I am currently selling three different CDR's at my gigs - a contemporary album, a "standards" album and a Christmas album. I plan on expanding the offerings to as many as ten albums this year. I have setup a home manufacturing operation that includes a color laser printer for the inserts, an inkjet printer for printing directly onto the CDR's, a fairly high-speed duplication process (about four minutes per), and shrink-wrapping. Including royalties paid for the rights to record the cover songs (10 songs per album or 80 cents per CD in royalties), the albums cost me about $2.00 each to produce. They are excellent quality and very unique: each CDR has my logo, copyright and website address "tatooed" into the data side of the CDR. The CDR's print-on front label has a "pearlescent quality" to it, and once printed the label is permanent and water-proof. I use Verbatim Azu Blue CDR's, which are a premium CDR that are supposed to last longer than regular CDR's (the blue finish helps to highlight the "T@2" or tatoo). I also produce "business card" demo CDR's that hold a five minute demo targeted at specific markets (jazz demo, wedding demo, party demo).
Incidently - I do get returns on CDR's that won't play on some players. I put a slip of paper inside of each CD telling the customer that they have purchased an album that is meant for CDR-compatible players and if not satisfied for any reason they can return it for full refund and I provide a shipping address. Very few come back but considering the quantity of albums I intend to produce, home manufacturing was my best option.
So here we go with the url's:
My supplies comes from either
http://www.cdrom2go.com/ http://www.warehouse.com/ The printer is an inexpensive EZ/CD Printer which has worked great for me:
http://www.ezcdprinter.com/ The CD recorder is awesome:
http://www.yamahamultimedia.com/yec/products/cdrw/crwf1.asp Shrink-wrapping supplies:
http://www.markertek.com/ On-line royalty payments & song info:
http://www.songfile.com/