Newsgroups: bit.listserv.allmusic
Date:         Wed, 15 Apr 1992 17:22:22 EDT
From:         "Michael H. Bloom" <MHB@MITVMA.BITNET>
Subject: Re: CD COSTS
              15 Apr 1992 14:10:17 PDT from <John.McCartney@EBAY.SUN.COM>

On Wed, 15 Apr 1992 14:10:17 PDT The Lion of Symmetry said:
>>a unit price of $1.75 plus printing costs

One of the bands I'm in made a CD. We sent a premastered tape (i.e. everything
digitized, even the table of contents information-- exactly the bits we wanted
to appear on the disc) and camera-ready artwork. It cost us over $3000, and we
got 1100 CD's. The extra hundred was a blatant maneuver to take us for all we
were worth; the contract stated that they could do an over- or under-run of up
to 10% of the quantity we contracted for, and have us pay for them; we figured
this meant a handful of test pressings or something. Nope, we got 11 cartons of
100 shipped back to us :-(

Obviously if you can afford to do bigger quantities, your unit cost goes down.
For smaller quantities unit costs go through the roof; it's hardly worth doing
for less than 1000. We didn't think we'd need 1000 (and we were right; we still
have eight cartons full), but the price difference between 500 and 1000 turned
out to be only a couple hundred bucks, and I suggested we go for it. I was told
subsequently that if you order 500 CD's, what they actually do is press 1000 (or
1100) and leave half of them in their basement waiting for you to reorder; that
1000 (or 1100) is really their standard press run.

One thing we found out later we could do to save some money was turn the print
materials into films, a step they did for about twice what it would have cost
us from a local lab. We did do the digitizing on our own, but not because it
was cheaper (I think we ended up paying more than their standard rate). We did
it because we wanted to be around for the final EQ and make sure it was what we
wanted to hear. (In fact we decided at that stage to leave out one song that we
figured wasn't gonna sound right no matter how we tweaked it. We gave that song
to a local cassette compilation instead.)

>I'd be interested in seeing your printing and packaging costs, be sure
>to specify what type of booklet/insert (# of pages/# of colors) and
>type of packaging (longbox?).

I don't remember the print charges offhand, but they were a bit of a surprise.
All our artwork was black&white, and we thought it would be cheaper.

Longboxes are an extra cost option, surprisingly expensive. We didn't go for it.
We think longboxes suck. American major labels insist on them because they need
more graphic space to beguile you into buying the product. For our ~$3 per disc,
we got the discs, the jewel boxes, the box card in the back with the spine copy,
a three panel foldout insert, all of that assembled in complete shrinkwrapped
units. No store has rejected it because it didn't come in a longbox-- either the
jewel box gets locked in one of those longbox-sized theft-proofing devices, or a
couple places took the insert out of the jewel box and stuck it in some sort of
display unit.

BTW, anybody want to buy a copy? I promise not to send in 362-line posts listing
how many copies I have left :-) but the temptation will be easier to resist if
we can sell a few...

>According to Musician magazine (some months ago), record companies
>have a standard charge of $4 per cd for packaging, charged against
>thee artist's take. Somehow I doubt it costs this much, especially
>in the quantities that major releases are pressed in.

I doubt it costs that much too; it sounds like another lie labels propagate at
the expense of artists.

>The article also mentioned that Michael Jackson managed to get this
>charge reduced a little in his latest contract, but they knew of no
>other artists who had.

His next 6 records * 10 million copies of each * let's say 50 off the price of
each CD knocks $30,000,000 off the value of his "billion dollar" contract :-)
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU