Counting Down
Dec. 23rd, 2025 10:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
billroperIt is December 23rd and all of the Christmas gifts are wrapped, unless we missed something. This may be a new record. Mind you, if Gretchen and the kids hadn't agitated to get it done, I would still be dilly dallying.
Having had to poke around in Square, I took the completed inventory from the basement, combined it with the Square inventory, and have now made a good start on the 2025 taxes. There is still a lot to do, but they are *started*. Our sales are up this year, largely on the back of having issued two new CDs. This is not a trick that I can do every year, so we need to figure out some more ways of boosting sales, which may -- in the current environment -- be impossible. The number of titles on the table that appear to have sold zero copies in the last year is distressingly large. And that's distressing to me as a seller of CDs, but also as a maker of CDs among other makers of CDs who would like me to buy some more of their stock because there's really a limit to the amount of insulation that they need in their garage, it's *also* a bad thing. Sales are driven by new products, but the folks making CDs are doing a better and better job of capturing more of the retail sales, which is admittedly good for them, but bad if you're trying to move product for them in places where they aren't.
There's also streaming, which is good for the artists if they can manage to capture some revenue from it, but not a solution for keeping the dealer table running. And figuring out how to capture revenue from streaming is a black art, I think.
Ah, well. This is not a problem that will be solved tonight.
Instead of finding a solution to this problem (which probably wouldn't have worked anyway), Gretchen and I watched "Thunderbolts", which turns out to be yet another Marvel movie that I was just as happy to have watched from the comfort of my living room rather than paying to watch in a theater. This is a problem for the theater owners that is remarkably similar to my problem with the dealer table...
Having had to poke around in Square, I took the completed inventory from the basement, combined it with the Square inventory, and have now made a good start on the 2025 taxes. There is still a lot to do, but they are *started*. Our sales are up this year, largely on the back of having issued two new CDs. This is not a trick that I can do every year, so we need to figure out some more ways of boosting sales, which may -- in the current environment -- be impossible. The number of titles on the table that appear to have sold zero copies in the last year is distressingly large. And that's distressing to me as a seller of CDs, but also as a maker of CDs among other makers of CDs who would like me to buy some more of their stock because there's really a limit to the amount of insulation that they need in their garage, it's *also* a bad thing. Sales are driven by new products, but the folks making CDs are doing a better and better job of capturing more of the retail sales, which is admittedly good for them, but bad if you're trying to move product for them in places where they aren't.
There's also streaming, which is good for the artists if they can manage to capture some revenue from it, but not a solution for keeping the dealer table running. And figuring out how to capture revenue from streaming is a black art, I think.
Ah, well. This is not a problem that will be solved tonight.
Instead of finding a solution to this problem (which probably wouldn't have worked anyway), Gretchen and I watched "Thunderbolts", which turns out to be yet another Marvel movie that I was just as happy to have watched from the comfort of my living room rather than paying to watch in a theater. This is a problem for the theater owners that is remarkably similar to my problem with the dealer table...
no subject
Date: 2025-12-24 07:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-24 11:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-25 03:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-12-25 10:45 pm (UTC)If they go out Media Mail to Chicago on Friday, they should easily get here before I leave for GAFilk. Posting them to Atlanta would be subject to all kinds of things going wrong.
Drop me an email and I'll reply with my mailing address. Thanks!