If you buy from Bandcamp or Mirlo the album will also come with the digital download in your choice of formats.
Anyway, inside you can vote on which additional albums I should focus on making available!
I’ve only listed the ones that I’m particularly interested in setting up, but if there’s one I haven’t listed that you want, feel free to write it in.
Also at some point I will get around to doing CD setup for elasticStage for folks in Europe, but their setup process is quite a bit more involved so it hasn’t been a priority. It’ll come eventually, though!
#Manufacturing #Merch #Distribution #Business #elasticStage ]]>But doing so also required, for very annoying reasons, removing it from all other streaming platforms as well, because the distributor I was working with, TooLost, had no option for removing music from just one platform without deleting and re-uploading everything2.
So, when is my music going to get back onto the other streaming platforms? Ehhh.
The state of affairs for independent music distribution is a horror show. Every distributor I’ve used has been a nightmare to work with in some way, and has ended up costing me far more in my dealings with them than I’ve ever made back. I’ve made probably around $1003 in total over the past 20 years from streaming. It has cost me a lot more than $100 to make my music available on streaming4.
Meanwhile, the “best” month I’ve ever had on streaming was the month after Furality Somna, where I got a brief surge of interest on Spotify, but not enough of one to actually get any of the sustainable characteristics that one would expect. The people who listened to my stuff didn’t keep listening to it, my work never ended up in any recommendation feeds or popular playlists, and even with the amount of direct interest I got, I only ended up making around $7, which isn’t even enough to receive a payment from my distributor. And it only pays for about two months of distribution fees anyway.
I’ve also written extensively about the problems with streaming platforms and Spotify in particular, and that’s not an industry I really want to support right now. In addition to Spotify’s issues, I’ve also learned of reasons to distrust Apple Music and Tidal, for example their partnerships with Rekordbox which makes it so that DJs can stream artists' music into their mixes without materially supporting said artists beyond “exposure.”
I’ve also had great difficulty with getting my music onto streaming platforms to begin with these days. In addition to costing considerably more to get distribution than I can ever expect to receive in return, every distributor has succumbed to the problems with a glut of AI submissions, where they have lost all trust in musicians who haven’t already made it big, and provide Kafka-esque hoops to jump through to prove that my music was made by me. This isn’t entirely the fault of the distributors, but it is a symptom of a deeply broken industry.
I have also applied to many record labels but they only want to sign up-and-coming musicians, not ones with a deep catalog of what they see as unsuccessful releases, or they want people with a much larger social media presence and a fanbase which would be large enough for me to not need a label to begin with. I am not a social media darling (nor do I want to be), and I just plain don’t have it in me to try to get what they want of me.
So I’m focusing on what I have control over.
At the moment, my plan is to do the following:
If someone can point me to a fair, ethically-managed distributor that supports independent musicians (rather than using the promise of winning the lottery to keep us constantly buying tickets), I would certainly consider reuploading my catalog somewhere.
What do I think counts as ethical in this case?
None of these feel very likely to happen in the foreseeable future. But also, the entire streaming music industry needs to change for me to want to really participate in it, and I don’t see that happening either. Too much about how the industry works is based around the demands of the major labels in order to keep the major-label content available, even though their requirements ultimately end up working against their interests as well!
Alternately, if any of the streaming platforms were to allow artists to directly upload and self-distribute to them while still earning royalties5, that would be peachy.
I know many musicians for whom this path would not make any sense. Last night at an open mic I was talking about this with a friend, and he was very surprised to hear about my experiences with streaming vs. sales; he makes substantial amounts of money from streaming, and very little from Bandcamp (and what he pays to get his stuff on Bandcamp hasn’t paid for his Bandcamp earnings).
A big part of that is that he primarily records and releases covers of popular music. As a result, he ends up getting his audience from people looking for popular songs, and this led to a level of sustainability that works in his favor. This is also why Bandcamp has been a money pit for him, because mechanical licenses for purchase are significantly more expensive than those for streaming.
