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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'."
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
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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
Unlikely to ever happen. I imagine that there's some fiscal wrangling going on that makes those 10 million "unsold" copies worth some $ amount as a tax deduction.
I'm probably being cynical, but I wouldn't be surpised if the tax deductions were more valuable to the company than the money spent pressing and storing the extra CDs.
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
Because mass produced CD's are actually *pressed.*
Expensive dies have to be made.
Look at it this way. If you want a model of a boat, just *one* model, it'll cost you several thousand dollars to have a professional modeler make it for you. That's an expensive model. Boat, boat models in plastic only cost pennies each to produce.
Yes, but the *mold* and injector equipment cost tens of millions.
For one boat this is doofey.
For one CD it's cheaper to spend $.25 on a blank and pay someone $5 to do the burning ( and if you're selling for $15 you turn a profit).
For a million CD's it's cheaper to make a mold, buy expensive machines to crank blanks through the in less than a second each with essentially no expensive human labor involved.
It's just like any other One Off vs. Mass Produced economy of scale problem.
KFG
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.
Labor intensive.
When you're dealing with onsey-twoseys, it's not a big deal, especially with these new high speed 52x replicators (of which I have one). But, imagine:
Hire a bunch of people, at $11/hour (and then add benefits, insurance, etc etc).
They have to process requests, and even at optimum efficiency probably only produce anywhere from 10-20 discs/hour (gotta verify contents, etc). Then pack those discs up and get them mailed out. That starts to become pricey and then they're charging $20/disc to make it "worth their time" (believe it or not, not everyone gives away their time or goods).
A second scenario is the whole kiosk idea, where you go to someplace like Tower and burn-on-demand. What kind of storage would a device need?? Could you imagine one store with every CD in existance on-hand to burn for your convenience. (Yeah, you could compress with MP3, but frankly, if I'm going to buy a CD I don't want a compressed format). And then the monthly or weekly "update" data for the hundreds of CD's released every week. Then you'd have to "secure" the data (don't need anyone walking off with the raw images.. it's one thing (copyright infringement) to distribute the CD images you ripped, but now imagine ripping the "authorized" image (really no difference, except in concept).
I think it actually needs to be done like Kinko's. YOu put in your request, the "print service" fills it (by requesting/downloading the appropriate image in a secure fashion from a central server somewhere, then presses/burns the CD), and then you pick it up a day or two later.
I'm not saying the idea is stupid or far-fetched, it just needs tweaking and some more thought put into it than "what's wrong with just burning a CDR of old stuff?".
And finally, my band will not be distributing music via website, but will instead create a "permanent" kazaa user and share that way. That way our bandwidth isn't killed (as if anyone would download it anyway), but it also helps ensure that our "official" stuff is out there to be had.
Maybe I'll report back if this ever does happen and let everyone know how it goes..
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
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
What this new business model means though is that they can quietly sell their back-catalogues to a less snobby label who can make money out of it by burning CDs to order. You might be in luck yet.
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
Agreed. I actually had that album in with my collection of vinyl that was destroyed a number of years ago along with a bunch of other punk including Stiff Little Fingers, Black Flag etc... and an awful lot of bluegrass music that will never see a CD printing by the music companies. There could be a huge business in selling this music along with lots of other world music and smaller artists this way. The costs of setting up a CD recording business cannot be that great, but the problem would be getting all of the copyright permissions.
I would certainly spend lots of $$$'s to get back my collection.
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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,
This article makes clear what has been true for a while now: With digital copying, there is no need for any such beast as "out of print".
In the olden days, you'd have to pay to store copies, and you'd have to guess at future demand. Then, if you were way under, you would have to reassemble the master (or original galleys or what have you) and start up a new printing -- with all the associated costs of initial runs. Now, though, you can print/press on demand and there's no reason to keep a large inventory. Heck, for that matter, the company could offer MP3 downloads and not have to burn the CD-R, either.
What's keeping us from this utopia? Greed -- on the part of download-hounds who gleefully trade songs they haven't bought and on the part of the Content Cartel, who feel threatened by the new technology and don't want to get their heads around new possibilities.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
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?
I'd be up for changing the copyright law on this one. I'd like to see copyright holders be required to prove that they have existing plans to re-release something currently out of print within a reasonable timeframe before they can invoke their copyrights.
I realize this might hinder the "business model" of some copyright holders that manufacture scarcity by letting popular items go out of print and stay out of print for a while so they get a bubble of sales when they re-release them.
I also realize this might hurt performers whose material has gone out of print because their sales fall below the million-a-day required to be considered businessworthy by large labels, but at least their material would be available.
I've been subscribed for less than a month and in that time I've downloaded probably 250 albums, including some old stuff I never thought I'd see again (like old Mighty Mighty Bosstones on good ol' Taang records).
The minimum investment is $45, but then you can burn all the CDs you want (these are unrestricted MP3's). If you only want an album or two, they have a 50 song trial period. I think this company is going about MP3 distribution in the right way... but they got my $$$ by offering what I want, not because of their ideology.
With your idea, someone is still having to process your order (and it makes it more difficult because now you're having to scan through catalogues to ensure you get the *right* version of a song (i.e. The Smith's "What Difference Does it Make" or Face to Face's cover of the same). Unless, of course, you're talking about downloadable music, which isn't what we're really discussing. Someone will still have to be there to verify your custom CD, then package it, then ship it out.
.iso images, but storage is an issue the industry already has to deal with, and moving to digital storage would actually save them money.
No, it's called "automation", and you might want to look into it some time.
The order is processed by the computer that takes it, and any scanning through catalogues to get the right version is done by the customer placing the order through the web interface. The relevant information gets sent to the machine that burns the disk, labels it, prints, staples, and folds the liner notes and stuffs it all into whatever packaging they decide to use, prints the shipping label, and then spits it out into a bin, which is then loaded onto a USPS truck, where it is finally touched by human hands.
You've got an entry level employee that swings by a few times a day to make sure it has enough blank CDRs, paper, staples, etc, and he probably tends several other machines. You've got a couple IT guys making sure the database and servers run smoothly.
As for the cost of building the infrastructure, I used to work for a company that designed and built custom industrial automation. I'd estimate that such a machine could be built for under $50k (doesn't include database developement, just the machine that produces the physical CD). That's engineering, fab, build, and testing of one unit. Obviously, subsequent ones would be cheaper since the design would already be done. There are no significant design challenges here, as most of the functionality is already available in COTS products, it's just a matter of integration.
You have vastly overestimated the costs of putting such a system into production. There's the issue of where to store all these
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
You dont need "copyright permissions", you just need a license to distribute it within particular territories. If you think you can make money selling these CDs, write a letter to their publishers asking how much the license would be.
:)
You take care of the artwork, pressing, distributing, and promoting of the CDs... bang, you become an instant record label and you can stop complaining about everything being out of print
The reason they dont press up these CDs is because (in their eyes) it is not economically viable. If it hasn't sold millions it means nothing to them. If you think there is a market, go for it. It'd cost you $1 per CD and you can sell em for at least $10.
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