 brand new albums every year to keep it going and slowly build back stock for future gains. In reality though, i divide that $50/month among multiple sources, and i only buy an album once. 

C: so it's a bootstrapping problem? 

B: exactly. I have to guess what you want, but you have to meet me in the middle and want something i have to sell. I'm a ridiculously indiscriminate music consumer, but most people are definitely not.There is another option, though. If i changed my mind, i'd probably offer to sell my collection at median value/free shipping, but that is literally a straight liquidation for cash at a substantial loss. My entire collection is barely worth what i spent last year after the cost of mailing them. And then there's the final option, but i don't know if anybody's really gonna want that. 

S: what is it? 

B: you're not gonna like it. 

S: that depends on what it is. 

B: well, i mean Skinny Puppy and the aural hallucinations i didn't tell you guys about got me thinking. I know how much we all miss Carl, and the garbage is certainly piling up, but i kinda just want to bottle the whole thing back up, so i bought a thing. 

S: what kind of thing? 

B: not important. What is important is that if things go according to the absolute lack of plans i made, you'll have at least one album to artwork at, and Skip and Compy can man their respective battle stations, and GREGORY might even get to do some piano/beatwork. 

S: so you're saying- 

B: i'm saying we just all put on the noise cancelling headphones and go back to not very verbosely publishing weird music while the world crumbles around us. 

S: what are you going to do? 

B: me? Oh, i'm still gonna yammer-type 'til my thumb lips fall off, possibly on the new profile page i had Compy make me the other day, but possibly just continuing to shove it all in whatever tube i've been shoving it, but i don't know. Nothing is ever set in quick drying cement around here. 

S: i dunno, Bottle. 

B: great! I'll take that as a resounding "sounds awesome" and proceed as if your eyebrows didn't just jump to Defcon 3, and finish reviewing this stack while we wait for the bomb to drop, i mean box to arrive. 

S: are you sure this is a good idea? 

B: nope, makes it more fun that way. Now if you'll excuse me, i've got a mess of cables to untangle.