From a fan POV: why do you think selling the digital album for $6.93 hinders hard-copy sales? Everyone I know that still buys albums understands the value of having the original artwork and a physical token from the artist. The digital version usually ends up looking expensive, not the opposite.
On not releasing full-length tracks: if there is demand, someone will do it for you. You get to choose if interested listeners get it from piratebay or your own website.
I think that if I'm selling the the physical cd for $10 and the digital for $6.93, people are going to be apt to get the digital album only. Plus I have anecdotal data from several indie musician friends that when they release digitally, online physical sales effectively cease. I do know there exists the kind of super-supportive fan who will buy digitally and then also buy the physical cd as an expression of support, such as several of my best friends and family members, but in a magnitude sense, I think they're a negligible percentage. At any rate, I'm having trouble thinking of how my staged process will risk me missing out on any benefits of digital-leading-to-physical. I'll still release digitally; I'll just do it later.
As for piracy, it's a good question. Keep in mind I'm pretty small-potatoes. The question is, for a largely anonymous indie-artist, is the piracy risk of releasing physically-only greater than or less than the piracy risk of releasing digitally? My hypothesis is that it's less. But I'd have to find a way to measure availability and popularity of my tracks on pirate sites. If there's a way to measure a spike of demand, and ascertain that it's from people that would buy the digital tracks if they were available, then yeah, it would make sense to speed up the time frame of the digital release. But I don't really have any thoughts yet on how to measure that kind of thing.
> I do know there exists the kind of super-supportive fan who will buy digitally and then also buy the physical cd as an expression of support ... I think they're a negligible percentage.
I agree, I think that expecting fans to buy your album twice is unrealistic. But there is a middle ground in the approach that mp3.com pioneered (and was mortally wounded in court for) -- sell the physical disc and include an immediately available digital download as part of the package.
I expect that you could put both options up on your website - $10 for CD only or $13 for combo CD+MP3 and you'd probably sell just as many of the combo as you would have sold of just CDs if that were the only choice. There's been a few studies of the psychology of pricing and marketing on HN that would probably help inform your decision.
I probably haven't made a hundred bucks from music, but IMO, as a small potato, you should completely forget about "piracy risk". People sharing your songs = good. Make it easy to buy the digital tracks and the CD + digital combo, and promote your website so that people get it from you first.
That's a cool paper, thanks for linking to it. I'm not quite sure how to make sense of all its findings. It seems to be saying:
1) If you aren't selling digitally, piracy can hurt your album sales (if your music becomes well-known enough).
2) If you are selling digitally, piracy doesn't really hurt your digital sales, as the piracy will generally be from people who wouldn't otherwise sell your music.
3) Making your music available on streaming sites has a measurable but very small positive effect on digital sales. However, it's unclear if they're trying to measure the people that would buy digitally if they weren't streaming, but don't since they can stream. (This my reason for being interested in jango/pandora but not spotify - on jango/pandora, the stream is presented to the consumer but not on-demand, so if the consumer wants to hear it again, they can't just stream it again like on spotify. So they'll still have an incentive to buy.)
4) Streaming might not have a positive impact on physical sales, although this might be because they're assuming that songs are digitally available.
Are there many people who would not buy a CD at all? I usually check amazon / itunes if it's available for digital download if I hear an artist I like on pandora.
On not releasing full-length tracks: if there is demand, someone will do it for you. You get to choose if interested listeners get it from piratebay or your own website.