VERY CHEAP CDs - Morning Gold Fix/Mobile Glitch Factory & Experiencing Difficulty

jinkies

New member
Hello all, before I continue I'd just like to make this disclaimer that although this is only my second post in these forums, I did not join in order to promote myself, I joined four weeks ago to answer someone's hardware question. But a couple of days ago I got an email from CD Baby that they are going to throw away my CDs if I don't pay to have them shipped back to me. Since that would cost more than it would to produce new copies, I've decided to deeply discount the remaining stock on CD Baby, in hopes that they actually get heard rather than destroyed. The CDs which cost $9.99 yesterday now cost $4.00 - the minimum amount allowable. At that price I don't make any money at all, but again at least they wont be destroyed if someone buys them...

So, if you like experimental electronica with an aim to be listenable and even 'catchy' at times, then you might want to take advantage of this tremendous deal! Note, however, that I don't care whether these get sold or not, since I make no money and they will be destroyed anyway, and I don't care much whether anyone ever hears it, enough people have heard my music already to satisfy me. So don't buy these out of charity because you pity me, buy them if you think you'd actually like them and think they might be worth four dollars, otherwise don't bother because only CD Baby profits if you buy them and I don't like CD Baby anymore...

The following CDs are available for $4.00US each, plus shipping I guess, from CDBaby:

Experiencing Difficulty - Future Failure

Experiencing Difficulty was created in Vancouver, BC as a broadcasting & recording project on The Summer of Hate radio show on CiTR 101.9FM campus radio, in 1993 and continued for several more years on the Plutonian Nights radio show, also on CiTR in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The band has released four albums and one collaborative album with South Korea's Rainjacket. The fourth and most recent album, Future Failure, was released in 2007 and consists of recordings from broadcasts that occurred from 2000-2003, as well as two sessions in my home studio. Experiencing Difficulty consists of two main members, Haitch C, of post-electro outfit Haitch C Soundcraft, currently living in Vancouver, BC by way of Birmingham, UK, and Caffeine Charlie of electronic act Morning Gold Fix/Mobile Glitch Factory and industrial/noise/acoustic folk ensemble Caffeine Charlie's Wake-up Service, currently living in Vancouver BC by way of Iowa, USA. On Future Failure they are joined by several guests, including Unjin of Rainjacket, currently living in Seoul, South Korea but living in Vancouver BC at the time of these recordings, Greg from Santa Cruz, CA, who records under the name Pitchfork, on toy guitar, and his girlfriend on keyboards, who were visiting Vancouver BC, and Sean from Maple Ridge, BC who records goth-ish drum-machine-backed alternative-rock (think early Sisters of Mercy) as Sense of Scenery, on bass guitar. You can also find Sense of Scenery CDs on CDBaby but they cost more than four dollars.

Experiencing Difficulty eschews the term 'improvisation', instead claiming to specialize in "spontaneous
composition", as every track is created in a spontaneous manner. No overdubs are used, but the results of each radio performance, which typically lasted two to three hours (the radio show ran from 12am-6am on Saturday mornings), are heavily edited to provide only the most cohesive moments in what all-too-often would drift away from cutting-edge experimentation and toward cacophonous mess. Inspired by foley work and tape-loops, instrumentation ranged the gamut from analog and casio keyboards to found-object percussion wired to contact microphones, lo-fi 'yakbak' sampling, plucked and strummed violin, toy electric guitar with piezo pickup, and anything else we could get our hands on.

Buy the CD for only $4.00US here:

Experiencing Difficulty | Future Failure | CD Baby Music Store



Mobile Glitch Factory - Hi-Fi Digimonster

Named after an infamous Canadian terrorist device, Hi-Fi Digimonster finds the recording artist formerly known as Morning Gold Fix changing things, including the name of the project, up a little. Originally conceived as a more consumer-friendly side-project to noise/prank phone-call act Caffeine Charlie's Wake-up Service, Morning Gold Fix contributed tracks to several compilations, including Arts Industria's critically acclaimed Art of Brutality compilation in 1994, appeared on a split cassette with Experiencing Difficulty in 1995 and released two CD albums and a 3" CDEP in the 2000s before changing the name to Mobile Glitch Factory for 2010's Hi-Fi Digimonster. Adding glitch-hop production to the already heady electronic stew Morning Gold Fix was known for results in a particularly potent mix. Featuring circuit-bent MIDI keyboards and original chiptune elements, (there's no "old video game music" being ripped off, despite the insinuation in the review provided below) punctuated by innovative record scratching techniques, Hi-Fi Digimonster aims to please even the most discerning electronic music connoisseur by exploring a retro-infused amalgam of beats, bloops, skronks, and even the occasional melody.

Here are two unsolicited reviews of the album from iTunes:

"Old School Meets New School

This album is basically a fusion of old video game music and modern techno. The combination is somewhat addicting, but at the same time, it is entertaining. I believe many people will enjoy this odd, but cool album
."

