Sockpuppet Blog.

On-demand

On-demand manufacturing is the easiest one for most musicians to do. Rather than buying a lot of inventory up-front, you set up your setup files with a manufacturer and then when an order comes in, the unit is produced and shipped on an individual basis. For a CD this means it’s burned to CD-R, and for a vinyl it means it’s lathe-cut.

The plus side to this is that you don’t need a huge up-front investment and you don’t need to manage inventory, and someone else handles the fulfillment for you (usually with better packing/shipping materials than you’d have access to yourself).

The minus side is that your options are extremely limited, and the per-unit cost is a bit higher (meaning less overall profit).

For most musicians I would recommend this as the first step, and then if interest grows, switching to short-run.

At present there are only two choices I’d recommend: elasticStage and Kunaki, but both have pluses and minuses. I will also talk about why I do not recommend a third option that I am aware of.

elasticStage

elasticStage is mostly known for their lathe-cut vinyl, but they also do CD manufacturing. Their vinyl quality is quite good; see my original review that discusses the packaging, and my updated review for their subsequent improvements to their audio quality.

They offer the following product types:

• 12" vinyl, with or without booklet
• CD, with or without booklet

So far I have only done vinyl and CD without booklet, and I haven’t personally seen the CDs (which are far less popular than vinyl) but they are packaged in a “Digipak”-style cardboard sleeve. In both cases the booklet is 12-panel.

The big downside to them is that they don’t currently support any sort of drop-shipping order fulfillment; listeners basically have to order through elascticStage’s website for it to make any sense. There are annoying means of kinda-sorta drop-shipping through them but they’re extremely not worth it.

Another thing to keep in mind is that they don’t let you set your own unit price, and they are also currently based in the UK so shipping can be slow and expensive for much of the world.

Their pricing is a little confusing, but the short version is that, for most people, the base price on vinyl is £22.32 (around $30) for the record and an additional £4 for a booklet, and CDs are £9.12 (around $12) with an additional £1.20 for a booklet, and then of course whatever shipping they charge on top of that.

They also do let you produce a short run of products, but the pricing is the same as the on-demand, so you do not benefit from any economies of scale, so I would not recommend using them as a short-run producer.

I hope that in the future, elasticStage allows for dropshipping, because they are by far the best choice I’ve found for on-demand vinyl.

Kunaki

Kunaki is a very well-regarded super-cut-rate on-demand manufacturer, that has extremely aggressive pricing. They also have a quite broad product selection, and will do CDs, vinyl, cassette tapes, DVDs, and blu-ray discs. Their on-demand pricing is actually comparable to most short-run manufacturers!

They’re also primarily set up for drop-shipping, making them an amazing choice for selling your music via Bandcamp or the like.

However, they have a big downside in that their packaging is super barebones.

On CDs you get a jewel case with an outer tray and a 2-panel insert. That’s it. But it’s also only $2/copy (plus shipping, which is super reasonable). That’s impossibly cheap.

Their vinyl is considerably more expensive ($36/copy) and I haven’t heard good things about their output, so I wouldn’t use them for that.

Cassettes are $5, and again I cannot speak to their quality. But that’s definitely a fun option for folks who want that particular form of nostalgia. (Personally I’d have no way of even playing one, but you do you!)

There is another big downside to Kunaki in that they will only retain your setup files for 180 days past the last order, so if you only get orders sporadically, you’ll have to redo your setup as much as twice a year. Doing the setup is pretty straightforward though, and if you’re only selling sporadically it’s probably Just Fine™.

So, that said, if the packaging limitations for CDs are acceptable, Kunaki seems like a great choice, especially for drop-shipping.

However, their international shipping is incredibly expensive, so that’s something to keep in mind if you have a global audience.

Artglider

Artglider is another on-demand manufacturing thing that comes up a lot in these lists. Their offerings are super limited — they only do CDs and vinyl, with the same specifications as Kunaki — and from what I’ve seen from reviews online, their quality is pretty abysmal, and their pricing is a lot higher. CDs cost $3.80 each with an up-front $20 setup fee, and their vinyl is $49/each with a $42 setup fee.

They do drop-ship, but I see no reason to go with them instead of Kunaki.

Short-run production

If you are doing larger amounts of sales than most independent musicians online, you might want to look into short-run production. Doing so means managing your own inventory and shipping (and that inventory can take up a lot of space in your home or office), and having to find a source for CD and vinyl mailers. You do get much better control over the output, and sometimes pricing can be a lot better as well.

Discmakers

There used to be a whole lot of businesses in this space, but most are long-gone. Discmakers has been around for ages, though, and many of the other companies you’ll find online are really just reselling Discmakers' services.

Their pricing is pretty good, at under $3/copy for a CD (with a number of packaging choices, including digipaks and jewel cases, both with and without booklets) and around $12/copy for vinyl, with highly-professional results. However, their minimum order size is 100, which can present quite a large up-front investment as well as a lot of space taken up by the inventory.

Atomic Disc

Atomic Disc isn’t as well-known as Discmakers, but they are a compelling option if you want a shorter run size and are willing to compromise on the packaging. Their jewel case and digipak options still have a minimum run of 100 (and cost a bit more than Discmakers), but they have lower-cost options that have a minimum quantity of 25, but which also don’t come across to me as looking very professional. They seem to be a better option for someone who is looking to produce polished-looking demo CDs to submit to record labels and radio stations, rather than for producing retail releases.

They don’t seem to have any advantage over Discmakers when it comes to vinyl, as they have the same minimum quantity at a higher price.

Bison Disc

This is another company I only learned of while doing research for this blog post. They have quite a few offerings for CD, and in particular their Digipak service looks pretty compelling, at $220 for 100 copies. They also include free proofs, which is super uncommon!

They do offer shorter run sizes but their pricing appears to cost nearly as much for 25 copies as it does for 100, so it’d have to be a pretty strange circumstance where you’d want to go with the smaller run size.

A note on longevity

All short-run and on-demand CD manufacturers are going to be burning CD-Rs. CD-Rs degrade over time. My very first album came out 25 years ago on a DIY short-run CD release and not a single copy that I know of is still playable. foodsexsleep was replicated by Discmakers in 2009 and while it’s fared somewhat better I’m still not super optimistic that these discs are going to last much longer.

Vinyl, no matter how high-qualty, and regardless of whether it’s pressed or lathe-cut, is going to degrade with every playback.

Even pressed CDs have a shelf-life.

These artifacts are good as collector’s items, and as a show of support for the artists. They are not a permanent, long-term storage solution for your music. Please make your music available digitally, in as many places as possible, because companies themselves also fail.

And for those who collect music, and keep everything locally on a hard drive with multiple backups, because you never know when that song you like is going to just poof out of existence.

Nothing is immune to entropy.

My personal conclusions

For now, I’m going to use Kunaki for my CD sales through Bandcamp, and I’ll probably put more of my albums on elasticStage for vinyl and CDs sold through their storefront. It will be some time before I’ve generated the required setup files, but people have expressed interest in physical CDs (not so much for vinyl) so I’d might as well make it available.

By the time that I’m in a situation where doing short-run replication makes sense, however, the landscape will have probably changed immensely.