« advice to Magnatune musicians about music publishing | Main | mini music browser inside a page »
CD packaging may include artwork
I'm currently in discussions with Allied Vaughn, the company that makes the physical CDs on demand for us, to place specific album art on the packaging.
Currently, our "wrapper" looks like this:
which is a generic high-quality printed wrapper, with black ink-jet printing at manufacture time, with the artist name/album name/track details. They don't currently put custom images on each package, but they are working with me to develop this capability, and this is what I'm proposing:
a blank square would be left on the front packaging, where the artist's cover would be printed.
Before any of the comments ask... no, we can't include liner notes and other things, as the packaging is standardized and limited to the pre-printed design and can't include other pages. The current price I pay for this product is $4, plus $.97 for shipping, which is passed onto the CD buyer directly without markup. I do have proposals from other suppliers to make cd jewel-case based on-demand CDs, that look very much like commercial CDs, but the per-item price rises to the $6 to $7 mark, before postage, making that choice, I believe, not very interesting to music buyers at magnatune. Hence, the current focus on the standardized packaging.
-john
Posted by John Buckman on May 20, 2006 at 10:29 AM | Permalink
Comments
Great idea! This definitely adds personality to what was a generic looking CD insert!
Nick
--
Posted by: Nick B at May 21, 2006 5:20:56 AM
I know blue distinguishes the site, but how about white? the pictures will look better on white, I think.
Make liner notes available as a single sheet of paper that you can fold and place inside the artwok. Make it available for donwload or direct print from your site and the owner of the cd can print it at will.
regards,
Posted by: zaxl at May 21, 2006 9:01:35 AM
Does the cover art image have to be so small? I can see that you might want to include some text on the front, but currently half of the front is a sea of blue that includes a mini-representation of artwork originally intended to be CD size.
Posted by: Nathan Jones at May 21, 2006 6:49:48 PM
Does the cover art image have to be so small?
They can't print too close to the top edge, which is one constraint, but I could, it's true, get rid of the light-blue band on the bottom explaining the artist name & album name, since that's on the album art as well.
-john
Posted by: John Buckman at May 22, 2006 9:32:45 AM
Make liner notes available as a single sheet of paper that you can fold and place inside the artwok. Make it available for donwload or direct print from your site and the owner of the cd can print it at will.
Liner notes, when we have them from the artist, are already available as a PDF that can be downloaded & printed, as extra pages packages with the PDF that has the album artwork in it.
Posted by: John Buckman at May 22, 2006 9:33:55 AM
Dear John:
I like to buy the CDs in cases, and this change would be a positive one indeed.
robert
Posted by: gurdonark at Jun 4, 2006 2:43:25 PM
