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Record Label Thrives Selling CDRs
n3hat writes "'The major music companies may fret over falling revenue, but one label saw its business jump 33 percent last year -- thanks in part to the recordable compact discs that the industry says are hurting its sales. The label, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, is using recordable CD's, or CD-R's, to ensure that each release in its extensive catalog is always available'."
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings saw a 33% increase in sales...
Woohoo, they are up to 9 customers!
I think the RIAA is going to sue them for violating the DMCA.
Dude, where's my packet?
I just want someone to go point out all these inconsistencies with the RIAA's case... It's amazing what powerful lobbying groups can get away with in the United States.
And how exactly is this a measure of how it would affect EMI/Sony etc who don't have a problem with running out of cds? For whom writing a CDR is considered more expensive than pressing 1000 too many?
Our studio recording classes in college would have 2 or 3 power macs hooked up to single speed SCSI cd-r drives, and people sitting around playing Marathon, drinking coffee, and swapping out cd's. Another person sitting there stamping on labels. :)
Interesting to see a company making it's mark by sitting around, playing Marathon, and burning CD-R's.
Wait....where do I sign up?
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Link
from the rip-mix-burn-???-profit!! dept.
That should be "bait". I think that *I'm* gonna get sued now instead.
Dude, where's my packet?
The label, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, is using recordable CD's, or CD-R's...
Ahh... so *that's* what CD-R means! I always wondered what the R stands for. Thanks a million!
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings ordering information
The solution that has worked best for me...is to avoid public discussion. -- CmdrTaco
I don't need the karma, but people might find this useful, which is why I'm leaving the bonus on.
Smithsonian Folkways Dusts Off Titles With New Technology
[PowerPoint] is a tool for capitalist presentation
They are up to n customers, where n>0 is some multiple of 4.
This is a good example of just in time manufacturing. However, as was pointed out, it's fairly meaningless for the giants who never run out. Then again, if they could ONLY burn what they are going to sell, then Sony wouldn't be left with 10 million extra copies of Michael Jackson's latest CD after selling only 2 million. That alone would boost margins by eliminating waste.
It is more cost effective to burn those music on CD-R's than pressing them on regular CD's.
Usually you have to press lots of CD's so the cost would be minimal.
I am guessing that the demand for the music that Smithsonian Folkways Recordings is selling pretty low.
Thus CD-R would be economically feasible and more cost effective.
Yeah, this is one thing that cheeses me off against the record industry. There are TONS of songs I'd love to get digital versions of...everything from old tunes from the 50's to one hit wonders from the 70's-80's...but, cannot find due to being out of print. Heck, I've got stuff on vinyl that I need to someday try to convert to digital...because they will NEVER be released by the music industry on a CD. Why don't they open up their catalogs....especially stuff they just have locked up with no intention of re-issuing?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
This is however the first time I have heard of this for audio distribution. Pretty good idea if ya ask me (which nobody has)
for anyone who is interested: :P on you.
www.mentor.com
www.synopsys.com
I don't feel like making them links, so
I hope that it is clearly labeled on the CD that it is a CD-R. I wouldn't want people to buy the CD-R, bring it home, and then find that it doesn't work on all of their CD-players. Before you know it, some numbskull is going to try to sue someone because they can't get their folk music working on their 1989 CD-player.
Another thing, how long will these CD-R's last? It seems ironic that the Smithsonian Institution is selling media that will likely not last very long.
--sex
Very popular slashdot journal for adul
There are two important conclusions to be made from this article:
1) As always, the very technologies that RIAA/MPAA complain about are often the source of their next, great revenue stream (like VHS).
and
2) What is so wrong about people being able to purchase otherwise out of print recordings? The argument is always that it is too expensive for them to fire up the huge CD presses (that are designed to crank CDs out by the thousands) to simply sell a handful of CDs. Why not take 1 master and burn it to 1 CDR and then charge an extra dollar or so?
It is amazing how the RIAA in particular seems to have this "sacred cow" of wanting to horde older music and make it unavailable even to PAYING customers.
-Michael
Threshold RPG
It is more cost effective to burn those music on CD-R's than pressing them on regular CD's.
Can someone please explain this a little more? I'm fairly unfamiliar with how pressing operations work. Why exactly is pressing a CD more costly than burning one? And what is the cost difference?
These were my questions upon reading the article and I was frustrated that the article didn't even try to answer it.
Thanks for any help,
GMD
watch this
...at least at the beginning. If in reality there were a way to set up a large bank of machines running 42x cd writers, and upon request burn a disc out of a vending machine....wait, why ISN'T this being done for music more than a couple of years old?
:P
Grr...oh the ideas, and it'll never happen.
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
"Music From Western Samoa: From Conch Shell to Disco"
Is this a report to take seriously?
33% .. hello, RIAA .. 33%! .. if i could always .. as it .. what
;)
get the music i wanted, i'd pay for it
stands, you really Need tools like Kazaa to find
some of the more scarce tracks out there
would be choice would be the option to order a
CD with only the tracks you want on it (of course,
this won't happen Here, but i understand this is
in place in japan?)
i don't Want to be a thief, but i want the music
i want, and i don't want the cruft
Some folks seem to be "getting it". This is a great way to make older material available without running a huge batch of CD's and liners. There was also a recent story (can't find a link!) about concert venues making burned CD's of live performances available while people are on their way out, which is a fantastic idea.
Stop by my site where I write about ERP systems & more
And how exactly is this a measure of how it would affect EMI/Sony etc who don't have a problem with running out of cds? For whom writing a CDR is considered more expensive than pressing 1000 too many?
