January Sale was a big success in many ways, we shipped out over 50 records and a great many downloaded a ton of great albums from the back catalog. Yet, to be honest, I still need to move a ton of material off my shelves if I am going to really open a new chapter for Debacle.

What does this mean for you? Only good things. A majority of the back catalog will now forever be insanely marked down and all previous digital releases will be pay-what-you-want. This means no more flash sales or March Super Sales. If people are just going to wait until these sales to buy, why not just always have these prices in effect. After all these records are going to do the world much more good sitting on your shelf than on mine.

New albums will have our standard price structure and most likely won't go on sale any time soon.

I am also looking into system for our customers to help us know exactly how many bells and whistles we can include on any one record. If I had it my way every release would have 180g colored vinyl, spot UV gloss art, and a printed innersleeve. Yet it's hard to tell which albums will sell well enough to make those options viable. We usually print the albums well before pre-orders go up so it makes it hard to estimate how far to take it. I have seen other publishing industries tackle this via Kickstarter and the like. Graphic novels, zines, board games, poetry and the like, who have hard physical costs, have adopted a sort of elastic preorder system. Wherein, most likely, the object is going to print either way they are just asking the customer to preorder so the publisher knows exactly how many to print and at what level. It seems like the music industry is a holdout from using these techniques so far.

So would you pre-order a release 6 months or more ahead of schedule to help increase the amount of included art and vinyl quality? Email me if you have any feedback here.