Weerover: CD's of old stuff are produced from masters the record comany already has. No studio costs, no royalties to the performers, and promotion and marketing is easy because they are putting out stuff with a known track record. It's a way of squeezing a bit more money out of old stock that's already earned its keep. It sell cheap because it's cheap to make.

Mark : I'm a MudCatter who has produced and sold his own CD's, and I am now faced with an interesting decision about recording for Wild Goose (A UK folk label specialising in English Traditional music). The economics are interesting.

The home produced CDR costs less than £2 each to make (CD blank, jewel case, paper and ink for inlay cards). I'm not counting my time nor the capital costs of recording and production equipment. They CD's sell for £10 and we sell them only at gigs or sometimes on the back of a floor spot at a club where we weren't the booked guest. I make batches of 10 or so at a time, and we've made less than 100 in total so far.

The Wild Goose deal costs nothing: you go to the studio and take however much time you need and all the friends you want on the recording, within reasonable limits. WG foots the bill for all the recording, production and promotion. You get 10% for every CD sold by Wild Goose, and you can buy copies of your own CD in batches of 25 at trade price which means you make about £5 per sale at gigs.

So on sales at gigs I make more on home produced CDR than I would on a "commercial" label.

With the Wild Goose option, on the other hand:
- It's a proper pressed CD on a known label, so more likely to be accepted by magazines for review, radio stations and retailers.
- The record label has the contacts for distribution and promotion.
- If it sells really well, there isn't a production bottleneck.
- The wider exposure might get you more gigs

So it's fame vs. fortune, sort of!

Of course, like any record label, they will only take you on if they think the risk is reasonable.

There's also the high risk route where you pay for studio time, mastering and pressing, then have a pile of 1000 CD's at home and wonder how you're ever going to get rid of them. I'm not going near that. It works if you know you can sell them all quickly but in that case a record label would probably be interested anyway.

Anahata