Dear Friends,
Some have recently asked us whether or not our new material will ever be released on CD or other physical media. As many of you recall, we released "Come to Life" in 1998 on CD (and cassette!), and "High Fidelity" in 2005 on CD only. Starting a few years later with our more recent string of original songs we have gone to a digital-only form of distribution using one of the leading digital distributors for independent artists. Since then our new material (along with the released CDs) has been available to stream or download on a number of internet music services, including Spotify, Amazon, iTunes (now Apple Music), YouTube, and many more. (Disclaimer - we did make a number of "homemade" CDs for use at live events containing several of our original releases, but these were not commercially released. Mentioning only in the event that anyone remembers seeing a CD at our concerts with "Walk In The Rain" and others on it!)
When we first started releasing digitally, it was still during a time (early 2010s) when most people did not have access to unlimited data on their phones and were still willing to pay the usual .99 for a download of a song that would be theirs forever to play on any system. Our income from those downloads was a healthy fraction of that one dollar price, and for several years that was a nice stream of income to help us move forward. In today's world, however, we are seeing almost 100% streaming and almost no downloading. While recent rule changes have placed the responsibility for streaming royalties with the host (meaning we don't have to pay streaming royalties), the payout for a stream is a tiny fraction of a cent vs. that big chunk of a dollar. So our revenue from digital streaming is significantly less than it used to be. That's reality, and that's ok.
Unfortunately the cost to manufacture and distribute a CD album in today's low-demand climate makes it impossible for us to consider (at least for now) doing another CD release of our newer material. CD sales are at record lows, and used CD prices at flea markets are generally about ¼ of what they were just a few years ago. No one wants physical digital media.
However, times change and trends that we once thought over for good have a way of resurfacing. Look at how young people have created a resurgence in the demand for vinyl! If you had told us this would have happened back when CDs came on the scene in 1984, we would have laughed. Who would want the burden of storage space, maintenance, fragility, and surface noise, not to mention the expense of the equipment required to enjoy it properly? The answer is a generation of young people who were raised on intangible music and video and who long for the physical interaction of a diamond stylus pulsing in a vinyl groove. We are even seeing a small resurgence of interest in cassettes, with young people connecting to their parents' past and longing to explore the frustration of having to use a pencil to rewind the tape after the takeup reel gets stuck and the machine "eats" your favorite song!
So who knows? If CDs are the next "nostalgia" item and we see a resurgence in the demand, we could find ourselves looking at a CD release.
In the meantime, the best thing you can do to support ROMANS is to find us on your favorite streaming platform and listen to us early and often!
To help you get started, here's our playlist on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4ob2dHmPc2b9ci9mqeFyyz?si=69ab194b9caf4081jÂ
Here is our artist page on Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/romans/125438323Â
And finally, our YouTube Music page: https://music.youtube.com/channel/UCwzb2DL4sULXfoUkyIT6Feg
As always, we thank you all for your support and prayers. Please also subscribe to our e-mail list and be sure to check out and like our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100033419082172 God bless you all!