Actually, while the title could be a little less vulgar (I dont really care, but many others might), I do agree with your outlook.

Here is my beef. When CD's first came out, they cost about $10 to make, were not mass produced and so on. The sold for about $14 or more. Today, most bands turn out crap on CDs with a few decent songs, CD's are like $.50 to make in mass production (if that and I mean case, print, etc) and they sell for $15 to $25 a pop, depending on where you get it.

So tell me why is it if CD's are damn near free to make, we are paying MORE now? I mean, inflation aside, it is ludicrous we should pay more than about $3 a CD. It used to be the cost of making a CD you paid for. Now you are paying 90% of that into the record companies pocket. Ya'll know the musician makes next to nothing off of the CD. Their money comes from touring and if they are like, sponsors. It's tough being a musician now, almost not worth it. It's actually cheaper and better to produce your own CD master, dup it and sell it at small stores. You probably make more money that way. If you dont get signed, you may as well play local bars, sell your CD's after playing for like $5 a pop or so, and try to pick up gigs at local bars. With computer music so powerful these days, you have a LOT more people writing music too.

On that note, I don't buy music any more, I download it. Yeah, that's right. I pay for the songs I want. I also download "copies" to make sure they are worth it before buying them. It's a real shame the big 5 don't get their heads out of their collective asses and realize that selling songs for $1 a pop is MUCH more profitable down the road than trying to sell CD's for the ridiculous prices. They have lost what, 25% of their market already in the past couple years? With the hackers coming out with impossible-to-crack networks, downloading music for free will go on forever and no matter how many they try to sue, they'll just find better ways to hide it.

So, start selling CD's for $3, or give songs at about $.25 a pop or so, and a lot less downloading would probably go on.

If you take offense to the words 'fucked up', you'd better not listen or read anything related to the music businness. Actually, imho the title is still too soft for the disgusting practices that are going on in this world.

The music business has never been about talent or musical catalysts. It's about business.

When a musician enters into a contract with a record company you lose the right to be creative on your own.

Hi Kevin, sorry about that, we took the week off to work in our house so I'm less at the computer than usual.

About the cost of the CD, you're right that they don't cost that much to make. However creating a professionally recorded one with a nice cover, inlay and printed CD takes a lot of investment to get all the material ready, the actual fabrication of the CD itself is a small percentage of the global cost.

Talking about myself, I decided a few years ago (when I recorded my album) to try to give it a go and do it 'professionally' all the way. So we find a great producer (Mike Butcher), rented a studio for a few weeks (during downtime to cut the costs), got some session musicians to take care of instruments we couldn't play, have some write special arrangements, ... The cost of this all was very high, but I was ready to pay that and I'm personally (still) very pleased with the result.

Now back to the price, even if I sell all of the remaining CDs at $15 each, I wouldn't even come close to the money that the production cost me, so I'm not sure about their value having to be reduced to $3, imho they're worth more than that.

About the equipment that was used during Dream Like a Tree, I can't really comment since this was recorded in a professional studio and the gear they have there alone is too much to remember, let alone what was used on each song. I do remember we recorded in ProTools, but we only used it to cut up different takes and create a the best 'final' version out of the seperate parts. I know that the producer / sound engineer put a lot of effort in the selection and placement of the microphones and the (pre)amplifiers.

The creation of the songs has totally been done by me and the band was merely a bunch of professional session musicians that happened to be friends of me or of the producer. I wrote out a collection of arrangements and had some made for certain songs (like the string quartet which was recorded with real strings). Most of the drum and bass lines were fixed during a collection of rehearsal sessions before the recording.

Hi Kevin,

I did submit my CD to all major digital distributions stores such as iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody and many others. They should all be selling the songs and the CD now. This already a lot off the price since you can buy per song and you can get the full CD for a lower price.