I would like to purchase the Clash album _Return to Brixton_ and will gladly pay the copyright holder a reasonable fee for it. Unfortunately, it's out of print. The record company is unwilling to sell me this CD *at any price*
Yet if I download it they claim I've stolen something.
If they had half a brain, they'd burn it on a CD-R for me and sell it for around $9.
I guess it's true what they say about recording acts these days not needing a whole lot of pre-production, if you can just sell blank CDs and call yourself a record label.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Pressing CD & DVD Discs
Stampers are used to create replicas by moulding, but there is a lot more to making CDs and DVDs than just moulding.
CD and DVD discs are made by first moulding using stampers produced during mastering and then metallising and lacquering (CD) or bonding (DVD). The steps are:
* Injection moulding of the clear polycarbonate discs using a hydraulic moulding machine
* Metallising to create an aluminium reflective surface
* Lacquering to protect the reflective surface of CDs ready for printing
* Bonding of 2 substrates to produce a DVD disc
* Printing of the disc label on top of the lacquer.
for more info, try this Google Search
I have such a machine.. it's only one bank though. It downloads digital music, burns it to CDs upon my request and spits them out the front on a little tray. Available at your local best buy for less than a thousand dollars. Comes with a monitor, keyboard, mouse, etc.
It said, "Record Label Thieves Selling CDRs". Which is, in spirit, kind of like cops selling crack then arresting you. Oh, wait...
SF provides one of the most valuable services in the US; they preserve recordings of US and international music that would never be released by a major label. After reading this article I counted the records and CDs I own that are released by SF; surprisingly (because I am not what I would call a folk-music fan), it's 1/8 of my 2000 title collection.
I imagine that every so often they see sales jump due to a fad (like when the soundtrack to "Oh Brother Where Art Thou?" spurred a new interest in traditional Southern country music), so I am glad to see them adopt a just-in-time manufaturing method to deal with the ups and downs of their markets. I am not sure if this is their official mandate or not, but their goal is to see that all titles are always available.
One problem I forsee, what is the shelf life of the dyes used in CD-Rs? I think that the gold ones are projected to last 100 years before they break down. Am I right, or did I remember it wrong?
On another point, I do not believe the RIAA's argument that "more blank than prerecorded CDs were sold last year." At my job, we go through 100 CDs a week archiving data, and at another job we went through 3000 per quarter releasing software updates for our customers. I have also worked for a large university which licenses software from the big companies; the internal distributions are done via CD-R (thousands of employees).
As usual, the RIAA presents a number without any proof of what it means. This is like their whole "falling sales" argument; labels' sales fell less than the number of new titles they didn't release during the same years. But then again, the RIAA represents what must be the single largest population of cocaine, crack, and heroin users in the world (and I am not talking about musicians), so cogent argument is not what I'd expect from them.
Let's see, sony, time warner, emi could all sell user selected custom music cd-r's with up to 24 tracks on them for $10 each.
Hmmm, that's pure profit as compared to selling CD's through retailers at 50% off.
came to own the rights to the Folkways catalog?
Moses Asche gave it to them. It was a donation.
This could stand as a good model for titles that have been removed from the catalog.
Plus, you could even turn a profit. The Smithsonian is a *non profit*, donations are tax deductable.
Art collectors take advantage of this fact all the time. Why shouldn't the music industry?
KFG
I recently ordered a book that was originally published about 20 years ago by Artech House Publishers. When I received the book, I was surprised to see that it had been printed on-demand, as part of the publisher's "In-Print Forever" program. The quality of the printing and binding was not noticably different than that of a mass-produced book.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
If you want it to happen, make it happen.
I plan on working on something similar myself. Not music, but rather distro's for local (county-wide) customers.
---
Get paid to code OSS
When I briefly scanned the headline I had originally thought it read "Record Label Thieves Selling CDs."
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
This may not apply to the m&m (sic), or Britney Spears types that sell millions of copies. But what is stopping the "marginal" acts that are considered "failures" on major or midsize labels because they only move 5 - 30 thousand CD's in the US -- from going to more of a "homebrew" and online distribution strategy. We are a diverse enough culture where you can have a cult following of 15-30 thousand purchasing fans -- yet bands and labels both lose money because the bands only see pennies for each CD sold, and labels don't break even unless they sell a certain amount of CD's.
I would say if a band went the "homebrew"/online distribution route, they could produce the CD's and packaging for about $1.50. If they were able to move 15,000-20,000 to there "cult" followers then everyone is happy.
Let the labels handle the heavy hitters -- let the other bands swallow their pride and realize that even though they may never go gold or platinum that they can still make a pretty good living peddling their wares to their fans.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
For example:
http://www.nytimes.com/auth/login?URI=http://www.n ytimes.com/2003/02/17/business/media/17FOLK.html
becomes:
http://archive.nytimes.com/2003/02/17/business/med ia/17FOLK.html
Alternatively, click here
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
start producing their own blank CD-R brand then? If people are downloading and burning so much music, why not enter the market where money is being spent? It's not like blank CD-Rs are expensive to produce.
I was going to say that you don't put money into your machine, as the parent suggests, but then I thought about my PC...
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
February 17, 2003 Smithsonian Folkways Dusts Off Titles With New Technology By CHRIS NELSON
he major music companies may fret over falling revenue, but one label saw its business jump 33 percent last year -- thanks in part to the recordable compact discs that the industry says are hurting its sales.
The label, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, is using recordable CD's, or CD-R's, to ensure that each release in its extensive catalog is always available. And in doing so, the label best known for dusty recordings by Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly is taking initial steps toward creating a 21st-century "celestial jukebox," where nothing recorded ever goes out of print.
