What
CD Slump? NJ Company Manufactures Discs For Dreamers by Associated Press
PENNSAUKEN, NJ - April 10, 2006 – You
might think a slump in the compact disc industry would be bad news
for a CD manufacturer. But no one is complaining at Disc Makers.
Sales of CDs have declined four out of the last five years and fewer
sold last year than in 1995. Still, business is thriving at Disc Makers,
a Pennsauken company that made more than 30 million audio CDs last
year, up 11 percent from 2004.
Discs Makers turns recordings into records for independent musicians
famous (reggae icon Burning Spear, for example) and fledgling (ever
hear of the Illinois-based blues rockers the Kung Fu Mamas?).
"It’s almost like we’re selling them a dream,"
said Tony van Veen, the company’s executive vice president.
The company, celebrating its 60th
anniversary this year, began loosening its ties with the mainstream
recording industry nearly 20 years ago. Until then, Disc Makers’
main business was wooing big contracts to manufacture records for
the big record labels.
Now, Disc Makers does not seek any of those contracts.
Instead, it sends catalogs and attends trade shows in an effort to
win the business of musicians one by one, helping do-it-yourselfers
do it themselves. With its DVD service, it does the same thing for
aspiring filmmakers.
The do-it-yourself boom comes at a time when big labels’ CD
sales are on the decline, partly because so many music fans are downloading
their music either legally or illegally. Last year, mainstream CD
sales in the U.S. declined by 8 percent from 767 million to 705 million,
according to the Recording Industry Association of America, a lobbying
group for the nation’s major record companies.
Van Veen said his company does not need to worry about the music-buying
public. It concentrates only on doing what the musicians want. "If
we’re going to make a product that doesn’t quite match
with the one in musician’s mind’s eye, it’s a disaster.
We’ve ruined their career," he said.
Disc Makers is not a record label, so it does not choose which CDs
to make. And while it offers help displays for selling CDs, for example,
and coupons for hosting services for musicians’ Web sites it
does not promote the recordings it replicates.
It
is also not a recording studio. Artists record their music elsewhere
anywhere from a pricey studio in Sweden to a home computer in their
basement and send it to Disc Makers.
In its factory outside Philadelphia, the company manufactures CDs
and prints the labels for them in batches as small as 300. The price
for 300 discs starts at $300. The company has engineers who tweak
the recordings to make them sound cleaner and graphic designers
who assemble the packaging.
Without
distribution deals, Disc Makers’ customers sell their music
on their own at concerts, independent record stores and through
online outlets such as CD Baby. Ben Kihnel, customer service person
for the online store, said far more of its products were manufactured
by Disc Makers than by any other company.
David Berger, a New York-based jazz composer and conductor who has
used Disc Makers for three of his albums, said he sees the CDs as
"expensive business cards" that he can sell at his concerts
and use to book his band, the Sultans of Swing.
He said that the downside of the vanity music press is that the
volume of CDs it produces makes it harder for the good ones to get
noticed. "Now I’m competing against 100,000 people who
are putting out records, most of which are pretty sad," Berger
said.
Dave Asti, who plays banjo and guitar for the Hillbilly Gypsies
("West Virginia’s hardest-driving bluegrass band,"
as he describes them) said his band has sold about 500 copies of
its debut album "One Foot in the Gravy," from the 2,000
it ordered from Disc Makers earlier this year.
The professional-looking CD is a big step up for the band, which
had previously produced CDs by burning them one-by-one on band members’
computers.
He said that philosophically, the band wants to remain independent
as long as it can. But there’s a business reason as well.
"All profits go directly to us," he said.
That’s why some musicians even those well-known enough to
record for labels admire Disc Makers as an alternative to a mainstream
recording industry that is hardly loved by musicians.
"We got tired of record company taking the product. They give
you an advance. They never give you any royalties," said Sonia
Rodney, the wife and manager of reggae veteran Burning Spear, who
has used Disc Makers to put out 13 new and back-catalog albums in
the past four years. "Spear wanted to be independent. Spear
wanted to be a free man. He wanted to be free from all record labels,
period."
About Disc Makers
Disc Makers is the nation’s leading independent media manufacturer,
offering a wide variety of products and services, including complete
CD and DVD replication and custom packaging for independent musicians,
filmmakers, and businesses. The company also offers a variety of additional
products and services including the country’s most popular line
of tower CD and DVD duplicators, automated CD/DVD publishing systems,
disc printers, blank media, and promotional printing services for
artists and corporate clients. The company’s state-of-the-art
manufacturing facility houses full-scale CD and DVD replication lines
and in-house printing, as well as mastering and post production studio
suites, a DVD and CD-ROM multimedia authoring facility, and an award-winning
graphics design studio. Disc Makers’ main office and plant is
located near Philadelphia in Pennsauken, NJ, and the company has regional
offices in Los Angeles, New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area,
Chicago, Seattle, Atlanta, Puerto Rico, and now Nashville.
Media
Contacts:
Ted
Miller Director of Client Services
Max Borges Marketing Solutions
3550 Biscayne Blvd., Suite 501
Miami, FL 33137
(305) 576-1171 x12 tedmiller@maxborges.com
Matt
Shumate PR Specialist
Max Borges Marketing Solutions
3550 Biscayne Blvd., Suite 501
Miami, FL 33137
(305) 576-1171 x15 mattshumate@maxborges.com
Steven
Spatz Director of Marketing
Disc Makers
7905 N. Route 130
Pennsauken, NJ 08110
856-663-9030 sspatz@discmakers.com
