My 5-Year Free CD Offer

Over the course of my career as a recording artist, I’ve released 13 albums on CD. Two of those got second pressings.

Five years ago, there were 5000 CDs in my garage. Now I’m down to a few hundred copies of my third CD, which I’ll likely take to the grave.

How did I do it? With a near-continuous stream of free CD offers.

It works like this: I offer a CD for free. The buyer just has to pay for shipping, $5 in the US. When they do, they’re presented with two or three additional offers, otherwise known as upsells.

In a perfect world, those upsells cover my costs and I grow my fanbase for free.

For more context, including hard numbers, check out my previous posts on the topic (in chronological order): How I Sold 1000 CDs in 10 Weeks, How I Promoted My Free CD Offer, Selling CDs to Strangers, My Pay What You Want CD Offer, and How I Promote My Music.

Once I ran out of a CD, I pivoted to a new one until they were all gone! Except that third one from 1999. Not the best intro to my music.

Here’s an overview of all items sold on my site from May 4, 2020 through July 16, 2025 when I sold the last CD:

In terms of CDs moved, the first six items below were all offered for free:

Some were also featured as upsells, which explains the positive dollar amounts. That and occasionally someone felt bad about getting the album for free and would pay full price.

And here are the top revenue generators, the top two being CD bundles offered as upsells:

That also includes sales outside of my offer, like the USB discography.

Out of the $47K in revenue, $32K came from the offer, and $15K was “normal” sales.

Were some of those normal sales from people who discovered my music through the offer? Of course, but where do I draw the line?

My plan in composing this post was to provide a detailed profit/loss report on every CD I gave away. Unfortunately, Meta Ads Manager only goes back three years. That was news to me!

Since August 2022, I spent $21K on Facebook and Instagram ads to promote the offer. Reviewing my earlier posts, I spent about $4K from the start of the campaign through the end of 2020, which leaves 2021 and half of 2022 unaccounted for.

If you’re keeping score, that’s $32K in income versus $25K in ads, plus whatever I spent over the missing year-and-a-half.

My guess? I more or less broke even.

But there’s no way to know for sure. Some of those buyers became patrons and continue to support me to this day. I also gained two thousand email subscribers, and certainly social media followers as well.

On the flip side, packing orders is a chore, as is going to the post office to retrieve the ones that were returned, contacting the buyers, and having them insist that you ship it again even though they’re the one who provided the incomplete address in the first place. To Germany!

As much as you hear about merch sales being the key to making a living as an independent artist (after all, one CD sale is equivalent to 5000 streams), I’m delighted to be done with it.

The main reason is that international shipping is prohibitively expensive, typically $20-30 for a CD. Whereas if you’re in the UK, you can ship that same CD anywhere in the world for $8 or less.

As a result, buyers in the UK are shocked and disgusted when they see a $20 shipping charge, and assume you’re gouging them.

It’s gotten so bad that every six months when I send out patron CDs, I ship them to a friend in Manchester, order the postage on the Royal Mail site, and then he applies the labels and ships them from there.

And now thanks to tariffs, shipping to the US is even more confusing, though CD and vinyl are exempt for the time being.

Shipping costs are one of the many reasons that I’ll be using elasticStage to manufacture and fulfill orders of my upcoming fourteenth album (link goes to the Countdown page on Spotify).

They ship from London, so buyers won’t pay more for shipping than the product itself!

Ultimately, dropping merch sales from my list of duties puts me closer to my personal ideal: making music anonymously, uploading it to distribution, and… that’s it.

To me, that’s the ultimate definition of a recording artist. No social media “content,” no music videos, no touring, no e-commerce.

No audience? Most likely. For now it’s a matter of striking the right balance.