Right you are, Kendall.
It's on thing when a performer knocks off a home recording on the PC
Our (Pyrates Royale) latest CD cost just over $12,000 to produce. This includes professional studio recording time, mixing (nearly 200 hours added together), mastering fees. CD pressing, artwork, shipping of production materials to the duplicating plant, long distance phone calls, royalties payments of nearly $700 per run of 1,000, time to find out who REALLY wrote that song that "everybody knows" is in public domain but is not. This isn't a complete list by a long shot. That production cost wasn't supplied by a big record label. Every cent came from the pockets of the band members.
We sell the CDs for $18 per. It's a 69 minute album that showcases our most technically demanding work. We know it's worth the price. If we discounted the price, we would effectively be paying patrons to have the recording.
One venue we were at tried to demand that we sell recording only through their shop, demanded the right to set the selling price and pay us their mandated net price that would have actually gotten us $2 less per CD than our unit production cost. In this case we refused to sell a single cd. Our performance fee covered our food lodging and transport. They viewed the entire profit(what a misunderstood word!) margin of CD sales as their right.
We give a discount when patrons buy it with our previous albums. The money we get from performance doesn't reduce the production cost of the recording at all. It goes to gas, strings, personal taxes, meals, the replacement tire for the van, and all the other things that previous posters have mentioned.
Very few of us makes big bucks at the folk music biz. Most of us earn those dollars and pounds the hard way. To pretend that CD sales are some kind of fluff or gouging on the part of the performer is simply not realistic or true.