Are Christian Metal Cassettes’s CD’s and Vinyl getting too expensive?

A few observations from my personal (German / European) point of view:

1. Today I hear again and again that CDs have become more expensive. They currently cost 15 to 17 Euros in stores. (This also corresponds to the prices e.g. at Nordic Mission.) I remember that a newly released album CD in my youth cost between 28 and 33 Deutsche Mark.
They currently cost 15 to 17 Euro in stores. The exchange rate between Deutsche Mark and Euro was about 2:1 when the new currency was introduced in 2002. According to this exchange rate, CDs in this country currently cost the same as in 1995!

2. However, the inflation since 1995 amounts to 48%. Accordingly, a CD should cost 23.65 Euro today. This corresponds currently rather to the average price of a vinyl LP, whose production, handling and storage are much more price-intensive.

3. The decline in sales of physical media is forcing labels to increase sales prices. Especially in the Christian scene we have releases with production numbers of only 500 pieces or less. Especially for bands with little live activity or in case of re-releases, the entire business is only through the internet. At a live concert, people are quicker to grab a CD than on the Internet, where they have to pay shipping costs.

4. At the same time, production prices have risen dramatically, especially in the last two years. There were increases of 20% or more! Especially vinyl production is a costly business with long waiting times and constantly rising prices. On the one hand vinyl is a hot topic right now, but the profit margin is not necessarily bigger than with CDs, because many factors make this medium more expensive.

5. Oh well, the shipping costs... Within Germany, CDs can still be shipped at a very low price. Vinyl LPs are much more expensive. As soon as you ship abroad, it becomes BRUTALLY expensive, especially outside of Europe:
1 CD: 11 Euro
1 vinyl record: 16 Euro
Uninsured and without tracking! With tracking and insurance the prices are at least twice as high!
Even if a band / label sends a larger number of CDs to a distributor abroad, this adds noticeable costs. For example, if you send 10 CDs, that's about 3 Euro more per album, which is either charged to the band or the distributor if you want to keep prices stable. Or it will be added to the final price and has to be paid by the customer. Then even plus taxes!

Conclusion: I think in many cases prices have EFFECTIVELY not really gone up because we often compare to prices 10 or 20 years ago and don't factor in inflation. Also, due to decreased sales, production prices per unit have increased significantly. Increased prices therefore often do not mean increasing profits for the labels or artists. I rather assume the opposite. And depending on the country of origin and shipping destination, shipping prices can completely ruin the fun.

I used to sell a lot of CDs in Europe, especially Germany, and even Japan.  It really hurts to have that market gone.  That market greatly prefers physical product over digital.

To simply answer the poll, I'd be willing to pay up to 20 euros for a CD, and up to about 8 euros shipping costs. All in all it feels weird to pay more than 25 euros for just one CD, although there are a few cases where I did exceed that amount (Reflection of Glory comes to mind). There are some new non EU releases that I would be interested to buy that are tickling or even exceeding that upper limit, and that happens more often than it used to. And that's not something exclusive to Christian bands, it's quite common for independent artists.

A bigger difference can be seen in the second hand market; Christian metal CDs tend to be worth more there than their secular counterparts. Maybe that could inspire Christian bands to sell their CDs for a higher price in the first place, I don't know.

As for Germany, it's quite true that there's a relatively big market for physical products (there are still lots of stores that sell audio books on CD!). I think this has to do in part with the relatively strict enforcement of IP laws. Besides, shipping within Germany is pretty cheap actually, especially with independent artists it's usually like 2 euros. And I'm not quite sure how but when I bought that Vanaheim album earlier this year, shipping to Germany was cheaper than shipping within the Netherlands.