World of Weird Al Yankovic

Hey there Jon!
I've been wondering and I don't know if you know this specifically, but when you guys finally finish an album, do you know how many disks are usually pressed and shipped out on the first run? Does that, or has that, number been different from album to album? Also, when the album is distributed at stores, do the sales numbers go based off of how many the vendor actually sells, or is it based off of how many total were shipped to each distributor, regardless of if they sell or not?

Initial CD runs are less than previous albums, simply because albums aren't selling like they used to. It used to be that a top-10 album meant you were Gold (500,000 unit sales) or Platinum (1m units.) Now, you can be top-10 with as little at 40 or 50,000.

Back in the day, awards were based on units shipped to stores - an album could be Gold before anyone even had a chance to buy it! Later, it was amended to reflect actual sales, tallied via bar codes at retail, and reports from internet sales. I used to do that for Al's web sales, reporting catalog #s and units sold to Soundscan. If there were returns, those also had to be reported so they could be deducted from the total!

Bermuda

Do you know a rough idea of how many CDs the label/Al orders to be made for for the release, or at least how many it had been in the past with with other albums?

I know where Straight Outta Lynwood was, but i shouldn't discuss numbers in that context. When an album goes Gold or Platinum, those are fixed, known sales numbers, and we proudly reveal them! But given the state of album sales, it's hard to say if our new releases will even achieve Gold again. Top-10 chart positions are very flattering, but it's just a relative ranking with how everyone else is doing, and they're not going Gold so quickly, either.

Bermuda