A growing number of musicians are not relying on corporate-produced and marketed "albums" anymore. They are recording songs or pieces or groups of songs/pieces, (which, by the way, is no longer that expensive thanks to the increasing availability of reasonably-priced digital recording and production methods,) and marketing them directly on websites, at live performances, on streaming radio channels, etc.
If you want to go the "make a CD" route, it is actually less expensive than it has EVER been to do so. You can rent a well-equipped professional studio for a very modest hourly fee, and chances are you can even access a very nearly professional-quality amateur studio even cheaper. You can learn to manipulate your own digital output and do so for a modest investment (probably shared with buds) in software and playback equipment. Or, you can pay a good fee-for-service producer to work with you, or swap with them, whatever, and get your final digital files produced. Then you can get them transferred to good-quality media for pennies a unit.
If you're deedy that way, you can even create your own disc art and/or cover art with an inexpensive illustrator/photomanipulator software suite, and have that included in the repro package for a few pennies more. Or you can get a creative friend to do so. Or even pay a professional illustrator/photographer. All for way, way, way less than it used to cost the corporate studios per unit.
So, what do you want a corporate studio to do for you? MARKET YOU?!??
Excuse me while I pick myself off the floor from rolling around laughing. Corporate studios do exactly bupkis to market 99.999 percent of newly-signed artists, and bupkis plus a buck-fifty to market artists already under contract.
And then they own the rights to that material and god help the poor schlemiel of an artist who realizes they're being scammed, takes off on their own, and builds a real audience and a real success. They can (if they're lucky) perform their own damn' material live, but they can never re-release it without getting an assload of expensive lawyers involved.
Movies ain't gonna die because people download them without making the studios richer. That's the same garbage we heard when TeeVee was in its infancy. "OMG!!! It's THE END OF THE WORLD FOR THE MOVIES!!!"
Yeah. Right.
It's all about profits for the Media Oligarchs. Save your sympathy for them. The artists are now escaping from their clutches by the hundreds and soon, by the thousands-- finding their audiences, being more creative than ever, and flipping the bird to the Oligarchs.
informatively,
Bright
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