Bar Codes

Can anybody explain how Bar Codes work?

I'll skip the mechanics of the laser and the black/white stripes, assuming you didn't really mean that part when you asked how they work. :-) You can safely say "It's Magic" and it won't hurt your music career in the least.

The only "raw manufacturer" of bar codes is the Uniform Code Council. http://uc-council.com. But don't bother with them for bar codes for music products (CD, album, cassette) unless you want to pay $750 for 10,000 unique bar codes.

When they set up this Bar Code deal years ago, they asked the RIAA and Major Labels, who in their usual slimey fashion, shut you indie artists out of readily buying a Bar Code by saying nobody needed less than 10,000 Bar Codes at once. The UC Council believed them, or didn't care, or got paid off, or whatever, and now you're stuck with not being able to really buy your own individual bar codes, if you want to get picuyane about it. Don't Despair -- Read on!

Oh, and for the record, the UC-Council (and everybody else in this article) are private companies looking to make money, not some semi-altruistic governmental body or non-profit organization or something. Caveat Emptor. Although the "bar code generator" guy (viz.) is only asking for tiny donations, so I guess that's about as altruistic as you can get.

Note that industries other than Music can buy much smaller quantities of bar codes from the UC Council. Only the intercession of the Major Labels has rigged the game so you can't. Any questions?

You can buy a bar code from Derek http://cdbaby.net/resources/barcode.htm for about $20. Plus you have to register to sell your CD on his site ($35) but you should do that anyway.

Or, if you're doing a one-stop shopping at Oasis http://www.oasiscd.com/ or DiscMakers http://www.discmakers.com, they throw one in for you for "free". If it's your first CD, and you don't want to kill yourself learning all the ins and outs of assembling the correct pieces to make a CD, these guys are great.

If you understand how to correctly assemble the pieces, Oasis and DiscMakers are a little pricey, but still maybe worth saving your time and energy, and they're very good at catching your bone-headed mistakes. YMMV.

*TECHNICALLY*. On paper. Buried in the UC Council vaults. Where nobody ever looks.

The Retailers don't really give a damn who actually owns the stupid bar code, so long as you don't screw up and put the same bar code on two different products (EG CD and cassette. NO!)

SoundScan doesn't really give a damn who *really* owns the Bar Code, they just want to suck off the teat of the major labels and report seemingly accurate numbers that will track their sales.

And SoundScan is MEANINGLESS unless you are selling THOUSANDS of CDs. Put it this way: To GET the SoundScan data, you have to subscribe for $10,000+ per year. Who is going to pay $10,000+ per year to find out that you sold 10 CDs to your mom, 100 to your friends, gave 300 away to radio/press/venues, and have 590 still sitting in your closet just waiting for you to get that big break?

While CDBaby (and some others) will report sales to SoundScan, it won't matter much. You can't report your individual sales at gigs unless you're on a "real" label with at least three different artists, that label fills out a lot of red tape, you fill out a form at every gig and get the venue owner to sign it, blah blah blah. Let me be blunt: Nobody CARES about you selling CDs until you hit ~50,000. In order to sell 50,000 in today's industry, you'll end up getting counted anyway. Stop worrying about SoundScan and go write a song that can sell 50,000 copies and go promote it enough to make that happen.

Thus, you can fill out a form (or let Derek do it for you) when you "buy" your bar code from him/them, and then send that form to SoundScan (or let Derek do it for you) and it's all tooken care of -- You'll have a bar code that will let you sell through any retailer. You'll be in SoundScan for the CDBaby sales, but that's meaningless anyway.

Once that bar code has been "sold" to you, and SoundScan has it on file as "yours," then it's up to you to generate the little black/white lines on your CD artwork. Whoever sold you the bar code will probably send it to you as a digital image (BMP, TIFF, whatever).

Nobody who MATTERS to you is going to care that, in theory, on paper, the bar code is owned by a third party. Derek of CDBaby has had actual representatives of UC-Council give his deal a thumbs-up. One can probably safely assume that the others who are doing this for THOUSANDS of artists have also. The BOGUS people telling you otherwise are trying to get you to attend their seminars and buy their books. Me, I'd sure appreciate it if you'd buy one of my CD's at CDBaby But if you don't like any of those, buy somebody else's. Whatever. Oooh, I get a dollar for each CD if you use that link above. If that bugs you, type in CDBaby.com by hand to tell me "Screw You"

If whomever sells you the bar-code doesn't send you a graphic, or you're in a horrible hurry, there are tons of software packages that will create them, as well as at least one free web-site http://milk.com/barcode/ that has an on-line immediate "bar code generator" that will let you plug in your numbers and get an XMP (XBMP?) out of it -- Which most graphic artists can convert to TIFF or even JPEG (keep quality HIGH) or something a bit more common and it will work just fine. The site's author asks for donations.

Make sure your Graphic Artist (or you) does *NOT* "shrink" or "scale" the bar code at *ANY* time in the artwork process. No, no, no. The little black/white line distances/lengths *are* the bar code. You shrink/scale them, and it's useless. Worse than useless, it might work sometimes on some bar code readers, and then fail miserably on others, and you'll never understand why it's so "flaky."