JUMPING DARKNESS PARADE: EYAL ON PHYSICAL CDS

Okay, honest question. How many of you are still actually buying physical CDs? If you download illegally, I don’t care. Just let me know what your preferred habit is. I’m not a tool from a major label that’s going to sue you. I don’t give a fuck. I personally think that the Compact Disc is a medium that’s in its death throes. Either that, or it died and occasionally twitches. Either way, I just wanna know…. How do you guys prefer to get your music?

Here’s part of why it doesn’t matter to me. When it comes down to it, we don’t make jack shit from record sales. Even if you buy a CD from us at a show, we’re still paying $7.50 or $8 to get it from the labels. If we charge you what stores charge, then it’s just highway robbery. So at prices we feel comfortable charging, our profit margin is like two bucks on CDs pretty much. You could buy a shirt where our margin is more like five to seven bucks and it might add up to us being able to pay our phone bills at the end of a tour. Sometimes we have to charge retail store prices because headliners make us price match, but if it were up to us CDs would be $7 or $8. They are definitely a loss leader for us on the road, but we bring them anyways because our latest album, The Concealers, wasn’t exactly easy to find in retail stores. So if you wanna buy a copy, at least you can get one from us.

But we’d rather sell shirts and hoodies. That’s where there’s actually profit. And it seems like metal fans are more into buying shirts anyways. I mean, you can’t download a shirt. Well, you can download the design and then iron on the print, but that shit ain’t the same. It’ll look like a shitty bootleg.

Anyways, it’s all the same to me if you download our record or buy it. I just care that you get it. If this was five or more years ago I might have cared that you were downloading it, but it’s just a fact of life now. Why would you pay money for something that you can get for free? Only shame is about the artwork. But, oh well, how many of you actually care about that? Seems like an old school thing, but I could be wrong. The artwork you guys seem to care about is on clothing items, not in CD booklets. Am I right or wrong?

Music buying culture has changed. It’s not about to change, it HAS changed. Remember the CD book? Where you used to keep all your CDs? Some motherfuckers had like five or six of them with a hundred CDs apiece. I’m sure some of you don’t even know what I’m talking about. Thing of the past. Nowadays you can fit all that on an iPod. So why would you even bother? CDs are cumbersome. I know iPods can fail and you could lose all your music, but it’s still so convenient, and our society is built on convenience, isn’t it?

I know most of you don’t buy CDs. Most people I know NEVER buy them. Shit, I haven’t bought a physical CD in so long I can’t remember what the last one was. Here and there are some dudes who collect them (funny that they happen to be older), but for the most part nobody I know buys them anymore.

So if you were to buy a CD, a physical compact disc, what would inspire you to lay down your money for it? And wouldn’t you rather get a shirt or two?

-EL

You can buy awesome Daath merch here. You should also check out their MySpace page.