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!

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

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.

On both of my albums, I am extremely pleased to report that the audio quality has improved in every possible way! The surface noise is essentially gone, and everything sounds perfectly clean. Some of the subtler sounds that had been lost behind the surface noise before are now super apparent, too.

The difference is much more profound on Transitions than on Refactor, but both albums have definitely improved as a result of their process change.

The actual manufacturing and delivery time was also greatly reduced from the last time, which tells me that they’ve probably cleared a backlog in their manufacturing.

Here are some comparisons between the original digital version, the first cut, and the recut. These were recorded on my TEAC TN-300 turntable using its built-in preamp and a Behringer UCA202 USB audio interface. All versions' levels have been normalized to the same LUFS target, but they are otherwise unprocessed. Also, the pitch is slightly higher on the turntable, which is likely a sign that I need to adjust it (or perhaps elasticStage’s lathes are running slightly slow) UPDATE: I just checked, my turntable is indeed running slightly fast.

Anyway, if you’re interested in buying physical copies of these albums, you can get them from my elasticStage page.

My lead time at the time was around 6 weeks, and I was told the records would ship on May 14. They ended up shipping a couple days later than expected, but I still ended up receiving them today, which isn’t too much further after the original estimate.

Anyway, here’s my review of how the product turned out.

UPDATE: elasticStage have responded to my review by sending me updated copies. Definitely check out what’s new!

The albums come in a very nice, professional-quality slipcover, with a custom-printed dust sleeve. The print quality is fantastic, and it easily meets or exceeds what I’d expect from traditional vinyl manufacturing.

The records themselves are lathe-cut, and according to elasticStage the blanks are manufactured with a process which are much more environmentally-friendly than traditional vinyl although they do not specify what exactly it is (although some sources say it’s PET, the plastic used for drink bottles).

The labels on the records feel a little chintzy, though. The label for Transitions was slightly off-center (unfortunate, given the circle motif) and both of them very much have a feeling of being printed on an inkjet printer, with a finish akin to early-2000s CD label makers. The print quality isn’t quite as crisp as I’d like. It’s still quite good, though, it just doesn’t feel quite so professional there.

Sound quality is, of course, the really important thing here.

First off, I should mention that while Transitions was properly mastered to modern standards (-14dB LUFS integrated with a -1dB true peak and with EQ matched to a reference curve), Refactor just got a “make things sound properly loud and consistent” approach where I did it all by ear, and spec-wise Refactor’s LUFS are all over the place and with some tracks having a true peak approaching +2dB. So I was super curious how well they’d turn out.

Both of them came out pretty great! They’re not perfect by any means, but the equalization on Transitions matched my expectations. Refactor was a bit treble-heavy, and there were a couple of bits where the high peaks sounded like they might have been hard-limited a little. This was especially prominent on Little Bouncing Ball, and the mp3 version streamed via Plex to the same hifi setup didn’t have the same characteristics.

I would be super interested to know how much better Refactor could sound if I gave it a remastering pass, but as it is, the current vinyl version sounds quite good! It also does sound characteristically like vinyl, so I don’t hate it by any means.

The big downside is that both albums do exhibit a lot of surface noise, and that surface noise actually sounds a lot like some sort of digital noise floor issue, which makes me wonder about the signal chain in their lathe setup. I had cleaned both records and my stylus and it made no difference to the surface noise, so I can only guess that it’s probably due to how the lathe cutting works.

But anyway, Transitions still made my tears well up at the places it normally does, and something about the string arrangements just felt richer and more emotional to me. And the surface noise gave both records something of a vintage feeling to them, even though the noise itself didn’t sound like typical vinyl noise.

So, with all that said, I produced the vinyl to be a collectible artifact, and not to have better audio quality. Given that both albums were produced entirely digitally and are available in lossless formats from Mirlo and Bandcamp, if you’re looking for the ultimate audio quality, buy them in FLAC. Personally I just use the high-bitrate MP3 versions.

But as an artifact, an indication that I was here and that I left my little mark on the world, I absolutely love that this service exists, and if anyone else feels the same, I have no qualms about offering these albums for sale through elasticStage.

(But if you just want to listen to them digitally, that’s fine too!)

I recently polled on Mastodon about next records to produce. The overwhelming response I got is that people would prefer that I make CDs instead. Fortunately, elasticStage makes those too! So, expect that to be a thing in the not-too-distant future.

I’ll still probably put more albums out on vinyl as well.

One I really want to do is Lo-Fi Beats to Grind Coffee To, but unfortunately that will have to wait until elasticStage supports multi-disc sets, as 63 minutes is a bit too long for an LP. They do have multi-disc on their roadmap, although they’re not expecting it to be available until next year at the earliest.

As such, I’ve set up an elasticStage page where you can order my stuff on vinyl! I’ll probably add more albums as they come.

I’m still waiting for my test copies to arrive (and they likely won’t arrive for a little while) so if you order a copy right now it’s at your own risk, but all of the reviews I’ve seen of the service are incredibly positive. On Refactor in particular I’ve scheduled it as a preorder to be released on June 14, which is both the 10th anniversary of the original release of the album and also my birthday.

I’ll definitely be reviewing the test copies when they arrive, and if you want to take a chance on something unproven, right now is the time to order, as the actual manufacturing lead time is currently around 6 weeks.