***

"Well done

a very original way to combine sounds. Something new, kids love it. It is moving, kickin', swinging, out of the ordinary. Really good !
"

Buy the CD for only $4.00US here:

Mobile Glitch Factory | Hi-Fi Digimonster | CD Baby Music Store


PS: I will never send CD Baby another CD as long as I live, so this may be your only chance to get a full-quality physical copy of this music. The $4 sale will last until the CDs run out or until CD Baby destroys the remainder on April 12th, 2015.
 
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There's less than a week left to take advantage of this tremendous $4 CD deal before CDBaby destroys the remainder of the stock on April 12th, 2015!! We've been getting a lot of inquiries so to clear up some confusion here is an FAQ we've put together to help explain things:


The CDBaby is Stealing My Jewel-Cases So F-Them CD Sale FAQ Version 2.3


Q) Why is CDBaby destroying your CDs, is it because they suck?

A) No, mostly it's because CDBaby was purchased some years back by DiscMakers, a company that does large-run CD stamping and short-run CD-R burning for independant artists and labels. They recently realized they could steal CD jewel-cases from CDBaby artists under the guise of 'recycling' and then direct those cases into the supply-chain of their CD manufacturing business to cut the cost of having to purchase new ones. Because most sales are now digital, CDs aren't selling very quickly at CDBaby anymore and so they justify their theft of CDBaby artists' jewel-cases by claiming they are 'overstocked' (even though fairly recently they had us send them more CDs for 'restocking'!).

Q) Are these CDs you're selling actual CDs or crappy CD-Rs?

A) Well, they're CD-Rs but they're less crappy than most CD-Rs. We do not use cheesy paper labels that are known to gum up car stereos in particular, labels are printed directly on the CD, for a professional appearance. We also burn every CD using a little-known but powerful feature found only on the Yamaha CRW-F1 CD burner called AMQR which stands for Audio Master Quality Recording. What this does is reduce the amount of jitter upon playback to a rate comperable to stamped CDs. You may have been under the impression that 'digital is digital' and that the retrieval of digital information should be error-free, but in the murky world of Red Book audio and its error correction techniques, that is never the case. If you use a Plextor Professional CD-ROM drive with Plextools software, you can compare error rates from reading stamped CDs compared to burned CD-Rs. Our CDs burned with AMQR will show error rates comperable to those of stamped CDs, that being much lower than those observed from typical burned CD-Rs. However, the physical quality of the discs is inferior to stamped CDs, so to ameliorate that, we offer a lifetime of replacement discs to anyone who purchases a CD. Just send us a photo of the broken disc or an audio file of it skipping or whatever, and we'll send you a new disc.

Q) Ok but why don't I just buy the mp3s off iTunes like everybody seems to be doing these days?

A) The truth is we make far more money from digital downloads than we ever did from CD sales, but this particular kind of music doesn't encode very well to mp3 because of the thick harmonics in the various types of distortion employed. We highly recommend listening only to the full-quality CD product, which has been painstakingly recorded, engineered and mastered at 24bit, employing many years of knowledge accumulated in the field coupled with tried-and-true methods of sonic clarity in reproduction. We can assure that this quality has been entirely preserved on a 16bit 44.1khz CD, but we can't make the same guarantee for mp3 versions.

Q) So what kind of music is this anyway?

A) That's a difficult question to answer. It could be called post-industrial, because industrial is the genre I started in back in the early 90s, except not the poppy kind of industrial that was popular back then such as Skinny Puppy or KMFDM, but more the experimental type like Einsturzende Neubauten, Test Dept or Fat Alberts Junkyard Band. The stuff I do now might be called post-industrial because while it no longer retains many of the trappings of industrial it is essentially an evolution from that position.

Q) Hmmmm, you've almost convinced me, but are you SURE I'm not going to go to the trouble of ordering your CD, invest my time into inserting it into my stereo, only to be disappointed by yet another Ableton-rendered dubstep nightmare??

A) Yes, I can assure you that these CDs are dub-step free and Ableton was not used at any step of the process, not that we have anything against Ableton, or dubstep for that matter. Well ok, actually we do have something against dubstep, in fact we have everything against dubstep, but we also have better things to do than get too bent out of shape over bad mainstream music.
 
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Q) Why is CDBaby destroying your CDs, is it because they suck?

A) No, mostly it's because CDBaby was purchased some years back by DiscMakers... They recently realized they could steal CD jewel-cases from CDBaby artists under the guise of 'recycling' and then direct those cases into the supply-chain of their CD manufacturing business to cut the cost of having to purchase new ones.