But by the same token, what works for other musicians has not worked for me. Why should I keep playing the game when I have 20+ years of experience telling me that it just plain isn’t worthwhile for me to do so?
Anyway. I do not need streaming in order to feel successful. So for now I’m opting out.
Maybe in the future this will change. But dealing with the stresses and frustration of streaming is the least important thing to me right now with everything else going on in my life.
Yes, I realize Daniel Ek “stepped down” as CEO, but only by becoming the chairman of the board. He is now essentially the CEO’s boss, and still the majority shareholder, so this doesn’t actually change anything vis-a-vis my issues with Spotify. ↩
I also had to pay $3 to do it because TooLost was holding my catalog hostage, but that’s just pocket change in the grand scheme of things. ↩
Or rather, I’ve had numbers in a database totalling around that amount, but I can’t even withdraw a bunch of it because it’s all in little pieces that are below their respective distributors' payout thresholds, where they will sit forever. ↩
It’s hard to put an actual number on it, but I do know I’ve spent at least this much: ↩
Tidal Upload, sadly, does not count: ↩
Does the music that I upload earn royalties on TIDAL?
No, your uploaded files do not earn royalties.
TooLost (my previous top recommendation) has gotten incredibly difficult to deal with when it comes to copyright-related things. They now have a hair trigger for deciding that a song “needs documentation” regarding its legality, but won’t provide any useful information about what they think the problem is. On my most recent track they seem to think that it violates someone’s copyright but they won’t tell me whose, and apparently they’re putting the burden on me to just plain guess what their issue is, while taking a week to get back to me on every single question.
The best advice I’ve gotten from anyone is to spend a crapton more money on a copyright registration service with the hopes that it’ll convince them that I own the copyright to my own words, and even then there’s still the chance that it won’t actually help anything.
Then, for individual tracks that required licensing, I was recommending Soundrop, but they’ve raised their price and their cut, and apparently have similar support issues today.
The other distributors are just as bad. And the streaming environment is also bad.
In the past year I’ve made approximately $5 on streaming services. $5. Total. For a whole year’s worth of music.
Why should I continue to pay into a broken system that isn’t going to serve me?
Y'all can find my music on Bandcamp and Mirlo and (eventually) Subvert. And my current stuff will stay up on streaming as long as TooLost decides not to take it down after I stop paying, but I’m not going to go out of my way to put more stuff up through them.
Fuck streaming.
#Business #Streaming #Distribution #TooLost ]]>I wrote this as an explanation of why I don’t support Spotify and why I ask listeners to return to buying and collecting music or, at the very least, moving to other streaming services.
Also, see Jeremy Blake’s very good video on this topic.
tl;dr summary: If you are able to, buy your music, ideally from Mirlo or Bandcamp. If you are going to pay to stream, use Qobuz or Tidal, and if you want to stream for free (and I totally get it! times are tough!), use YouTube Music or Pandora.
Here is my personal ranking of the best ways to get and/or listen to music, ordered from best to worst.
All per-stream prices are an estimate and based on my most recent available earnings data at the time of this writing, and based on the US market. They are definitely subject to change based on a number of factors that are difficult to predict.
If the band has their own website1, they’ll probably display their preference for how you get their music. Above all else, that should be your top consideration.
Note that listening to a band’s music on their own website typically does not give them any revenue; listening on a band’s website is generally offered as a means of doing a “try before you buy.” If you like what you hear on a band’s website, please follow the respective purchase or streaming links for your actual collecting/listening.
Mirlo is an independent online music store run as a cooperative. The audio quality is great and musicians are in complete control of how much money they make on it, including choosing how much of the purchase price goes to Mirlo itself. The people running it are doing so for the love of music rather than to make fat stacks of cash, and my understanding is that the site pretty much just breaks even on its operating costs.
It is also open source meaning people can contribute changes or directly influence the development efforts, and you can run your own instance of it if you really want to for some reason.
