"while our music is apparently more and more loved, respected and listened to than ever before, the actual record sales are getting noticably worse than before"

-> niko, that's the whole point: people don't wanna PAY for music, they just wanna LISTEN to music (and yeah, when it's available for free the "audience" grows = catch 22). selling cd's is passé. none (literally none) of my close friends buy music anymore (plague included) and i don't blame them. 99% of them have spent 10(0).000's of euro's during the '80 and '90. they all have between 2500-11.000 units (vinyl and cd) in their collection and if they wanna check out something new they D/L it from blogs or newsgroups, soulseek, torrents, etc. easy come, easy go. not BUYING music means saving 1000's of euro's/year which they spent on undownloadable stuff, eg. vacation.

plague 013 is a free digital D/L. > 200 people downloaded it within the first 24H, no promotion was made, just a single post on MS and the plague site... this is 2009, why spending money on something u'll be playing 5 or 10 times in your life. i agree in full what the beer-drinking argument is concerned but as stated above, beer can't be "downloaded" for free (if it could people wouldn't BUY beer neither).

small labels releasing unknown ("unhyped") artists can't make "money", especially not when the activity is done officially (which is truly an exception) like in our case. on the other hand, let's be honest, when i do 300 CD's i only need to sell a relatively small part to reach break-even as i'm fully DIY and don't have to pay employees etc., so ... personally i don't care about "profit"; as long as i don't lose money i'm happy. what does bother me though is the time i spent on it (unpaid), eg. packing, promotion, administration, etc... no idea how long i'm willing to deal with that part any longer, especially in this banana-republic i live in, time will tell... more and more i prefer sitting in the sun reading a book.

conclusion: eventually stopping releasing PHYSICAL albums isn't a shame...

cheers fré

ps. and there is another, at least as important "issue" too which u didn't mention above: 99% of similar labels (and mailorders) don't work officially, they press 1000 cd's for 1000 euro (or less) of which they trade 950 and then start an unofficial mailorder where they can sell traded cd's for 5 euro and still make 4 euro profit ... this will eventually kill small labels that work officially.