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Record Label Thrives Selling CDRs

Posted by michael on from the rip-mix-burn-profit dept.

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'."

2 of 213 comments (clear)

  1. Old news for frequently changing apps by MentlFlos · · Score: 5, Interesting
    Mentor Graphics and Synopsys have been shipping me programs on CDR for a pretty long time now. Their programs are updated so often that its cheaper for them to burn it then get disks pressed. These programs are NOT cheap either. One faculty member told me that the licenses we have would cost over $1M US per seat if we were to buy it outright. Expensive CDRs hua :)

    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:
    www.mentor.com
    www.synopsys.com
    I don't feel like making them links, so :P on you.

  2. Smithsonian Folkways by 47PHA60 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.