The Folkways inventory includes 2,168 titles dating to 1948. Some of those are collections by familiar troubadours like Pete Seeger and Phil Ochs. But many more are obscurities like "Music From Western Samoa: From Conch Shell to Disco" (1984) and "Folk Songs of the Canadian North Woods" (1955).
Most recording companies, if they would ever release titles like that to begin with, would let the master tapes languish once a first pressing was sold out and initial interest had waned.
The notion of any recording falling into history's dust bin was said to gall Moses Asch, founder of Folkways Records. Dan Sheehy, director of Smithsonian Folkways, recalled that Mr. Asch used to ask if Q would be dropped from the alphabet just because it wasn't used as much as the rest of the letters.
When the Smithsonian Institution bought Folkways from the Asch estate in 1987, the museum agreed to keep every title in print. Initially, requests for rare, out-of-stock albums were fulfilled with dubbed cassettes.
Now, music fans hankering for "Burmese Folk and Traditional Music" from 1953 can pay $19.95 and receive a CD-R "burned" with the original album, along with a standard cardboard slipcase that includes a folded photocopy of the original liner notes.
The Recording Industry Association of America, a trade group representing the major music corporations, worries that CD-R technology aids music piracy. Rather than buy new CD's, the theory goes, people will burn downloaded music onto CD-R's or burn a copy of a friend's CD.
In 2002, 681 million CD's were sold, down from 763 million the year before, according to Nielsen SoundScan. But Smithsonian Folkways Recordings has been using the CD-R technology since 1996 to sell its obscure titles, essentially creating a just-in-time delivery model for record companies. Every time an order comes in, a Folkways employee burns five copies, one for the customer, and four for future requests.
Last year, the company sold 13,467 CD-R's, accounting for 6 percent of its CD sales, said Richard Burgess, director of marketing. Over all, Smithsonian Folkways had net album sales of almost $2.9 million in 2002, up 33 percent from 2001, despite its cutting its advertising budget more than 50 percent.
Interest in Smithsonian Folkways has jumped since the bluegrass-flavored soundtrack to "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" (2001), from Universal, won a Grammy for Album of the Year and went platinum six times over.
But it is not just rustic American music that Smithsonian Folkways is selling.
A 2002 double-CD set of Middle Eastern and Asian songs called "The Silk Road: A Musical Caravan" has sold 7,800 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Though that is just a fraction of the sales for Eminem in a single week, it is a respectable figure for a museum label that makes no videos, places few ads and deals primarily in music recorded by artists long dead, or in foreign languages, or from locales most Americans will never visit.
"Getting rid of inventory, which is what this custom on-demand stuff is about, is a huge step in the right direction toward making even low-selling albums into a business," said Josh Bernoff, principal analyst at Forrester Research.
Industry analysts say it is also a step toward making all music forever available, one the record business has yet to take successfully.
In 1999, Alliance Entertainment's RedDotNet subsidiary unveiled kiosks that would burn discs in retail outlets while customers waited. But that program failed, in part because the company was not able to secure licensing agreements with major labels, according to Eric Weisman, president and chief executive of Alliance.
Echo, a new consortium of retailers including Best Buy, Tower and Wherehouse, is considering development of in-store stations that would allow customers to download music onto portable digital music players like Apple's iPod.
While the Smithsonian Folkways CD-R operation allows the company to fulfill its obligation to keep everything in print, it is a labor-intensive solution that would be inefficient for the higher-demand catalogs of the major labels.
But Smithsonian Folkways is also venturing into just-in-time delivery for more popular titles. Last fall, the company enlisted the print-on-demand company Americ Disc to manufacture CD's, which are expected to sell significantly more copies than typical CD-R's, but fewer than full-blown retail releases. These Collector's Series discs come with full-color booklets and are identical in quality to commercial releases, but are sold only through the Smithsonian Folkways Web site (www.si.edu/folkways).
The first CD in the series, "Bells & Winter Festivals of Greek Macedonia" proved so popular through mail order that the company quickly made it a regular retail release.
It is hard for some to ignore the irony that as Smithsonian Folkways uses CD-R's to further its business, much of the industry hopes to limit the technology's use.
"It's almost like a little bootlegger's operation going on," said Dean Blackwood, owner of Revenant Records, an esoteric Americana label.
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company | Privacy Policy
I imagine that is to cover the costs of a human being touching every copy they sell, going down the hall to photocopy the liner notes and such. But how about freeing this stuff to Project Gutenberg or sticking it on ibiblio? Much wider access, no human touch required (you could pdf the liner notes) and Moses Asch's mission would be that much closer to home.
And with that much listenable music out on the web, I'd probably never buy another CD again!
...as long as your burn is to Music CD-R instead of normal data CD-R, you should be safe legally. By paying more for Music CD-R, you're buying a license from the RIAA to burn as much music as can be burned onto a disc, which (they say) will be distributed back to the artists.
Of course, the label in this story owns the copyrights to the music in their catalogue, so they can burn to CD-R themselves without repercussions; it is their right to copy that they're exercising, be it to pressed disks, burned disks, cassette tapes, or even etched onto drums designed to be played on old wire recorders.
It would be like the famicom Disk System that was populat in japan, you put in your money, and a blank disk, and pick the game anf the machine puts the game you wanted onto the disk, and you ended up paying less for the game. if you wanted the game on an "official disk" with case and instructions then you could buy that too, it just costed more.
Thinking back I recall these machines called "Lazervend" in the states that would distribute Shareware PC games on demand on floppy discs. It was like $2 a disc, but it was a pretty cool idea.
CD vending machine like that would be extremely cool.
Bork Bork Bork!!
