A Physical Release

or: Get Your Mind Out Of The Gutter - I'm Talking About Music You Pervert

We live in exciting times for musicians. First there was the tin-foil wrapped cylinder (wax would come a little later). The earliest means for recording sound and then replaying it (prior to this was the phonautograph, which would transcribe sound waves visibly with no means of playback and, consequently, no real use thank you very much inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville). Yell into this metal horn; the vibrations of your vocal chords make the air vibrate which makes the needle wiggle up and down, cutting a physical representation of that sound into the tin-foil. This was the CD-R of 1877, and all your aspirations of making and sharing music owe a debt to Edison's first device.

The technology has obviously come some distance since then, but consider that people have had the means to produce music themselves for over a century now. Fortunately today we are no longer limited by the crude analogue devices of the past. With the CD we gained a way to faithfully store and reproduce music, and the competition drove vinyl to become a more specialised niche inhabited by demanding audiophiles. These are Good Things.

Of course, it's all rather archaic now, right? As I've said before, the internet means mass reproduction and distribution is a piece of piss and since pretty much everyone has MP3 players now that are both portable and can dock into external speakers in lieu of bothering to have a home stereo, sales of CDs are dropping faster than the property value of my apartment (thanks, Gordon Brown).

And yet, somehow, despite using technology that predates CGI movies and Epic Lulz and satellite TV and microwave ovens and jet planes and in fact aeroplanes at all and mains electricity and DNA and television and motorways and any one of the thousands of other pieces of technology we take for granted, vinyl just keeps on hanging in there. The tactility of it. The versatility of being able to put the needle in a groove, to scratch a record, to see the actual thing there in front of you rather than being one or two steps removed from it; it just keeps on going. Until someone comes up with a much better way to interface with and manipulate MP3s on the fly, lots of DJs are going to keep their arms firmly clasped around their 7 and 12 inches.

Plus, there's CD-Rs. If anything is going to keep the CD alive, it's the CD-R. Yes, they can be used for boring, mundane things like spreadsheets and presentations, or even to backup your vast and disgusting porno collection you filthy puppy, but being able to easily record your own CDs (something you can even do automatically from iTunes) ensures continued popularity.

So, let's face facts and cut the waffle; you want to do a physical release. You want to have your music not just on some net service, but in a tangible form you can hold and caress and show your mates down the pub with a big shit-eating grin on your face like "Yeah; I'm a musician."

Are you already signed to a label? Yes? Well then lucky you; they'll take care of things (and spend your advance on doing so). Of course, I'm pretty sure you wouldn't be reading this if you were already signed, so let's assume you want to do things as cheaply and easily as possible.

Obviously, the simplest way to do a physical release is to burn the CD-Rs yourself. Shopping around online you can find places that will sell you a big stack of discs for £10-£20 that are actually silver on the data side, rather than the tell-tale green of the older cyanine-based discs. Newer ones use phthalocyanine which lasts longer (older CD-Rs can degrade over time) and looks more like a proper CD. You can fire up your own colour laser printer and produce labels and case-inserts yourself as well, and have something which is pretty much on a par with a proper CD to all but a trained eye. Hooray.

Except you know you're just faking it. Sure, you could probably sell some of these at gigs, send them to DJs, or just share them with like-minded individuals (do all of these - it's good self-promotion karma), but deep down inside you'll know that these aren't the real deal. And also you'll grow to hate the long hours you spend keeping your CD burner company, never quite managing to synchronise the disc-burning cycles with any normal activities like making a cup of tea or nipping to the loo, then losing sleep thinking about the inefficiency of the potential burning time you've wasted.

Plus, unless you have more money than sense, you can't make any of that lovely lovely vinyl in your spare room. So we're gonna need to front some cash and get this done properly.

The first and most obvious step-up is to press a dubplate. This is like a vinyl recording, but made of acetate instead, and they're often used to check mastering on a track or for DJs to trial a track they've been working on. The cutter itself (the thing that cuts the groove into the surface of the acetate) is a few grand in price, so you'll need to take your recording to a specialist cutting house instead. I've personally heard good things about Transition Mastering Studios, who'll cut you an acetate for £30 (double-sided, one track per side, price correct at time of writing) and who accept orders via the net and will get it back to you pronto. An acetate is a bit heavier than vinyl and wears out quicker so is only good for around 50-ish plays, but it's a cheap way to start.

A true vinyl release is more pricey because of how it's manufactured. To make a vinyl record a hot, gloopy blob of molten vinyl is pressed between two metal plates (often called the metalwork). These plates contain an inverted reproduction of the track to be pressed, so when the vinyl is squashed between them the mold presses the track into the plastic, which then cools and sets hard. The plates may cost one or two hundred quid, and they're produced from a lacquer (similar to an acetate) which also must be cut at a cost of maybe £100, though this may well include a professional mastering service to make sure your bassline isn't going to make the needle skip onto the next groove (intercut). There's far too many pressing plants out there for me to give you an exhaustive list, and with the industry currently faltering over physical releases and thus jeapordising the main revenue-streams of many pressing plants (not really an issue for dubplate cutting houses, since they cater to specialists and individuals, not major labels), any reccomendations I could make right now may be completely out of date within six months. All I can suggest is that you read the Yellow Pages, ask around in real life and in the various forums online, and choose carefully.