With Mirlo you will have to own your collection, which is a good thing. More on that later.
itch isn’t really a music store, but a lot of people sell music there. The experience usually isn’t great and is up to the musician (although things like bandcrash can help to make it better). Like Mirlo, it’s totally up to the musician how much money they get and how much goes to the platform.
With itch you will also have to own your collection.
Bandcamp is probably the most popular indie music download site there is, and with good reason. They offer high-quality downloads in a number of formats, they were the first site to offer a lot of features which many places take for granted these days (pay-what-you-want pricing, embedded lyrics, optional per-track artwork, full discography purchases, and so much more), and if you buy something on Bandcamp you can also stream it through the app so you don’t need to manage your own local library. They also only take a 15% cut for small musicians, and a 10% cut for larger musicians.
They’ve somewhat fallen out of favor in recent years due to a series of changes in ownership, but it is still a great place to buy music which supports the artists.
While it isn’t strictly required that you own your collection (thanks to the streaming app), it’s still a good idea that you do so, especially if you listen to music that comes from a mix of sources.
Qobuz is both a streaming provider and a download store. Their claim to fame is that they provide everything in the highest possible bitrate and quality, and they are also quite good in terms of how they support artists.
They’re not the best option for purchasing (since Mirlo and Bandcamp match them in terms of quality and exceed them in terms of payment cut), but they are the most-desirable option for streaming (since they provide the highest per-stream rate in the industry, at 1.5¢/stream at the time of this writing).
If there’s an album you want to buy and which isn’t on Mirlo or Bandcamp, Qobuz is probably the best place to acquire it.
Unfortunately, they aren’t available globally, buf if you’re in one of the supported countries they’re a good choice.
Tidal has good quality, a reasonable monthly price, and one of the better per-stream rates (1¢/stream) of the larger/better-known providers. They’re also one of the few major DSPs which allows musicians to directly upload their music for streaming and sales, although some of their artist management could be better. That shouldn’t affect listeners, although sometimes my music ends up on the wrong artist profile and getting that corrected can be tricky.
For example, as of April 2026, my official artist profile only has one release on it, while most of my music has ended up on a different profile, and Tidal support is taking their sweet time getting that fixed. (They claim it will take at least 8 weeks to get sorted out.)
I’ve also heard anecdotally from other musicians that the opposite problem often happens, where other musicians with the same name release music, Tidal erroneously puts it on their profile, and getting that corrected also takes, apparently, forever.
The Amazon Music store and Amazon Prime Streaming are pretty okay, all things considered. As a download store they take a 30% cut, but they provide music in reasonably-high-quality (but not the best quality) MP3. The streaming service pays around 1¢/stream.
The main downside is that using them means supporting Amazon, which a lot of folks do not want to do for very good reasons.
The iTunes Music Store is one of the earliest major download services (and they set the standard for how those work), and even today it’s still a reasonable option. It’s far from the best, though, mostly because they only offer AAC downloads at a high-but-not-amazing bitrate, and being Apple they heavily encourage its use on Apple devices (although there are Windows and Android clients as well, and with effort you can make your purchases on Linux too).
For downloads they keep a 30% cut, which isn’t the worst in the industry but is also far from the best. For streams, their payment rate is just okay, currently around 0.8¢/stream.
YouTube Music has a bunch going for it:
The main downsides are that the subscription is on the expensive side, and that you’re supporting Google, which a lot of people don’t like.
They currently pay around 0.6¢/stream for subscription plays. (They also pay based on ad revenue for content match videos but that’s not relevant to this discussion, or to my music, as being Creative Commons-licensed it’s not eligible for ContentID, but that’s a whole other rant.)
Providers like Deezer, Rdio, Napster, etc. all seem to offer rates of around 0.8¢/stream.
There are two notable exceptions:
I would honestly prefer people pirate my music before they listen to it on Spotify. This is because:
If you listen to music on Spotify, even on a free plan, they get money. And where does that money go?
