Esperanto Music History
In-depth histories of Esperanto music groups and albums by Thomas Preece
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Economics of Esperanto Music
Something that often surprises people about Esperanto music is how expensive it can be. A quick look through the UEA catalogue or the FEL Retbutiko shows that the majority of CDs sell for between €15 and €20 - considerably more than the price of a major label CD, which is generally no more than about €10. Given that Esperanto music is almost universally performed by amateurs, it can seem strange at first glance that it is more expensive than music made by highly-paid professionals - but in fact there are good reasons for the price disparity, which I will explore in this post.
The premium price of Esperanto music is nothing new. The very earliest Esperanto records, on the Esperinst label, were sold in the UK in 1926 for a price of 5 shillings, when typical records from the same factory were priced at 1/6. In my original post about Esperinst, I suggested that maybe that price was for the set of two records, which would still be a significant markup, but further research has confirmed that 5 shillings was in fact the price of each individual record. I’ll publish a full report of this research later in the year, to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the records’ release in August, but 5 or even 6 shillings per disc was indeed the typical price of Esperanto records in the UK during the shellac era. An advert in The British Esperantist, April-May 1940 for the Linguaphone Esperanto Course, consisting of a small book and a portable case containing 15 double-sided records (total duration about 90 minutes), described how it “remains at the pre-war price of £6 6s. 0d.” - over £300 in today’s money!
Esperanto vinyl records were also more expensive than mass-market releases. In 1955, Marguerite Santreuil’s EP Esperanto was sold for 1200 old French francs, compared to between 900 and 1000 francs for similar mass-market records, and in 1967, Duo Espera’s LP was advertised at a price of £2 5s plus 2/- postage, compared to a typical price of £1 12s 6d for a normal LP.
The reason for this high price is not that the record labels are making large profits on each sale. The typical margin on Esperanto music is actually incredibly small, and instead it simply reflects the fact that Esperanto records sell in very limited quantities, and so each customer has to pay a much higher proportion of the fixed costs of producing the master recording than for a mass-market release.
In the first decade or so of the 21st century, the dominant format for music was the CD. A major label may have expected to sell hundreds of thousands or even millions of copies of a typical CD, but an Esperanto CD would sell no more than about one thousand copies. As such, even though the production budget for the master recording is much lower for an Esperanto album than a mass-market one, the share of that budget that is accounted for by each copy is significantly higher.
Furthermore, duplication is much more expensive per copy for small production runs. This is especially true for CDs or vinyl records, as the majority of the cost in pressing discs is in cutting the master. A single master disc can produce perhaps ten thousand copies, but the cost of making it is the same even if you only press a few hundred.
Album cover: jOmO Slavumas
In an article in TEJO Tutmonde in 2006, Flo Martorell outlined the costs involved in “one of the most recent releases” from his record label Vinilkosmo. The album in question isn’t directly identified in the text, but as the cover art of that year’s album jOmO Slavumas appears elsewhere in the article, and the price quoted in the text matches its sale price, it seems safe to assume that it is that one.
Martorell states that 1000 copies of the album were pressed, and breaks down the costs on a per-copy basis, for the case of CDs sold directly to consumers and for CDs sold to third parties (such as the UEA Libroservo) for resale:
| Direct sale | Third-party sale
Recording | €4.65 | €4.65
Mastering | €1.07 | €1.07
Graphics | €1.01 | €1.01
Copyright | €1.06 | €1.06
Duplication | €1.57 | €1.57
Marketing | €1.63 | €1.63
Royalties | €0.92 | €0.92
Admin / storage | €2.00 | €0.49
Profit | €1.15 | €0.00
Total | €15.05 | €12.40
It is interesting to see that Vinilkosmo only makes any profit at all when the album is bought directly from them - and even then, their margin is very small, at less than 10% of the production cost. Clearly the vast majority of the stock needs to be sold for Vinilkosmo to even recover their costs.
A further cost in the price of Esperanto physical media is that of postage. The physical copies of mass-market albums are generally manufactured in or near to the country in which they will eventually be sold, and are distributed to local record stores and online marketplaces in just about every country. The cost of getting the record or CD to the purchaser’s home is therefore very low - either local postage or a short trip to a nearby store. Esperanto music, by contrast, doesn’t have the same distribution network and generally has to be posted internationally directly to the purchaser. This adds a considerable amount to the cost of buying an album that isn’t even included in the above figures!
Of course, music these days is more commonly bought as digital downloads, or even streamed for free via services such as Spotify or YouTube. Vinilkosmo stopped producing CDs in 2018, and aside from a handful of titles with remaining CD stock, now only sells digital downloads. jOmO Slavumas, which is one of the longest albums in Vinilkosmo’s catalogue and so understandably the most expensive, sells as a download for €10; most of the other full-length albums sell for €8.33, with EPs and shorter releases being even cheaper.
This reduced price is achievable because digital downloads have essentially zero cost for duplication and storage, compared to a combined cost of €3.57 per CD, second only to the cost of producing the master recording. The reduction in price to the customer is of course even greater, because digital downloads don’t have any postage costs.
Please see the HTTP version of this post
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