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Sorry, it's not a complete explanation.

I'm an indy musician.

I don't have a lot of cash, and I don't have a lot of sales.

Unit for unit, on small runs, cassette tape is WAY cheaper than any other medium.

Cassette audio fidelity (or lack thereof) is a fine match for my typical output.

And for people who want digital fidelity, I include a slip of paper with a download code.

But yes, from a marketing and artistic standpoint, having a physical product on offer for those who want it is important, and no, streaming and digital downloads alone don't satisfy that need.

Yes, I was around for cassettes the first time. I was around before CDs. I know all the arguments, and have lived through them. Your casual dismissal is just incorrect.

You can get 100 CD's (printed disks in jewel case) for $139 does anyone do small cassette runs for less than $1.39/piece?

Blank CD-R's are 10 - 20 cents a piece in bulk if you have a very small run and want to record your own.

And more importantly, how do you find fans that still own cassette players? I don't even own a CD player anymore, all my disks get copied digitally, then they get packed away in a big CD wallet, never to be seen again. The last time I bought music from a small indie band, they emailed me a link where I could download it.

Every one of those examples you listed was sold on DVD. That's the very rule this article is about

Does "sold on DVD" have the ordinary meaning of the work being distributed to the public in copies playable on DVD players, or is it stricter? For example, once the film is finished, will a competently self-mastered DVD + short-run duplication + self-distribution count? Or does it have to be through a mainstream distributor?

And of course, there are places like CD Baby and others that you can sell your CDs on.

And, the best new way to promote your band that I know of:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Band_Network

Seriously. Read how it works. Any band can make their song, do the mastering process and submit it to Harmonix. If it is a hit, well, you can sell a half million songs in a few months. If not, well, so be it - it ends up in the recycle bin/deleted from consideration and you try again. But it's not even necessary to have CDs or burn anything anymore.

Only fools sign anything with the RIAA or the major labels these days, since it's never been easier to do it yourself.

http://www.discmakers.com/duplicators/automated/DiscproducerPP100.asp
This is pretty much all you need if you want to churn out a few thousand CDs. Basic units run $300-$500 last I checked, but the professional units are well worth the money. Put a stack of labels and CDs in and come back in two hours - 100 ready to put in cases or sleeves. With a bunch of coffee and a friend to do some work for you, that's an easy thousand in a 18-20 hour long "shift" before a concert. Total cost is way under $1 per CD. (the above 5K for $2000 or so is fairly spot-on if you go to a firm that does this sort of thing). But you can also do it at home as well.

- You can produce yourself. Write, record, mix, and all the rest at home in your own private studio.

- You can promote yourself.(or let others do it for you - some only charge a flat percentage fee per CD (CD Baby comes to mind), which means the artists gets the majority of the money(after duplication costs unless they deliver the goods to the company's warehouse of course)

- You can burn/copy the media yourself if all else fails. Make them at home for 50 cents each and sell them at the concert for $5. Almost anyone will buy a CD at a concert for $5 these days.

There's simply no need to waste time with contracts any more if you have even a little skill and moxie.

CD's are 800MB. You could easily replace them with SD cards without significantly affecting what the music industry earns.
I dunno what the real price of SD cards of that capacity is, I see most places selling them 512mb SD cards (a bit smaller than a CD but you could easily use some kind of compression on there to make up for that) are selling them at prices in the $5 range though a few are selling them a lot cheaper (most likely surplus stock), lets assume the bulk price is a quarter of that or $1.25 plus you have the cost of duplicating, labeling, boxing etc,
so say $2 per copy.

CD duplication in bulk seems to be about a $1 in medium quantity including cases and inserts http://www.discmakers.com/products/CD100S.asp , I suspect they get much cheaper in huge bulk.

Given that many CDs retail for less than $10 I suspect an extra dollar would be a pretty big chunk of the profit.

some other companies that make duplicators are Rimage and Amtren(Discmaker Elite Series). Amtren was once working on an automated ripping solution but it went nowhere.

http://www.amtren.com/
http://www.discmakers.com/

2 years ago-
Worst tech support experience I've consistantly had was with rimage and it lasted over 1 month!! All I was trying to do was replace a broken drive they had assured me was standard way back in the presale days. They had no replacements, wanted me to buy a new unit at $6k. My old software which was great in its earlier days had gone through some 'improvements' post veritas buyout and wasn't working anymore. Rimage had a new $$product that was supposed to replace all these features and more. I demoed it all and it was horridly inefficient- IIRC- 4 cd-r's took 3 hrs to make 4 cds, nevermind the crashes. The old unit with 4x drives was much faster. Then they too told me nobody actually uses this out of the box, they just buy the dev kit and customize it. Then they recommended I do the same for my team of developers. Sounds like a handy tech center stock answer. Guess what. I dont have a team of developers! I suggested they use their team of developers to make their own stuff work as advertised.

After much strife they finally provided me with someone at another company who could provide me with a copy of their customized firmware so i could replace my drives with identical ones. The robotics finally gave up the ghost a year later.

My replacement for it was from a less known company handled through discmakers. Discjuggler runs it with a special autoloader product called imagejuggler which works very nicely (you can also use DJ.NET and they have a web interface too. They could improve a few things but all in all robotics are top notch and simple, no weird firmware, replacable (upgradable!) drives (as long as your burning app supports it, which dj handles many) and I can easily burn different images simultaneously. Furthermore both discmakers and DJ support was great.

http://www.discmakers.com/duplicators/products/eli te_series.asp

and yup its only for windows. but at least you get browser ui.

The $950 for a thousand CD's is for commercially pressed CD's.

