KodamaSoft

KodamaNews - August 2025

Written by Robin

KodamaNews - August 2025

Comic Market 106

Hello people! We have some excellent news to share with you - we have confirmed the reception of all three of our planned physical releases for Comic Market 106, meaning that this is the first time KodamaSounds will be distributing our new releases physically during a doujin event! There was a lot of tears and sweat that went into making all of this happen, so we hope that anyone in Japan on August 17th could take this opportunity to come in person to the event to get our new releases! If you aren’t caught up yet, please check out the crossfades of those gorgeous albums.

Phantasmal Metamorphosis / KoDyMaxx

Lapis Lazuli / YOKAI 3rd Solo Album

ECLECTIC RESONANCE PARADISE

Although we will not be joining in person (just yet, since we will be there for M3-Fall 2025), we are privileged to have our albums distributed by our friend at Four Corners. The booth location will be at East Hall 6 オ-24b [東ホール6 オ-24b], so come over if you can!

M3-Fall 2025

We have unfortunately lost the lottery entry for M3-Fall 2025… But thankfully, we still have ways to distribute our works and I will be there in person to help out at the following spaces:

  • Rolling Bassline コ-34a
  • Four Corners P-17b

We will be distributing ECLECTIC RESONANCE UPRISING 3 and Memories 2 during M3-Fall 2025! We will also be distributing our three releases from the upcoming Comic Market 106.

During the first hour of the event, I will be helping over at Four Corners. After that, I will be staying at Rolling Bassline. If you want to come say hi in person and have a word with me, please keep that in mind! We will also ensure a balanced flow of stock at both booths, meaning that anyone who really wants copies will be able to get one, whichever hall people choose to go to first!

For artists who contributed to KodamaSounds at some point who will be attending the event: Please come over to either booth whenever I'll be present! I would love to feature your signature and name on a collaborative signature sheet and reunite as many people as possible on it!

We hope to see you there, as this event is really personal to me, and the opportunity of a lifetime. I am not sure when I will be able to come back again to live something like this again, and I want to make this count. See you soon!

Spring 2026 Projects

With 2026 already approaching, it means we need to get started with next year’s first few albums. Therefore, we are now putting deadlines on:

We also have another COUNTERFEST RECORDS project planned as our first release of 2026, that we will share with you once the stream of releases of this summer passes by!

Availability and Sustainability

2025 means we are now jumping from 0 to 5 albums available in physical format - in just 4 months for KodamaSounds. Those are big numbers, especially for a relatively niche circle like ours. Three of those are going to be Jewel Case CDs, one of these a Download Card (despite just being simple printed materials, those still do cost money), and another will be a double jewel case CD. As you can imagine, this means a lot of funds and research for the best options out there were needed to make this happen.

I would like to personally insist on the fact that I personally want nothing to do with a speculative market - I firmly believe that our art needs to live on and stay preserved for as long as possible, and this is why I am very happy to finally offer a physical format for our albums. If anyone was worried about this, KodamaSounds’ albums will absolutely always be available digitally, and we have NO plans to make any of our albums physical only.

Which is why we have requested more than 200 copies of each of our produced albums, with the majority of our batches being 300 copies, even. Due to our niche nature, I hardly believe that we will run out of stock too soon. But at the same time, it is important for our albums to sell well enough so that we can not only break even the initial costs of production, but so we can produce physical versions of older and oncoming albums, as well as reprinting any out of stock products. We want to reassure anyone scared of stocks running out, that we do plan to keep on printing album copies so long as we have some form of warranty that they will indeed sell. We do ask for your understanding that we still hardly know what to expect sales-wise however, so we will be using the coming months to properly evaluate our scope regarding future printing/selling copies for the future of our discography and its preservation and availability to as many fans as possible. 

With all of those upcoming announcements, we understand that many people who cannot attend events in Japan would still be interested in acquiring physical copies of our albums.

As much as we are not planning to do any domestic shipping directly ourselves (through Bandcamp, for example), we are however working and discussing opportunities to sell our content on most major doujin distribution platforms.

Sales and Costs

As much as digital sales cost us nothing at all to publish, this is different for physical goods. Due to the high costs of production, we ask for the understanding of artists that our first focus when selling copies is to get rid of the albums’ costs of production. We are on a solution to operate with royalties while also doing that, and we think that for now a fair way of doing so will be to focus our first sales of CDs to make up for the costs of the CDs, with 100% of the sales’ revenues dedicated to making up with the net loss of production. This means that approximately 40 copies per album will need to be sold to break even (for a batch of 300 copies). Once the breaking even part is done, we will add royalties off the following net album sales to 70% (which will then be processed exactly the same way as royalties from digital sales), with the remaining 30% of the sales’ revenues being used to anticipate future costs of production and reprints of albums. Note that the same would apply for download cards, but considering how significantly lower the production costs are for these (just about 10 copies would need to be sold to break even), that threshold would be reached much faster. It would be appreciated if I could get feedback from contributing artists for this, as I would love to discuss this further.

That’s about it for today’s yapping session - please support us, and we will give it back to you tenfold! We hope to do relatively decent sales and exposure to our circle through our CDs and Download Cards sales. Thank you all so much, and I will hope for the best now! See you soon!

-Robin