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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?
Link
from the rip-mix-burn-???-profit!! dept.
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings ordering information
The solution that has worked best for me...is to avoid public discussion. -- CmdrTaco
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
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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...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.
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.)
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