Is this your own theory or is there a source that can be cited? I would imagine it would cost DiscMakers much more in labor to unpackage and discard your old CDs in order to canibalize the jewel cases than to just procure new jewel cases at a fraction of a penny each. Not to mention the added costs of shipping your CDs/cases from whatever warehouse they are stored in to their production facilities to be processed and the fees to dispose of the discarded materials (CD-Rs, booklets, tray cards, shrink wrap). Doesn't make sense. Maybe they just need to clear out some space for newer releases so they are getting rid of older releases that are no longer selling. How long have your CDs been sitting in their warehouse?
 
Is this your own theory or is there a source that can be cited? I would imagine it would cost DiscMakers much more in labor to unpackage and discard your old CDs in order to canibalize the jewel cases than to just procure new jewel cases at a fraction of a penny each. Not to mention the added costs of shipping your CDs/cases from whatever warehouse they are stored in to their production facilities to be processed and the fees to dispose of the discarded materials (CD-Rs, booklets, tray cards, shrink wrap). Doesn't make sense. Maybe they just need to clear out some space for newer releases so they are getting rid of older releases that are no longer selling. How long have your CDs been sitting in their warehouse?

Just what I was thinking. Jewel cases cost about $0.20 each when you buy 50 at a time, buy 1000 or more, I'm sure we're talking pennies. Ths simple fact is that CDBaby has shelves and shelves (or drawers and drawers) of CDs that haven't sold - probably a warehouse full and space is expensive.
 
Hello, I realize I am bumping a 4 year old thread, and the forum tried to discourage me from doing so, but every time I Google my band name this thread comes up and I'd like to respond to it for the record...

Is this your own theory or is there a source that can be cited? I would imagine it would cost DiscMakers much more in labor to unpackage and discard your old CDs in order to canibalize the jewel cases than to just procure new jewel cases at a fraction of a penny each. Not to mention the added costs of shipping your CDs/cases from whatever warehouse they are stored in to their production facilities to be processed and the fees to dispose of the discarded materials (CD-Rs, booklets, tray cards, shrink wrap). Doesn't make sense. Maybe they just need to clear out some space for newer releases so they are getting rid of older releases that are no longer selling. How long have your CDs been sitting in their warehouse?

CDBaby (Discmakers) claimed they would be 'recycling' those CD cases. Now, if they're lying about that we can discount everything they say, but if they're not, then there could be two things they mean by 'recycling', either they mean re-using the CD cases, or they mean recycling the plastic through traditional plastic recycling channels. Either way, they would have to employ someone to pull the paper inserts out. Since they have to do that anyway, it would be very stupid of them to send plastic to be recycled (at their cost) only to buy the jewel cases that they always need for their business that may be made from the same plastic of the jewel cases they sent to be recycled. That process would cost them more than dumping them in the landfill. It makes MUCH, MUCH more sense to keep the jewel cases and re-use them, as this gives them a significant advantage over their CD-manufacturing competitors: it's a major input they don't have to pay for. Furthermore, it's a mistake to assume that they would be hiring extra capacity to handle this job. They have employees on the payroll that they can divert from sitting around waiting for, for example, technical support calls, to taking apart CDs when they're not taking calls. This is what any competent manager would do, which means that if you couldn't grasp it before I just explained it to you, you're definitely not management material...

So to answer your question, this is not so much my 'theory' as it is self-evident given a full understanding of the facts, which I just gave you (and the reason you didn't understand them yourself probably isn't a reflection of your intelligence, but rather, the small amount of time you chose to devote to thinking about what you were reading before responding).

Incidentally, I'm sure that freeing up warehouse space is an added bonus, but a minor one. Maybe they even moved to a smaller warehouse, but we're taking about a product that takes up very little space. Each album had anywhere from 1-5 copies on hand before the purge. I don't know how many unique albums they curate but let's say it's 10,000. That would mean they were storing 10,000-50,000 CDs at any given time. I know people with 10,000 CDs in their garage, all filed away and easily accessible. The room saved by the purge would be meager. And if storage had been the main issue, why not offer a service whereby people could pay a small fee simply for additional storage time? Or even have an option to allow them to send them free to people who buy other CDs? Because they wanted those cases, that's why...
 
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Is this your own theory or is there a source that can be cited? I would imagine it would cost DiscMakers much more in labor to unpackage and discard your old CDs in order to canibalize the jewel cases than to just procure new jewel cases at a fraction of a penny each. Not to mention the added costs of shipping your CDs/cases from whatever warehouse they are stored in to their production facilities to be processed and the fees to dispose of the discarded materials (CD-Rs, booklets, tray cards, shrink wrap). Doesn't make sense. Maybe they just need to clear out some space for newer releases so they are getting rid of older releases that are no longer selling. How long have your CDs been sitting in their warehouse?

assuming that they ever put any cds into any cases at all or were going to burn 1 and insert it IF and when it ever got sold
 
My question is if you were duplicating your CDs somewhere else, why would you even go to CDBaby for fulfillment?
 
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