But why, exactly, should this be our problem? If Sony is too big to handle individual requests, than what's wrong with an automated online distribution system?
No, these greedy bastards (and not just Sony, btw) want not just some, but ALL to themselves. Their own rules. Their gameplan or no ones. This is why the vast majority of the American public thinks that music companies and those that support them (RIIA, for instance), suck.
And don't get me started about the ridiculousness of 'public performances'. If the RIAA wants the public to feel better about them they should stop suing organizations like the Girl Scouts for singing 'Happy Birthday'.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
This works for the Smithsonian because they're selling music with some staying power.
/. reader.
The archival value of a random track of Brittany Spears's is zero.
In general, her discography's value goes to zero as her age approaches 50. See also Tiffany.
Generalizations of this Law Of Bulging Middles to other pop stars is left as an exercise to the
(hint: analysis of Madonna or Michael Jackson requires taking into account of relativistic effects.)
That's what Rhino's been doing. They've obviously had a great deal of success sellign back catalogues of stuff. Some of it isn't even that obscure - it's just that they package it better.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
In Canada they'd have to pay a tax for their CD-Rs. Taxing your own productions, isn't that a strange form of masochism. :-)
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
The article complains that burning CD-Rs on-demand is labor intensive. I don't think it needs to be, given a small amount of capital investment. The company I work for shipped its own software on CD-R (got tired of shredding pallets of CDs every time we made a dot release). At first, we used a typical Young Minds burner which was quite labor intensive. Currently we have a much more automated machine that takes spools of 100 CD-Rs, burns them and automatically prints a label on the disk using ink-jet technology.
... OMG!
I can imagine easily setting up a system that takes web orders, burns a CD-R with printed label-side, concurrently prints liner notes (rather than photocopy), sleeve graphics, and a mailing label. The labor consists of assembling the liner notes, sleeve, disc and packaging for shipment.
This model faces many of the same hurdles and benefits that the on-demand print model does for book publishing. No book need be out of print and revisions would be [relatively] painless. Unfortunately, most of the on-demand print companies have gone bust in the last couple of years before the consumer even had a chance to sample the product.
On-demand reproduction technologies tend to shift the costs and responsibility for replication away from the publisher and closer to the consumer. The article gives the example of reproduction at retail-outlets (failed). The extreme case puts reproduction completely in the hands of the consumer. The publishers are lured be the desire to sell something without actually having to manufacture material goods, but horrified with the thought that the consumer may then reproduce the material in whatever manner/media the consumer sees fit: computer, CD player, portable music player, digital home music library, car audio, home video soundtrack, Braille, eBook,
But the shipping isn't the issue! It's a marketing model that is lacking! How do you get someone to pick from millions of songs and buy, buy, buy! Sure, when you have an old favorite that you want to get your hands on, that is one thing... but marketing new music to people is much more complicated.
The shipping cost is insignificant (especially if liners are still requried).
Honestly, if the business opportunity isn't great enough for them, why don't they let go and let people get the music they want?
There may be an argument that copying an out-of-print work may not constitute infringement. One of the things a U.S. federal judge looks at in a fair use defense under 17 USC 117 is the effect on the market value of the work. The defense could conceivably argue that by taking a work out of print, the author has admitted that the work has no significant value.
Nothing you read on any web site operated by OSDN is legal advice.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Sony owns Sony Electronics and Sony Music. Sony Electronics makes CD-R media. Sony Music is a major label.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings ?? If you are going to refer to record labels generically, you should make sure you are actually talking about a record label people have heard of. The big record labels don't have the time or money to sell cdr's with music on them, they can just as easily print too many cds and warehouse them for when they need to have extra on hand.
The title of the article would then have to be changed to:
"Record Company Thieves selling CD-R's"
They would be in violation of antitrust. It's not that they don't want to, they just can't.
We should all pick one OOP recording from an RIAA member. Then, we should all go to the RIAA headquarters and demand that they take our $10 for it.
Of course like all other protests, for this to actually turn any heads, about 10000 people or so would have to show up. When the news shows up, people tell them that the RIAA gets all these laws passed to protect their right to silence music, and the protest is because the musicians have the right to have their music heard for a fair price, however the RIAA companies are refusing to take our money.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Stampers are used to create replicas by moulding, but there is a lot more to making CDs and DVDs than just moulding.
Thanks for the reply, "very". I guess my original question wasn't very clear. People kept telling me about the large start-up costs. I already knew that a (relatively) expensive mold had to be created but I was assuming that the startup cost had already been paid in the first pressing. What I was envisioning was that the record company would store the mold indefinitely (since it cost so damn much to create in the first place) and could then press new CDs from the existing mold anytime they wanted to. So my question really should have been phrased "Once the mold has been created, is burning a CD-R really cheaper than pressing one more CD?". So you're step-by-step expanation really helped me understand that it's not as simple as dusting off the old master mold and pressing a new CD.
GMD
watch this
Mainly because of the upstream bandwidth limitations. 650MB would optimistically take 20 minutes to download if split among 3 DSL lines. To make it all viable, you have to build an infrastructure within a geographic area to centralize (at least a large portion of) the data, and have a very fat pipe back to the 'office.
If you can figure out a way to accept orders via SMS (or some similar non-PC, universal interface), and have the disc ready in a half hour, it can work. You'll need a cage in a telco hotel, and the vending machines distributed throughout the area.
My guess is that you would need to have about 50 machines in an area, each selling about 500 CD's each/month at a $10 markup to stand a chance at a profit.
I don't think they worry too much about leaking links. Since they give away the stuff anyway, serving a static text page doesn't cost more than returning a denied error. And the happy user might even click on an ad.
