Tuesday, January 31st, 2023.
Hey, it’s TJ Miller, “you want some game?” Let's #tipundathehat!
For the best indie music from indie artists, click, and follow Indie Artist Of The Week Unda The Hat. This week, Watson’s Head Be sure to hit the like button and follow this amazing group of indie artists. They will be major soon
CDs verzuz Streaming- Let’s go -
The question keeps coming up from artists, do I need to make CDs or just go strictly digital? Well contrary to popular belief CDs still sell. So then the next question is are CDs better than streaming? Well that depends on who you ask. For you sound quality gurus out there, CDs deliver uncompressed audio, whereas most streamed music uses data-compression formats that entail removing some digital information to make song files small enough to stream. Now obviously the biggest issue and problem is actual having a CD player. I still have a portable one and an old computer with a CD rom drive on it, but that’s about it. By the numbers however, CDs are on a back-and-forth swing. The number of sales went up in 2021 then back down in 2022. But you may ask what does that have to do with me a DIY musician? Well it’s simple, it’s called revenue stream. You want to have as many revenue streams as possible. One of these streams is going to be gigging, touring, singing at church or in the neighbor’s backyard. After you sing what are you working with? In today’s industry, income in the form of physical music sales – such as CDs, and vinyl – are certainly less prominent than before. But that’s not to say physical music sales aren’t still a viable income revenue for musicians and artists.
CDs could be a good way to go. They’re cheap to make, easy to reproduce, and they can be bundled up and sold with other merch items. But to be honest, very few people actually listen to them nowadays. Now the other thing that this will depend on is your demo and genre. The younger the audience the less likely you are to sell anything physical. Some of the late Gen Z’ers for the most part have never even owned a CD. But if you are a gospel, jazz, southern soul or even an old school rocker like this week’s artist of the week Watson’s Head, your people are still holding on to CD players and their CD’s. The name of the game is to not leave any money on the table while you are trying to make your money.
Now on the other hand streaming music of course if the leader in music sales. The issue for me with that is, for how long? But that’s another blog post for another day. Anyway this chart will show you that not only is streaming leading the way but where. In your marketing plans you should have an international plan. As you see, India is becoming a big market. 
In the past couple of years Ed Sheeran and Dua Lipa were the top two most-searched American artists. That tells me that Pop is their preferred Western musical genre. So if you are doing Pop, you might want to look at India as a market for your streaming. I think we can all agree that Asia will yield good results in the area of hip hop and the UK for rock has always been solid.
So this is not to say that you should go and invest in making a ton of CDs and forget about Spotify and all of that. I mean once you sign on to your digital distributor, they will make sure that you are in all the DSPs. So it will be up to you to make sure that you have a few CDs on hand to sell at the gig, or even if you want to go old school and do some hand-to-hand combat, meaning stand in front of a Best Buy and sell CDs to customers as they walk out of the store you can.
This week's #IAOTW - Independent Artists Of The Week is - Watson’s Head. The St. Louis born San Diego living rocker is taking no prisoners with his 6th release coming February 10th. Click on his name link, scroll down to his picture, then click and support. This is that psychedelic funk rock with a spoonful of reggae type of music.
For more information on this or to hire Unda The Hat as your brand or label consultant send a message via undathehat.com. See you next week!!