You see what’s missing from that list? The actual musicians.
Back when Spotify paid musicians, the rate was about 0.5¢/stream. This is among the worst in the industry.
HOWEVER
At this point they rarely even pay musicians, especially the smaller ones:
So, for a smaller independent musician like me, Spotify pays essentially $0.
You may then ask, why do so many musicians put their stuff on Spotify if it’s so bad? It’s mostly because it’s the platform everyone uses, and the hope is that if one gets discovered on Spotify they’ll actually make a decent amount of money. But even the artists who do are getting largely screwed over, and not making nearly as much as if those streams had come from a different streaming provider.
But enough musicians have decided to remove their music from Spotify that I hope that listeners will decide to go to other, more ethical sources for their music.
Every time I perform at a show I get people asking me not “where can I hear your music?” but “Where’s your Spotify?” Or if they do ask where they can hear it and I point them to my website, they ask about Spotify, because that’s the only place they can conceive of listening to it. Sometimes these questions even come right after I’ve performed The War Machine, a song which is explicitly about why my music isn’t on Spotify. It will take some time to get people on board with seeking alternatives.
My goal in this post isn’t to encourage musicians to leave Spotify. My goal is to get listeners to do so. It’s the listeners who make Spotify money, and that money goes to terrible places.
There are better listening experiences that cost you less while doing a much better job of directly supporting musicians.
Owning your collection means buying and downloading your music, and managing it in your own local collection. This has so many advantages:
I manage my collection by keeping it all on my desktop computer and then use Music.app/iTunes to track it in its database. Then I have a smart playlist setup that will randomly select albums I haven’t listened to recently, and use that for actually listening to my music and for building playlists to sync to my phone.
I also have a backup (always keep it backed up!) on a file server which is also running Plex and Jellyfin, which gives me the ability to stream my collection from just about anywhere. Plex in particular provides an “Album Radio” mode which will build a playlist from randomly-selected albums, and the paid version gives you some nice virtual DJ things for automatically building mixes from a particular song (great for crate digging!).
People often ask me about how I discover new music.
First of all, my playback setup is integrated with last.fm, so that maintains a history of the music I’ve played, and can also make recommendations for more music to listen to. Plex has last.fm support built in directly, and both macOS and iOS have tracking apps to feed the play history in.
The other major thing is that I follow a lot of musicians and music fans, both via blogs and via social media (the Fediverse in particular). Ether Diver has a blog called Other People’s Music which has been particularly helpful. (And of course sometimes I try to remember to post similar things here to pay it forward, and this is also why I keep my last.fm profile public.)
Sometimes I also listen to the radio. A good radio station will expose you to so much good music that you hadn’t heard before. Also be on the lookout for various community Internet radio stations like KVRR and The Indie Beat. But most of how I discover new music is by word-of-mouth, and then buying entire discographies of bands I like.
Here’s some non-iTunes music players and self-hosted streaming systems that you might consider for managing your collection:
If a band does not have their own website, they could do well to build one using any number of website builders. Faircamp is pretty decent for a lot of folks. Personally I use a combination of Publ and Bandcrash but that can be pretty involved to set up. ↩
When I first wrote this article Ek was still the CEO. He has since “stepped down” to become the chairman of the board, which makes no actual practical difference because now he’s the CEO’s boss and still the majority shareholder. ↩
No llamas had their asses whipped in the making of this blog post. ↩
Of course, the best place to sell your music is on places like Mirlo and Bandcamp, where you actually get paid well for things and your buyers are able to retain access to your music in exchange, but the unfortunate reality of music in the current era is that most listeners are going to the streamers to listen to stuff, so if you want your stuff to be listened to, this is where you have to put it.
TooLost is my current primary distributor for the major streaming services. Their upload process is pretty okay (not perfect, but not the worst either), they have support that are reasonably responsive, and they cost only $20/year for unlimited uploads with full royalties going to the artist. They also support a huge number of streaming providers and marketplaces, including the ones that people actually use.
