Another factor is pre-orders often go live massively in advance of the product appearing, with pressing plant queues sometimes 6 months or so, e.g. I ordered a signed limited edition of the upcoming Wet Leg album on the first of December last year and it won’t land until April! These days I’ve always got a load of stuff pre-ordered and the delay is such I’ve often forgotten what it is when it turns up! Must have at least five, maybe ten on order. Depending on how pressing plants work regarding deposits etc I guess this can help a band crowd-fund a release. Offer pre-orders a cool bonus and they can help fund the actual release. Some actually are real crowd-funders, e.g. the second
Andy Hay album was just that and the first 50 or so of us got our name in the booklet. I’m not going to gigs at present as I just don’t feel they are a safe environment with covid mutating away in the background so I’m more than happy to fund interesting new music in other ways.