Clean It Up! is something of an experiment I guess. We don’t really know what it’s about or where it will end up but we’re steering it as best we can.
One day we wondered where all the money went when you pay £5+ for a cd. Check out the numbers below for roughly how much it costs us to put out a release:
CDs x 1000 - around £400 – Key Production
Booklets x 1000 - £250 – CDR Print (Hugh rocks our socks)
Plastic Wallets x 1000 - £50 – Jet Media
Ok we take a few shortcuts along the way – for example, we only use one colour on the body of the cds and we use plastic wallets and not jewel cases. Even if we did that stuff though it would still come in at under a grand for 1000 cds. These plastic discs are not expensive to make.
So, the unit costs come in at about 65p a disc. On top of that we have some extra costs like postage of review copies, website hosting ya ya ya. This means that we set the distro price at £1 a release (order 5 copies or more of one release for distro price – get together with your friends, bulk buying is fun!). You can buy them off the website at £2 a pop or get three releases for £5. This seems to be as cheap as we can do it and still hope to break even on releases.
On top of that, we give the band a whole load of free copies. We keep one copy for every £1 we spent on the release. So say we spend £650, a band gets 350 copies which they can sell at £2. The band can use this money to cover their recording costs, get some shirts printed and maybe even sort out a tour or something.
That’s how Clean It Up! works - two kids, two bedrooms, some cardboard boxes and a lot of small change cluttering up the place.
