I've just recorded an EP of four of my songs, using a community recording venue at no cost to me. There is a demo CD (currently with my mother) but otherwise no physical copy of the songs. I've copied the files onto my laptop and uploaded them to SoundCloud. The next stage is to make physical copies of the CD that can hopefully be sold for the benefit of both me and the venue.
My producer, who runs the venue, doesn’t want to bear the cost of making any physical CDs because all CDs have lost money so far. Instead, he proposes that the venue should offer to record the EP, help with the artwork, upload it onto the internet and help with the admin of making the CD and selling it, but not to fund it upfront. Instead, the artist would pay the upfront costs and have the obligation of making sure it sold. Any profits made would be split 50/50.
He currently uses a company called
Duplication Centre in Essex, where the upfront costs of making 100 CDs are about £140 - this includes all the artwork and packaging. I'm quite hard up and reluctant to put so much money upfront. Is there a cheaper way of doing this? It strikes me that if we had a machine for duplicating CDs, we could do most of the work ourselves - we could print the labels and sleeves, and we'd only need the boxes. Although there are quite a lot of unsold CDs lying around the place in boxes and we could maybe even use those. I should add that I don't even want 100 CDs at the moment - 50 would probably be enough, but that costs about £100 and it doesn't really seem worth it. I think that's the minimum they'll produce.
I have absolutely no experience in any of this as you may gather, and my producer is currently on two weeks' holiday. I'd like to get going before he returns. Any advice for me?
