i don’t know anything about you, your music or this particular project, but i…

yes, in the example i gave here, i showed a 16% roi on the $3000 cd. your mileage may vary.

i didn’t include any “cd party announcement” and didn’t suggest how they might sell 700 of those 1000 cds – that’s something too particular to each band and audience to generalize into an example.

the rest of this, i addressed in the second post – see “back to plan g”

But if the band instead produces one track every month, and releases those as they happen, they are pinging the weblogs every month, re-inforcing their presence. The net publicity is 10 times as much as that one shot “CD party announcement”.

At the end of 10 months, they have a CD sampler they can give away for free at their concerts, in two years, they have a Greatest Hits, and while the quality may not be Hollywood-scale, no matter, next year they will have 36 tracks to pick from; every concert can have a unique mix, and because of the 10x increased audience pinging, maybe their shows will sell out so often the venues will also pay them a bit more.

today, and for at least several years into the future, i think the cd represents some great advantages at the low end of the music business – i think it’s more a question of what’s appropriate for a given musician/audience and how well they (the musician) leverage the format if it’s appropriate. for some musicians, the cd can build and reinforce the relationship, and that’s where all the value happens.

there’s just nothing quite like replacing a $250k system with a $500 pc to “level the playing field” that’s a great reference point…

thanks for visiting…

- Obsolete technologies with a large installed base can have a very long lifetime. Remember that installed base is not just tracked in terms of hardware units, but consumer habit and social patterns. NTSC video and the CRT have been functionally obsolete for a long time, but…

- I agree wholeheartedly with the idea that a CD is a good ‘take-away’ for a fan of artists at small concerts and festivals, something that’s become more clear to me now that I’m dropping my $ there, rather than with the RIAA. If I went to see a big act, I’d get reinforcement of that relationship from airplay and other promo. For the small act, the CD is a physical memento of the experience. Yes, I rip it when I get home, but the full res original is still around, and I can drag it out to look at liner notes, artist lists, etc. It’s one of the few ways the small act can keep an ongoing presence with a fan.

(But do the MP3s, too, of course.)

I’ll also mention that though I’ve never been part of the production of a music CD, I was producer on a couple of early data CD-ROMs, and the drop in capital required is stunning. The first premaster system I used cost $250,000.

your comment really doesn’t address anything i brought up about the value proposition of the cd, particularly for the independent musician. yes. “right now” i can create that cd for that price.

i can’t speak about your friends who spend too much money recording cds. i demonstrated, i think fairly well, that it could be done for $3000, and that it could be profitable for the musician, even at an outrageously low (for the riaa) and internet-distrubution-competitive price point.

yes. now i have a cd and i need to find 1000 people to give them or sell them to. this is part of the business of the music business. for some musicians, in some circumstances, i have provided a profit-making cd-based low-volume example. if the band doesn’t have 1000 fans that can afford $5, maybe it’s not such a good idea to get 1000 cds. but if it is a good idea, it can be done.

how did you find your way here? essentially, i told you i was reviewing your model (ping!). perhaps more interesting, is how did i find you and your model?

this may sound a bit harsh, but if a band can’t come up with a few grand to launch themselves into the wonderful world of the music business, then they are probably better off keeping their day jobs. the barriers to entry are now so low as to be irrelevant. nobody ever promised a musician a free (or easy) ride. they don’t call them starving artists who are payin’ their dues for nothing.

music doesn’t become obsolete – as long as someone loves it, it’s never, ever obsolete.

You might have Internet, but your neighbour doesn’t or your car doesn’t, so you burn the tracks you download, and yes, you put them on the CD technology to give one to your neighbour (or sell for some small fee) but

the cost is low because they could just do it themselves, if they had the bandwidth.

and in my system, the band doesn’t mind if your neighbour makes more copies, which could be CDs, they could be IR pulses beamed between handheld MP3 players, but since the musicians don’t have to recoup $5000 production costs, or $50,000 production costs, or $5M in production costs, there is no loss, there is only benefit because now, for the cost of your one download, there are now three new fans who might show up at Sneaky Dees next time that band is booked.

Now, you have a CD. How old is it? Do you still play like that? Really? What if instead of $800, you spent only $80 this month, and you do the same next month, and the next … less than a nice dinner for two in my neighbourhood and what we have after one year is a CD worth of material that incrementally tells me the story of you as an artist, and each song might find a different audience, positioning you as the bridge between those bubbles.

And as for tracks that suck … here’s the scene, at Mike’s house, a bassist who’d played with Chuck Berry among others, fine session guy, and me, I’m broke, as usual, doing my evil soundscapes experiements, with about 50 fans and sales in the single digits and I’m sitting on the sofa and Mike comes up and tosses an LP at me and says, “You want this? I can’t stand this crap” — it was an original pressing of the Plastic Ono Band, featuring Ornette Coleman and 3/4rds of the Beatles, I had the Lennon companion disk, but never could find this one, and here it was, being discarded in my direction. I almost kissed him (not really) and Mike says, “Hey, don’t make a big deal of it, just get it out of my house!”

And then there’s the folkways records. Who would put Screamin’ Jay Hawkins on the radio today? How about the seniors at your local legion hall who just so happen to be the last remaining archive of the songs that your forefathers brought to that place, songs you’ve never heard, songs you might someday want to breathe some new life into and amaze the world — don’t forget, those old songs didn’t have one super hot-shot composer, they were all workshopped, opensource collaborations by musicians who met every weekend in the pub with “Hey listen to this!” and “Y’know, if you tweaked this a bit, it would really burn” over and over for decades until the song gelled. CreativeCommons is a different issue, but in your model, who’s going to spend $800 + coordination and transport costs to haul all those seniors into the studio to record every last song only to discover that most of them only know the Achy-Breaky Heart?

But think for a moment: How did I know you were reviewing my plan? How did I end up in your “dark corner of the net” to leave these comments?

What if you were a band? If you were, and you are, you are still sitting on $3000 worth of last year’s CDs, but had you posted audio tracks on your blog instead of discourse, I might be playing your songs to my friends here and saying, “Y’know, they’d be a good band to bring up for Summerfolk next summer …”

And who knows, I might also have put you on a compilation Audio-CD of “Bloggers who Rock” and made a few bucks flogging them on eBay doing you a favour by making your band known internationally. Or I might have only blogged about how cool your track was and helped drive the Blogdex in your direction. Lots of new options pop up, options that aren’t there when it’s going to cost you a thousand just to pop into the game for a blink of an hour.