They also provide content ID management with a good level of granularity (for example, you can whitelist various YouTube/Twitch/TikTok channels to allow them to use your music without restriction), and they have a bunch of addons for analytics tracking.
It would be nice if they had better bulk-editing features for the music uploader, and if their catalog importer actually worked reasonably well (I do not recommend trying to use it if you’re migrating to them since it ends up being more work than just reuploading your tracks directly), and I’ve had some difficulty with my YouTube channel mapping (which doesn’t really matter all that much), but generally-speaking they’ve been great to work with.
They also provide mechanical licensing for cover songs, but currently charge $15/track (as a one-time fee). This is perfectly reasonable, but not the best deal around.
They also include a simple “find this release” page for free (and you can customize the URL!), and it works well enough, although sometimes the links break and you have to pester them to fix it.
As far as I am aware, they are unique in being an affordable distributor that also lets you specify your own release label without paying a bunch extra for a label account.
I have’t worked with Soundrop yet but I’ve heard good things about them. They charge only $1/track per upload with no annual fee, and instead take a royalty cut from the streaming services. This makes them less of a good deal than TooLost if you’re uploading a lot of albums or singles per year, and it also means you aren’t maximizing your revenue, but for another $1/track they will also provide mechanical licensing for cover songs and administer your royalty splits, making them an extremely good deal if you do a lot of covers. You won’t make as much money on a popular cover as you would doing it yourself or through TooLost, but you also won’t get sued for messing something up. Probably.
CDBaby is pretty much the original indie distributor for the streaming services. A lot of why they have so much cachet is due to them being around the longest. One of my albums is still handled by them because I can’t be bothered to move it elsewhere.
The plus side to them is that they only charge a one-time fee for distributing your album, and then maintenance comes in the form of a 10% royalty cut.
The minus side is that one-time fee is $10 per release (which isn’t awful for albums, but is enormous for singles).
It’s a lot better than it used to be, though; back when they were the only choice it was something like $75/album and a 30% cut, and I think they only changed it very recently. They also charge money for a “find this release” page, and the amount they charge is enormous for what amounts to a single non-customizable static webpage. No thank you.
I ended up moving the two released-as-Sockpuppet CDBaby releases to TooLost mostly to simplify my album management and that process was also a bit annoying, especially since they ended up taking down the TooLost versions of those albums when they did so and that was a giant mess to sort out.
Amuse made their way by being a free distributor that used artist success as a sort of A&R thing. I did a couple releases through them. The process was abysmal, and accessing any information required running a goddamn mobile app for some reason.
They are no longer free, and they’re still very app-focused. I don’t see any reason to go with them over any of the above choices.
I was pretty loyal to DistroKid for many years, but I switched from them to TooLost last year because of a number of issues.
If you are fine with all those things, their price is pretty good, although not as good as TooLost. Like TooLost they provide a “find this release” page for free, although you can’t customize the URL at all.
TuneCore was the first real alternative to CDBaby, and when they came around they were very much not good. They were extremely expensive (something like $100 per album per year) and I don’t even remember why I was convinced to try them out for a year. I think it’s because they were the first distributor which didn’t take a royalty cut? Not that it mattered, because I made something like $2 in royalties on that album. Then when I asked to take my album down instead of spending another $100 they got weird about trying to retain me as a customer even though that release was now $98 in the hole. So I have a lot of lasting resentment because of that.
Nowadays they charge much more reasonable rates, starting at $23/year (which is decently competitive, although doens’t include all the features that TooLost does at that price point). Getting all of TooLost’s features requires paying twice as much.
#Music #Business #Distribution #Industry ]]>The manufacturing space used to be a lot bigger, but these days there’s not a whole lot of options. For most musicians, there are two paths to go down: on-demand and short-run.
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 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:
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 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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
#Manufacturing #PhysicalMedia #Business #elasticStage ]]>