At least once you've shelled out for the pricey lacquer and metalwork the cost per-unit isn't too bad and the pressing plant will probably be able to stick any artwork you've designed on the sleeve and/or label as well. Expect something in the region of 30-60 pence per unit, though they will expect you to be ordering at least a hundred units. The good news is that unless you're pressing thousands and thousands of records, the metalwork should be just fine in 6 months if you decide to press up some more records. Check that the pressing house will hold onto the metalwork and the lacquer and not just throw them out.

So, that's vinyl. If you happen to have £500 burning a hole in your pocket then it can be yours, and DJs really like vinyl even if they never actually use it and instead just download your track from iTunes like everyone else, because they'll still tell everyone they're a vinyl purist and wave your record around to prove it.

Next, CDs, and getting them pressed isn't vastly different from getting vinyl pressed. Instead of using lacquer to make a master copy, CD pressing plants use glass. Again, if they're any cop they ought to hold onto this if you want to do another run of CDs in the future. They also only tend to deal in orders that run into the hundreds, with a short run of maybe 500 in cases and with full-colour booklets and tray inserts costing around £500, or about £1 per unit. Larger orders are, of course, subject to better pricing. Again, there's plenty of these places around, and hopefully they'll be a bit less inclined to fuck you around in favour of major label contracts these days, since their business isn't looking quite so rosy any more. Yet again, ask around because who knows which plants will and won't still be in business by this time next year.

So, that's it, right? Well, not quite. Y'see, while the dubplate cutting houses may play a bit fast and loose when it comes to the law, the bigger plants (in the UK at least - you may have better luck getting things pressed abroad and shipped) are technically supposed to check that you are legally entitled to reproduce the music you want them to press. There may be some wiggle-room here and space for negotiation, but many will just turn you away if you don't have a licence from the Mechanical-Copyright Protection Society (MCPS). Yeah, I know, I know; another £50 expense, but the MCPS are the Good Guys. They keep an eye on your copyright for you and make sure you get royalties from any mechanical reproduction of your song (not just CDs and vinyl, but use in films or TV, and the big fat cash-cow that is ringtones). They only let people who have already had at least one instance of their music being recorded (e.g. getting played on the radio) join and you need a letter of proof, but if you've got the cash to be pressing up music then it's worth it to have them watching your back.

OK, good luck, and if you have great or awful experiences with any companies in particular let me know and I'll add the information to this article.

Let's get physical, physical, I wanna get physical, let's get into physical....

Seej 500

Yorkshire, UK, 7/9/2008

UPDATE, 20/11/2009

Brilliant, amazing news! You can now ignore me! Well, to be a little more specific, you can ignore what I said about only being able to get orders for your CD made if they run into the hundreds of units. You can now have a single copy of your CD made, for a very reasonable price indeed.

POD, or Print On Demand, is an area that all of a sudden looks extremely exciting. Finally a few manufacturers of books are letting you upload your book to them, stick a link to buy it on your website, and customers then go order it. At which point, the book is printed. No more risky investment in a huge pile of stock that just sits there, potentially unsold. Nope, now the customer pays their money for a single book, and that money is then used to print, bind and ship that single copy to them. And it can now be done at a price point that isn't prohibitively expensive. This, my friends, is nothing short of a publishing revolution the like of which has never been seen before. Now anyone, anyone, can get their book published. Have you written a book? Yes? Then get it published! There is no longer any excuse at all. Cost to you is the time you've invested, nothing more. Best of all, POD harnessess The Long Tail. Just like other media put online, once it's up it stays there, so you could still be selling those first pieces you made in another ten years or more, just an odd one here or there when people want one.

And now they're doing CDs as well. Yes, Lulu (about whom I've heard some positive things from some people who would know, though I'm sure there's other places that will do this too) are now also publishing CDs on demand. You upload the contents of the CD and the sleeve design to them and it sits there in your store on their site. You then direct your customers to your store. A single order of your CD costs just £3.25. Think about that; you can have a proper CD, which you pay no money to have made (because the customer pays this), sent to the buyer, and all you need to worry about is waiting for your profits to arrive. You don't have to burn it, you don't have to put inserts into cases, you don't have to even bother with the hassle of going to the post office or handling the money. It's all taken care of for you. If you want a copy for yourself, then just buy one for yourself. The cost per unit is only just over three quid after all. I paid that much for a pint of lager today. What's more, if you want to send your CD to DJs, then I assume you'll be able to specify another delivery address. Every musician in the world should be getting extremely excited by this; you can really play with the labels now.

Brilliant, amazing news Part 2! The MCPS and PRS have now merged into one single organisation, PRS For Music, and they've changed their membership fee - they now charge just £10 (bargain!) and this is deducted from your first royatly payment, so you don't need to pay a penny up front (double bargain!). You just need to provide them with proof that your music is being played on TV/radio/online/live or played in public in some other way. There is, basically, more or less no good reason to not join (unless you want to be sniffy about music ownership or something, in which case I applaud you, while thinking you're mad).

Seej 500