There are differences in what you are talking about here.
For a company to purchase a barcode, it's $750, but that allows them to assign 10,000 different barcodes (to different products).
What you want to find is a company that will sell you one of it's 10,000 (or however many they've purchased) barcodes. You can get them from different places. Many CD pressing companies (like disk faktory) will sell you one if you use their services - I think theirs is $30 or $40 for a barcode.
CD Baby is the cheapest place I've seen. If you sign up a CD through them, you can get a barcode for it for $20. You have to pay another $35 for album setup (which includes a page for your album with song clips).
Here's an article from CD Baby about the whole thing. . . You can find it here:
http://www.cdbaby.net/resources/barcode.htm
"You may have heard that UPC barcodes cost $750.
See - when you register with the Universal Code Council in Minnesota, and pay them $750, what you're actually doing is registering your COMPANY. Once you do that you can release 10,000 products under that company registration.
But most of us independent artists are only going to release a few records - and paying $750 wipes out all the profit you'd make from your first 100 album sales.
So - CD Baby paid the $750, and can give you your own unique UPC Barcode for only $20. It will be entirely yours for all eternity. When your CD is scanned by Tower Records or Amazon, it will show up on the register as YOUR Album, YOUR Band, YOUR Record Company. The only place you will be "tied" to CD Baby is in our records here in Portland. Nowhere else.
We will send you a BITMAP graphic. You or your art designer can import this graphic into your album art, or make stickers from it.
If you want to do this, you need to be a CD Baby member. I know it's a chicken & the egg thing. ("How can we be a CD Baby member if we need a UPC code for a CD that won't be out for 2 months?") So go sign up now, submit your CD to CD Baby in advance, we'll send you your UPC Barcode now, and mark you down as pre-paid for the future when your CDs get back from the factory!
Again - to get a UPC Barcode from CD Baby you HAVE to be a CD Baby member!
If you're already a CD Baby member, click here to pay for it, (bottom of the screen - says PAY FOR MEMBER THINGS) - and we'll do the rest.
See - by law, we can't just hand out barcodes to anyone who asks. These are meant only for people who are a paid member of CD Baby.
To be a member, you have to fill out our submission form, send us some of your CDs, and pay the $35 setup fee.
If you don't have your CDs yet, you must fill out the submission form NOW - giving us all the information possible, pay the $35 setup fee, and send us your CDs as soon as they're back from the factory. We can still give you the barcode now.
It takes 1-2 weeks for us to give you your own UPC Barcode. Please don't call us in a panic, needing it in 4 hours . We give you a BITMAP GRAPHIC file, which you can either place into your album art, or print onto stickers. We don't do the printing for you. We just give you the unique UPC barcode graphic and digits.
If all is understood, please submit your CD to CD Baby first. Then, when done, pay for your $35 setup and $20 barcode."
Hope that answers your question!
I have used CD Baby for selling CD's, and they are a great company. I'd recommend them!