I've ordered a couple custom items from the Folkways back-catalog. (I am a folk music fan and radio DJ).
Riddle me this: Most of the old Folkways recordings are approx $20 for a CD-R and $10 for a cassette. Why?
I don't expect they have some surplus of pre-recorded tapes around. I assume they're doing those Just-In-Time as well.
CD-R media is *much* cheaper than even basic grade cassette, particularly at the bulk they must use.
I *assume* much of this is in a digital vault and burned/taped on demand. By my reckoning, there is less labour involved in burning a CD than in setting up a tape to dub. If nothing else, you don't have to flip the CD halfway through.
If the vaults were reasonably set up, the duplicator could burn the CD-Rs at 8x or more. They *might* be using high-speed tape duplicators, but more likely it's at real-time.
So, why the difference? The old capitalism of "that's what they'll pay"? That's not the point, or the attitude I've ever gotten from the Folkways people. Cultural inherency? Perhaps. It's blessed dumb, that's all I know.
You would not have to send 650MB you could use a Lossless compression system. The other issues is Cover art and Album Art. If you pay for a cd you will want all liner notes and a cover as well. That printing will cost a little time.
It's trivial to get silver/silver CD-R's these days. A silver playing surface is no guarantee that you have a pressed CD in your hands, and not a burned CD-R.
When do you think that the RIAA is going to clue in that the reason that CD sales have been dropping is because they're producing shit, calling it music and charging 400% markup on it?
Nahhhhhh. Must be piracy.
Karma: Non-Heinous
From the article: ... A 2002 double-CD set of Middle Eastern and Asian songs called "The Silk Road: A Musical Caravan" has sold 7,800 copies, according to Nielsen SoundScan. ..."
"
Though that is just a fraction of the sales for Eminem in a single week
The Globe & Mail reported on Saturday that the Michael Jackson documentary has piqued interest in his music. Quoting HMV, which has over 100 locations, they said sales of all of MJ CD's are about 40 a week nationwide.
Assuming 10% of the copies of "The Silk Road" go to Canada (pretty standard sales figures for music), that makes 780 copies (or more, as a 2002 release it may not have been out for 12 months yet), compared to the "normal" sales of about 2,000 MJ CDs (all titles). Assuming not every MJ CD was the exact same album, you may well find Silk Road outsells his most popular album.
I work for a CD Duplication company that pushes CD-Rs a lot for short run CDs for small bands because they're so much cheaper than pressing a CD out of a glass master, especially if you're doing fewer than 1,000 CDs. Of course, it's all totally legal because these small bands write and produce the music and want to sell copies to their friends. It's all cool. If the RIAA and others looked around a little, perhaps they would see this kind of legitimate usage and realize that we don't need 50% taxes on CD-Rs and that CD-Rs actually help get music out there.
I've found the CD ripping utility CDeX does a wonderful job. I thought I had a really rotton sound card trying MS sound recorder. That made a very cheap-o cassette recorder on substandard tape sound premium. After using CDeX, I found the record ablility of my sound card is pretty good. Switch the source to Line in instead of CD. I've about finished transering my stuff. Don't connect a magnetic pickup turntable directly to the sound card. Use a quality receiver or amp with a phono input to get proper amplification and EQ curve for the magnetic cartridge. A good turntable with a magnetic cartridge with a quality receiver is a must for this process for good recordings.
The truth shall set you free!
Sounds like you have several people waiting for one burner to get done. I see you've never worked in a mass production environment. My factory math may be rusty, but benefit from the experience of a veteran. ;-)
Even using stock off the shelf equipment from CompUSA, you could do much better than that. Lets assume your CDs are 52 min long (so they take 1 min to burn), and verification takes the same amount of time as burning. That gives you two minutes per disc on each burner.
Lets say you have two workers. One puts on the CD label, puts the CD in the case, replaces with blank CD in drive. The other puts in the insert, closes the case, puts the thing in a shipping box, and slaps a shipping label on the box. Even a dead cat with arthritis could do each job in 30 seconds. If the inserts have to be cut or folded, it may take a little extra time. Cutting can be done beforehand, but a pre folded sheet won't print well. ;-) Also you'll need some sort of printer which can print both sides by itself, otherwise I predict it'll be a mess. ;-) ...unless you decide to print on only one side of the inserts.
This ties up each burner for at most 150 seconds--120 s for burning, and 30 s while your worker fumbles around. # of burners needed = 150s /30s = 5 burners. # of CDs per hour = 60 min / ( .5 min / 1 CD ) = 120 CDs/hr. Lets say total cost per worker (including benefits) is $13/hr. Labor cost per CD = $13 * 2 workers / 120 CDs = $0.22. The cost of materials (CD-R, slim case, paper, and ink) can't be more than $1.50--I don't pay more for those materials myself, and I bought retail and have a rip-off HP printer with rip-off ink cartridge prices.
I didn't factor in the cost of taking orders and shipping. I assume taking an order over the phone wouldn't cost a huge amount. Anyone know? $1/order, $2? Probably less for a web site. Shipping, well most sites not only charge separate for it, they also add a handling charge. Cover your ordering and packaging costs too! ;-)
You'll also need a script to coordinate and handle all this--if the packaging guys have to do lots of typing, it'll slow them way down. A properly formed script will eliminate any need for interaction. It just has to pull the CD info and address from a database and start the burning and printing processes and eject the CD at the right time. I'm sure any ol' script kiddie could write it.
Also, your figure for pay seems a bit high to me. When I was doing that sort of thing, we were only paid minimum wage or a little more. What's it at now? about $6/hr? Yeah, if you run your operations in an overpopulated area with a high cost of living (like San Francisco or New York City), you'll have to pay workers $11/hr or more, and they'll be living in a cardboard box, but other places can be more resonable.
