I see various kickstarter campaigns looking for money to produce various audio CDs, and I'm just not sure where the money goes. I mean, with digital audio capabilities being what they are today, who gets paid for producing a CD anymore? On a lark, I started producing music CDs over 10 years ago through cafepress, one of the fist large print on demand sites. At that time I was just figuring out about a couple of audio formats, and my own recording device was basically just a microphone plugged into the audio input on my computer. I asked other artists for mp3 tracks in support of the King Arthur Faire, and just uploaded them to the site along with some graphics that I threw together, and "Sounds from the Village of Carlisle" was born. We purchased a bunch of the CDs (at about $3.50 each) for any artists on the CD that were interested, and then turned the Cafepress shop that I created over to others at the faire. The initial CD purchase cost money, but otherwise, we produced a CD for no cost to us.Cafepress has since stopped Printing CDs on demand. They also developed glitches in their software that kept perfectly sized graphics from fitting correctly on their CD booklets. Too bad, because they also inadvertently did something that other print on demand services do not. ![]() For a brief while, I printed sticker labels and burned music CDs on my own blank stock, effectively cutting down on overhead by eliminating the printer. Sticker labels, however, tend to bog down and get stuck in "toaster" type slots for CDs in automobiles and laptops, so I soon stopped. Now I use lightscribe CDs to burn pictures onto the CD surface. |