$907.13-Includes printing on CD, 1 fold 4 color insert, shrinkwrap in jewel case
$1412.03 if you want a 8 page folder. Probably has a initial setup charge.

$1,390 for a 1000 one pagers, $1,090 for a reorder of a 1,000
They'll do a little more of the work for you?

A to Z, wants your information to give you a quote

Morphius is offering a free barcode ($300 value!)
Another online quote one.

Oasis is $1,465 for the "complete package"

"Whether you like the style or not, whether you agree with what he has done artistically this is an aside. The recording industry is dead, it's fucked, it's ruled by grey suited accountants and lawyers."

AzOz.com sure does look like a reliable source of information, with headlines like "Downloading is NOT Illegal -- How to Avoid the Foreign Terrorists".

People like you are brainwashed by all of this anti-"M$", anti-RIAA, anti-everything rhetoric that is being published (and I use the word published very, very loosely) all over the Internet.

But now, I am going to do you a favor, and present ACTUAL FACTS to you. Make sure you read them, and understand them.

The copyright held on any particular recording is completely separate from the copyright held for the actual song that the recording was made from.

If you knew how record contracts work, the "work for hire" in the record contracts refer to the actual recordings, not to the underlying songs.

An example for you: Powerslave, by Iron Maiden. The record is copyrighted by EMI Records, Ltd. The songs themselves are copyrighted by Iron Maiden (Holdings), Ltd. They are two separate entities with two separate copyrights.

Here is where you are going to insist that I am wrong (without any kind of evidence) and that you are correct. But, I'm going to cut you off right there, and insist that you prove that I am wrong. Answer these questions for me:

1) Since the rights to the songs belong to a record label, why doesn't the band have to pay the label a royalty every time they perform the song? If you know anything about the law, you have to pay a royalty every time you perform a copyrighted work. (A good reference for this is

2) Since the rights to the songs belong to the record label, why doesn't the band have to pay royalties to the record label if they switch labels and then perform a song later in their career, and record that song for a live album?

You won't be able to answer those, because you're wrong. The song-writers retain the copyright to their songs, UNLESS they have a clause in their contracts that says otherwise.

But this doesn't happen. From a practical standpoint, it would destroy your music career if you signed the rights to your songs away -- what if the record label dumped you? ANY LAWYER would tell you not sign a contract with a clause like that.

DiscMakers writes about this kind of crap all the time in their newsletters.

Harry Fox Agency represents over 27,000 music publishers for licensing and monitoring services -- are there 27,000 RIAA record labels?

So, I did some reading -- AzOz is full of propaganda.

I, however, have been at this music thing for quite a while, I've done my homework for years, and I know what the facts are.

Seriously, if I'm going to pay for music, I want a real CD ... and maybe a nice jewel case and cover. IF musicians want to sell their product on Ebay in order to make some money, would it really hurt them to invest a little money into their product? It doesn't cost that much to have real CDs produced...

You've been rated "Funny", but I think you're serious, so I'll respond as such.

It does cost that much to have real CDs? Try again. A minimal run of "real CDs" can easily run you $1,000. If you're a small time artist who is working a traditional job to pay the rent while you work on your music, $1,000 is alot of money, especially if most of your disposable income is already invested in instruments and recording equipment. On the other hand, with the help of a friend with a computer, a CD-R writing drive, and color printer, you can burn runs of almost any size for a few dollar per disc (with nice jewel case and cover). What a great way for an unknown musician to get his music out!

I've purchased a half-dozen CD-Rs from musicians I've discovered online, and I've been pleased with every one I. I don't begrudge them that CD-R is the only format they can economically produce.

wouldn't it help these small bands to produce a product that people will be able to remember (not just the music, but the CD cover as well??)

Wow, and to think I've been making my music selections entirely based on the quality of the music.

That said, it's not relavent in this discussion. The artist specifically did print nice CD covers. The jewel cases he bought are identical to the jewel cases most commercial CDs come in. He's trying to market himself in all sorts of ways (personal website, free mp3 samples on mp3.com, and selling CDs on eBay) He's trying to market himself without going broke. He's using various services as they were designed!

Though I'm a student, I work as a free-lance graphic designer. Right now I'm doing a bit of work on spec, meaning I get paid only if the client accepts the work, mainly to pad my portfolio and generally spread good karma because the client is a good guy.

Conveniently, he happens to be an independent musician in Austin Texas. (Guy by the name of Phil Pritchett. Check his web site out. It's cool -- and there are MP3s.) The company that is actually pressing the packaging and making and pressing the CD itself is DiscMakers a national company which does a lot of work for indie artists.

Just so happens that I've got a copy of their catalog sitting across my lap, open to page 5... and hey! There's a price listing here!

For CDs in Jewel boxes, the pricing is as follows:

• 300pc - $1995
• 500pc - $2190
• 1000pc - $2490
• 2000pc - $3780
• 3000pc - $4860
• 5000pc - $6100
• 10000pc - $10 400

(All prices US$. Subtract $200 if submitting your own, press ready art.)

The above includes:

• Glass mastering
• 4/4, 4-page booklets. (Full color on each side of the paper)
• Full color tray insert
• Two color silk screen on the disc label. (Well... three really, if you count the silver of the disc itself)
• All proofs -- design and audio -- FedEx'd to you overnight
• UPC label which itself is normally $350 if you do the paperwork yourself.

Now for 10k pieces, the price-per-piece is US$1.04. Labels run more than that and own their presses and mastering equipment, meaning that they pay cost-only (film, plates, paper, ink) for their runs. So you can safely drop that per piece cost down to less than $.25/piece.

Now where is the rest of your $17 going? A bit to the artist, a bit for studio costs (mixing, recording time, etc.), a bit for marketing... and the rest is profit and corporate lawyer money.