My archaic boombox CD player from 1987 (still works despite maltreatment) plays CD-Rs just fine.
We are going to come home with our CD's and try to rip them only to have the damn Xbox not read it because it is a CD-R. That would piss me off to all hell if that happened to me. Fortunately, it hasn't yet.
A lot of the music I recomended to people were the bands that were basicaly local garage bands for me people like Segar and Nugent for example; basicaly Detroit area bands. Others recomended band to me from other area; sure some of it was great and some of it sucked. That's want I don't like about our modern mega-corperate entertainment industry, nothing's great and nothing suckes it's all kind of blah. A lot of kids today have a pretty eclectic music taste and are listening to some of the stuff I lestened to 30 years ago as well as new stuff; just the kind of people that would use such a service to get some of the out-of-print music
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
The two issues have nothing in common. CDR are hurting many music companies because most people can make them. The CDR used by the folksong folks has nothing to do with the loss experienced by other music companies. Does this make sence, or am i just missing something?
Independent music distribution by Joe Hahn In the five years I worked with K-Rad, I masterminded the majority of different methods we came up with to distribute our music. Initially we had some friends at Reckless Records and spread out 100 copies of the first K-Rad album, each of which had a different name (re-released as "Lithograph"). They were constructed of lithographed paperboard that we colored with Pantone markers, and then lined the insides with strips of old T-Shirts. The CD-Rs were burned by a third party. Things were still 1x and 2x back then. Overall, they took forever to make, confused a lot of people, gave us somewhat of a name with no other info to relate, applied some mystery to "K-Rad", and made about zero dollars. It was a lot of fun, though. Our next step up was getting our own cd-burner. I came up with an idea to spray-paint the CDs and jewel cases with stencils, or objects used as stencils. Over time we had faster burners, vellum inserts, and had the process pretty refined to which we could make up to thirty CDs a day, but it was still very time consuming to burn each one by hand, one at a time. Fans were very excited about the custom spray jobs, but over time, it became too difficult for us to keep up the pace (which didn't increase much) . Also, spray-paint is pretty expensive, especially for the better brands, and often CDs would be ruined by getting a little spray-paint on the bottom which became discouraging. I remember the morning we got a box in the mail a made the jump from 2x to 8x CD burning. "Now we can make thousands of them!!" While we were making the spray-painted albums, we had a few methods of distribution. We could sell directly from our website using Paypal, or people could get our info and send cash, checks or money orders. I still have some currency from the Yukon that "Currency Exchange" won't exchange, as well as a money order from Sao Paulo that my bank keeps sending back to me. We also were on consignment at a bunch of Chicago record stores, and would distro 20-50 at a time around the world with Choked Distribution who was also in Chicago (www.choked.com). These methods worked pretty well, but still it became difficult to keep manufacturing and painting all the CDs. Still, although we were becoming pretty popular, no actual money was being made. It was all going into the process of makng them: Ordering the CDs and jewelcases, driving to Home Depot in rush-hour to buy Krylon, cruising out to the burbs to get the correct vellum. The best option beyond that was to do a real CD rather than handmade CD-R, but most places will only let people do 1000 at a time, and we were more into doing smaller runs of all different things, because we constantly made new music. We did however press 1000 records on our own, and Someoddpilot Records (www.someoddpilotrecords.com) did a real CD release of our latest album, "Deli Mood Spot". Both the SOPR CD and our 12" took 300% longer to get done than expected. About 1.5 years average. By the time the product was ready, the music was ancient to us. However, having the record to sell encouraged online sales of our handmade CD-Rs. I am not sure how the SOPR CD "Deli Mood Spot" is doing, because I have not yet seen $$ for any sold so far. Around the time of the SOPR release, other members of K-Rad decided to stop selling CD-Rs because they were afraid it was too inferior of a product, and led to people thinking we were not a "real band." Amidst all the spray painted CD sales (1998-2001), I also put together some different ways to distribute our music online. Aside from our website, which at the time for K-Rad was my domain www.protman.com , but later swapped to its own www.padk-rad.com (which also involved a lot of turmoil with the www.k-rad.com guy who runs a site for Mazda RX-7 tweaking), the first way we widely distributed our music online was an FTP I set up at my job with 21stCentury (Late 1999). It had free, anonymous access to MP3 versions of about 200 of our various tracks and live shows. It was especially cool to have the live recordings up there, because we weren't really inclined to release those as albums due to audio fidelity issues and misc screwups, but fans typically preferred the live recordings over the albums. The server had a ton of bandwidth allotted to it, and it created a frenzy of high speed downloads. These were all people that knew about K-Rad and had an active interest in getting the music. We were a little concerned about all these people being able to get all the music for free, even though it was a lower quality format than 16bit 44khz uncompressed, but whatever, we were "K-Rad". Eventually I got canned from 21stCentury for being insubordinate and the high speed FTP was gone. This was also around the same time Napster was becoming most popular and other p2p / gnutella software was coming to be. At the pad (networked apartment we all lived in) we always had cable modem from one provider or another. We had low-bandwidth clips of music on our website to encourage people to an FTP we had set up there, but its bandwidth was quite low compared to the previous, and people became less impressed with it. Most of the fans we had downloaded everything already anyway. However, we did make a strong effort to keep recording and putting our live shows on it for download. This was still all for free, hoping to encourage people to buy the CD-Rs of our sprayed albums. At a later job that allowed me a high speed connection, I set up another FTP, but this one had a public and a private section. I set it up so people could pay $1.11 a month for user/password access to the private section. The public section had all our live recordings, and some misc. tracks, while private section had all our official albums, some other special tracks, as well as everything in the public. About 10 people went for it. Several of them cancelled their subscription after a month because they just queued it all up and mirrored it in a matter of days or hours. Some cancelled over time for whatever reason. Some still pay. The concept intended more