CDs / Physical Media

Growing up in the 80s and 90s, I was used to cassettes, vinyl records and later on CDs. Despite digital downloads having their place, I have always liked using physical media and I see many advantages in owning physical copies of your favourite music. There are still some people who don't know their way around buying and using digital downloads/streaming.

When I released my debut album 'One Way Ticket' back in 2006 I had a batch of CDs professionally produced and did actually sell most of them.

But the times have changed since then and physical media have become less and less widespread. I still have a small batch of 'One Way Ticket' copies left, which are currently for sale on my website and Bandcamp page, but the demand seems practically non-existent. The costs involved in duplicating CDs professionally are just too much for me to able to do this with every release, so I reluctantly accepted that my releases are available as digital downloads and on streaming services only for the time being.

With the release of the 'Through The City' EP, however, I decided to give the matter some thought again and looked into on-demand CD printing. The idea behind this is that there is no upfront cost for the artist, as the CD only gets produced after an order is placed. That way you can offer CDs with a professional look, even without a budget.

I was going to go down that road and looked at different companies, but there were a few issues; One of the major companies offering this service looked promising, but I felt the price for the customer was too expensive. For a short EP like 'Through The City' I was going to have to charge £10.40, of which I only get to keep £1.73. This seems a bad deal both for me and the customer. If I wanted a larger profit for myself, I was going to have to charge more. I looked at a smaller company, but I wasn’t sure how trustworthy they were and their website seemed somewhat clunky. Long story short - I decided against going down the on-demand route at this point in time.

After weighing up the different options we decided that the best thing at the moment is to do everything as DIY as possible. So what I am offering instead is a CD-R which I burn at home and send out to you personally. This is not going to look “professional”, like the 'One Way Ticket' CD. It is going to be labelled with a pen and it won’t have all the bells and whistles - just a CD in plastic sleeve. The upside to this is that I can personalise the CDs. And the music will still be high quality, as you’d expect from a CD.

We liked the idea of this, because it eliminates the middle man and takes things back to basics. I rarely listen to punk music, but I do like some of the punk ethos of doing things yourself, even if you don’t have a large budget.

By doing it this way, I am keeping the expense for myself at a minimum, while still offering the option of a physical CD purchase to those people who still prefer buying CDs. If there does turn out to be a demand for CDs and I consider it worthwhile, I might offer professionally produced CDs in the future. I would love to expand the availability of this Music on different physical media and it would be cool if I could one day offer my releases as cassette tapes or even vinyl records. But for the time being I will be offering these DIY style homemade CDs for all of my releases.

I am unable to take returns for these CDs, but if it should be faulty or broken I can provide a refund.

Note: There is a small stock of professionally made "One Way Ticket" CDs left, so if you are interested in that take a look in the shop or click here.