Directors Cut CD – Enhanced CDs Are The Answer

In a previous episode of the Musicians Cooler I through out my "Half Baked" idea that one of the reasons people buy DVDs is to get the extras. Is there a way musicians could create a "Director’s Cut" CD? There is, and the answer cam from Steve Pasek of BiG Productions, Inc who is working with the band www.chainsawdupont.com

One way to do a "director’s cut" for CDs is to do an ECD, or enhanced CD.  Discmakers will try to charge you more for doing this but if you manufacture your CD as a data disc with two partitions, it’s the same thing, you just need to master it as a single disc with two partitions, one data and one music.

The ECD portion can have essentially anything you want, MP3s, video, text files — in our case, the first pressing we did for each of our Chainsaw Dupont CDs includes a data partition with all the lyrics, session notes for the recording sessions, photos and quicktime videos from the sessions, and stories about how each of the songs was created, lyrically and musically.

We then adapted the stories and included them as part of our Broadjam profile as well, so we re-purposed the content.

Essentially, people who got in on the ground floor by purchasing the "first pressing" of the release got a special CD that not only said "FIRST PRESSING" on the CD face, but had this extra special content. 

Well, the first CD we issued is currently out of print and the second is on its way.  When we completed our trilogy of CDs, we added another feature to the sales — anyone who buys a copy of "Ghost Kings of Beale St.", our third (and fastest-selling) CD gets an additional bonus — a fan club membership that includes a membership card and downloads of live acoustic and electric versions of songs from all 3 CDs.

These live tracks are not available anywhere else, and we’re using disc revolt to handle the downloads, so the "membership card" is essentially a disc revolt card that we mocked up as the Chainsaw Dupont fan club membership card.  We mail it out separately after we see sales at CDBaby, with instructions on how to do the download as well as other features of the fan club membership.  One bonus is 2-for-1 admissions at selected live shows (we do this with any clubs that are willing to go along with it, with some others there’s a time restriction, e.g., 2-for-1 until 8:30 p.m.)

This has worked remarkably well in terms of giving the customers an extra incentive to buy, and also gives them a taste of the live show if they haven’t been to one (a lot of people know the band from podcasts and have never seen the live show).

I talk about this and more in the latest episode of the Musicians Cooler Podcast