to keep updating it with new tracks to keep the pay access valuable, but K-Rad's creative process had slowed down a bit. I also did some guerilla marketing from that server using some different Gnutella clients like Bearshare and Limewire. We actually renamed a bunch of the K-Rad tracks to the same Artist_Album_Title_Track format as many of the current uber-pop hits, applied our own contact info to the ID3 tags, and cause a bunch of unsuspecting people to download and advertently yet inadvertently wind up hearing K-Rad music. They downloaded gigs and gigs which was many times more than the FTP logged. After a while, I put it to an end, because I felt sort of dirty and foolish, but it seemed to be somewhat effective though some people emailed us aggressive complaints about faking them out. We did keep everything on Gnutella with the real K-Rad track names. The most popular tracks were the ones with insinuating words in the titles like "gay" or "piss". Those were typically Mark or Chris's tracks. The subscription thing sort of fizzled so I tried my best to just keep the FTP+Gnutella and also Soulseek (www.slsk.org) online and free with a donation box in plain view on the website. Bandwidth isn't free and I had to restrict it some so people wouldn't keep the pipe constantly pegged. It would make my supervisor mad when he would see the little bandwidth graph as a big green rectangle rather than some nice wavy lines and blips. Once the real K-Rad CD came out on SOPR they decided to kill off the CDRs completely. Around the same time and for additional reasons, I quit K-Rad and proceeded as my pre-K-Rad pseudonym, "Protman". It's not as cool of a name as K-Rad, but it has much sentiment dating back to when I first got "into music". Toward the end of K-Rad, I had invented an online application called the "Ghettoblaster". The ghettoblaster consists of a database of 24kbps 22khz mono mp3s that can be randomly streamed from a website without any special player or plug-in. The sound quality is pretty low, hence "Ghettoblaster", but a lot of people would tune into it and let it run all day like a radio. If you leave the browser open, it will just play random tracks from a selection of hundreds. Some are completed pop tracks, some are just ideas or bits of audio. Now, as Protman, I am integrating more functionality into it. Each track-name will link to a database entry that will give more info about the track, as well as a link to album it's on, which will later link to an online store catalog. Not all tracks are officially on any Protman releasable album, and there will be about 400 to choose from. Oy vey. (*Joe groans about the audio mastering work he has placed ahead of himself.) I plan to make the unreleased tracks available somehow. The best way to implement that is to allow people to compile their own CDs, but it would need to be automated somehow to keep it fast and cheap. What I hope to eventually have with this is a complete catalog of all worthy released and unreleased music, that the end-user can poke around in, be impressed with, and then wind up ordering a CD or two directly from the site. I own some cd-duplication equipment that allows me to automate the burning and printing process, and I also do some custom packaging. The new process is nowhere near as time-consuming as making K-Rad's spraypainted CD-Rs, and just the fact that I have automated the burning process kills 90% of the tedium, so I may opt for other more creative printing/packaging on certain projects. The printer is a thermal process that winds up looking like dual or mono screen print, and can be done on any type/color of CD-R (www.donerecords.com). I do make all of my music available for download from Soulseek which allows me to interact with the people downloading it. I think FTP is at its end for now. FTP was kind of evil, because I had no real idea what was happening on the server without messing around with the logs, and it provided no way to communicate with the users. Soulseek is cool, because I can get feedback about the music, announce new things to people on the list, chat with people about what they like or recommend tracks to them. Sometimes users have questions like "What was that one track where it like sounds like and like.." I am happy to oblige, and encourage them to get the album. There are also some other sharing apps I want to try out like KDX (www.haxial.com) which is totally cross platform (Mac, PC, Linux), and possibly another purely user-based FTP for special people. In my current mode, I don't really intend to try to do any consignment or mini-distributions. I feel I am too busy at my job and with other projects to deal with a third party to sell and promote my music. For now I just want to sell to people directly at my shows and/or from the website. This also lets me sell them for $5/ea rather than the $10-$15 they would go for in stores. I saw the K-Rad SOPR release for sale online for $29. Want the MP3s? Check Soulseek. In the the past 5 years, many different distro approaches have become more viable while others have been murdered or died on their own. I think a problem with most people's approach and arguments about they new ways people can share(steal) and distribute music is that they consider the artist as a single type of object that is homogenous throughout the industry. At the most they exclaim two; the super duper pop-icon, and the little guy who just wants to be heard. However, there are dozens of types that all rely on different ways to try and profit from their talents. Some different ways to make money with music are live shows, commercial scores (ie. Videogames, tv, radio, websites, rollercoasters), and cd/record sales. Some artists thrive on playing live gigs at a lot of small places, others less frequent at larger venues. Some are strictly studio musicians that never play live and rely completely on commercial gigs or cd/record sales. A lot of older jazz artists that I have seen perform at the Green Mill have no records to sell, but they play out all the time. I doubt many of them even have computers, but then take a handful of home-studio electro-pop artists, and you'll find their music all over the net, none of it for sale, and they may have never even left their basements except to get a taco or something. Then there's Britney Spears and a mariachi band killing the Aragon, and the Elvis Christmas album at Target, and the pre-release of Drukqs on Kazaa in 320kbps mp3. Also, what works at first for a startup-band may not be suitable later on. As K-Rad, initially the FTP was great to spread our sound around, but as we became more popular, we disabled it because we feared its access was too free and it's availability was too high. Some fans wound up disappointed. How can artists make a good transition from "free trial" mode to "pay $29 for our import CD" mode? Should that transition be made at all? Next issue, I am going to document what some other bands have gone through, get their opinions on the state of music sharing, and bounce off of them some of the new middleman distro attempts a few larger commercial organizations are attempting to get off the ground. Some combine the wasteland of MP3.com with an e-comm gumball machine where the gumballs lose their flavor after a few chews. Others are more promising and help one to feel less mortal.
