>
>
> If anyone's curious, here's my costs as they stand now...
>
> $4.00 - media. Remember that discs fail, otherwise this would
> be less than $3.
> $2.50 - packaging. Those slick liners cost money.
> $2.00 - shipping, including packet and so on.
> $1.50 - Sales tax on all raw materials, since I don't have a
> tax ID this is unfortunately necessary.
> $3.00 - estimated portion of total equipment costs.
> $various - cost for the music itself. Some stuff I got free.
> Other stuff I had to buy. I paid over $600 for the
> master to Critical Mass, and I'm paying $400 for the
> master to E2E. It depends.
> $1.00 - total for jewelcase plus assorted misc. such as pens, etc
> $1.00 - approx. electricity it takes to make a disc. Remember that
> the entire system is powered, plus it's temperature
> sensitive so I gotta keep the room at 75' when it's over
> 110' outside, plus light, plus monitor, etc.
> $2-4 - my take-home pay per disc. If I make 10 discs per day, I
> made about as much as the average burger flipper. I do
> try to make far more than that on most days. :)
>
>
Hopefully, this will be my only public comment on this subject.
Follow up via private email if it's something you only need to say to me.
I don't know how many of you have had experience doing mail-order,
but I've had some. It's amazing how much of the costs and time spent is
due to little things. People who were saying that it would only cost a
few dollars and would only take a small amount of time obviously haven't
had experience doing it. If you have, I'd like to hear how you did it.
Doing a single CD or even a few each week is one thing, but doing 10 or
more per day starts taking up serious amounts of time and costs quite a
bit (as you can see above from Mike's breakdown of his costs).
What I've done below is estimate (given my own experiences) how
much time Mike Bahr spends doing each task and then add those times up
to get a total time spent per CD. I also emailed this to Mike and he
confirmed that my estimates were accurate.
These times are just *averages*, so sometimes it will take less
time and others it will take more. I've tried to be conservative, so
I wouldn't be surprised if it actually took more time. In fact, these
times assume that Mike is organzied and disciplined enough to do things
very efficiently. If you think these times are inaccurate, try doing
it for a few days and let me know how you were able to improve on the
times. I think both Mike and I would be interested in how to improve
in mail-order efficiency .
My estimates on how much time Mike spends:
20 min/day mailing packages (driving, standing in line at post office)
2 min/disc addressing + sealing package (more if shipping addresses
aren't computerized and organized).
30 min/day reading and responding (when necessary) to numerous emails.
5 min/disc -- time spent putting discs in recorder, starting recording,
removing disc and placing it in jewel case, placing label in
jewel case, making sure recording hasn't failed.
40+ hours total to gather material for a disc, digitize it and
arrange/mix it properly to prepare it for recording.
5+ hours total to prepare label, talking with artist, and getting copies
made and cut them to size.
5 min/order for opening envelopes, making sure the correct amount
was paid, putting their return address and order in database.
10 min/day driving to and depositing checks at bank and waiting in
lines and getting out money to pay for post office and supplies.
This could be less if he went only once per week.
2 min/disc making sure that the persons who have ordered discs have
received the ones they ordered, marking this down in database.
Plus time spent looking for the best prices for supplies and
making the orders for supplies (and possibly picking them up). And
probably other things that I'm forgetting.
If we assume that he sends out about 10 CDs per day then for
a release of 250 CDs, we get the following average time spent per disc:
2 min/disc for taking to post office and mailing
2 min/disc for addressing + packaging
3 min/disc for reading/responding to emails
5 min/disc for recording CD
9.5 min/disc for time spent gathering material for CD, digitizing it,
arranging/mixing it.
1.2 min/disc for preparing label, talking with artist, getting copies
approx 4 min/disc for opening envelopes, making sure amount is correct,
putting return address and order in database
1 min/disc for depositing checks at bank.
2 min/disc for making sure that the persons who have ordered discs
have received the ones they ordered and checking to see if
people who reserved a disc still want them.
Total: 25.7 min/disc
At 10 discs per day, that's 257 minutes/day or 4 hours and 17 minutes.
So, if as Mike claims, he makes $2-$4 per disc, then he makes
about $20 - $40 per day. This is $5 - $10 per hour. I'd be willing
to bet that he makes more than that at his other job. So, he's
obviously not doing this just for the money! He's doing it for the
fun of it and he's making money at it because otherwise he couldn't
justify the time.
How many of you would be willing to spend anywhere near that
amount of time *per day* to make CDs for people without profit??
Personally, I appreciate the time and effort that Mike puts into creating
these CDs and I'm glad he can make enough of a profit to continue doing it.
Steve
schew@tis.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Apr 01 2004 - 17:59:46 EST