*I used to be quite irreverent and ignorant. I am probably much smarter now. I seem to realize this every 45 days or so.
I'm suprised people are talking about a CDR label like its a new or unusual thing... CDR labels have been around for quite a while.
A little background: I run a small industrial record label, Cranial Fracture Recordings (www.fracture.ar.com.au). We do proper CDs, not CDRs, for various reasons. But a lot of people in industrial music do CDR releases (I mean real industrial music; power noise, experimental, dark ambient, field recordings, power electronics, etc, not bands like Nine Inch Nails, VNV Nation, etc).
Some industrial labels do only CDRs, like Flesh Made Word (who put out some outstandingly good music), or Zanftig Research. Some do both, CDs and CDRs, like Ad Noiseam or Frozen Empire Media. Oddly enough, these CDR releases are nearly all limited. If you ask them, its unlikely they'll burn a copy, even if you're prepared to pay. An excellent New York power noise/electronics artist Navicon Torture Technologies (for my money one of the best electronic musicians in the world today) put out a lot of self-released CDRs with print runs of 20 or 30 copies; they sell out in a matter of weeks or days. One of them, Power Romance, was of really exceptional quality and was re-released on proper CD format on my label. We tried to make it worthwhile for the lucky (very few) who had the CDR to buy it; it was remastered and had two bonus tracks.
Industrial music is obviously a niche genre. We don't get a lot of sales. The reason people would go for a CDR release is usually simple economies of scale. The minimum print run for CDs that a studio will offer you is 500. If you're only expecting to sell say 100 CDs, and you're not really planning on sending off lots of promo copies, these labels will go with the cheaper option of printing 100 CDRs. Now the cost per unit is actually higher for CDRs. In Australia, a print run of 500 CDs will cost you about $1000 (not including mastering, artwork printing, etc). A print run of 100 CDRs will cost you about $300. But as I said, if you're only going to sell 100, you're better of going CDR.
Now CDRs will never really be sold in a shop, but these underground (much as I hate that word, you know what I mean though) labels sell through their website, or through word of mouth, to friends, etc. Or do trades with other CDR labes. So that's no great loss.
I'm guessing there are similar CDR labels in other niche genres such as black metal, hardcore, etc, but I'm not entirely sure.
don't the enumerated factors apply only when the use is for "criticism, comment..."
Did you miss the "such as" right before the list? According to 17 USC 101, "The terms 'including' and 'such as' are illustrative and not limitative." But a republisher of out-of-print copyrighted works can still improve his legal chances by taking the "criticism and comment" angle, as ESR did with the so-called "Halloween" memos.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I skimmed through about half of the posts and none of you seem to note the fact that extra prints have to be made for retailers. You all talk about how 'I would buy X copies of Y item' but what about 'Joe Average' who would rather walk down to Tower Records and pick up a copy there rather than order it online?
My local library sold off it's old Disney VHSs
:)
I bought the lot and made good money on ebay with them.
I incorporated this into my 'modest proposal' to reform copyright that I posted in my livejournal last month:0 3/ 01/15
http://www.livejournal.com/users/fin9901/day/20
(excerpt quoted below:)
We need to reform the copyright laws. My modest proposal goes something like this:
1) No copyright will ever under any circumstances last more than 100 years from original creation. If you can't make enough money off it in 100 years, you never will. This also makes it very simple to know when items are definitely out of copyright.
2) Items under copyright that are not being published fall out of copyright much quicker: any item that has been out of publication in the US cumulatively longer than a given time (varying as to the media type) becomes public domain-- i.e. "use it or lose it". Such a scheme might be: books, 20 years; audio and video, 10 years; computer software, 3 years; etc. The 'cumulative' wording is to keep publishers from trying to skirt the law by publishing things for 1 day every n years.
At least mafia-owned pizzarias make excellent pizza. Compare to Bill Gates.
Their distribution model sucks. I've read the posts and it seems that almost everyone is grabbing downloads of things that just aren't available. Did you know that when Napster was operating that CD sales actually ROSE 20%? How is that harming those vultures?
When are they going to clue in? We, the consumer, want everything all time. You, the vendor, will give it to us or we'll get it on our own. If you had a clue, you'd change how record stores operate. They would ALL be burning CD's on demand. New albums might only be available as a pre-recorded album. Otherwise, your entire library would be available to the record store all the time. The technological issues are minimal.
What are they afraid of? They don't want the public to realize that we could deal with the artists directly. The internet forms the perfect distribution channel. No one really needs them. If we paid the artist directly, we'd get our songs for a $1.00 each and the artists would get exponentially more money than they get from the RIAA now. So the artists don't really need them.
God knows that we the customer don't really need them. They tell us what we can and cannot purchase. I don't want the things you tell me that I should. I WANT WHAT I WANT! If you don't want to supply it, someone else will.
QueenB
HDGary secures my bank
All of the people in my building are insane. The guy above me designs
synthetic hairballs for ceramic cats. The lady across the hall tried to
rob a department store... with a pricing gun... She said, "Give me all
of the money in the vault, or I'm marking down everything in the store."
-- Steven Wright
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