Buffalo Rising Online

May 30th, 5:10pm By Anthony Swinnich

Buffalo's music scene has a lion's share of active artists and bands, so it makes sense that businesses in the industry would be attracted to the area. The more bands there are to work with, the better business is going to be. Zoran Busic, founder of CDExperts, recognized the talent pool in the Queen City and moved his company here at the beginning of 2008. According to Busic, it's been a fantastic decision so far.

“We've been in business for about 10 years, primarily in Toronto,” said Busic. “Then we moved slowly to St. Catherine's. At the beginning of this year I decided to move the business into Buffalo because Buffalo is such a great place. There's a burgeoning, vibrant music industry here and a lot of great bands.”

The needs of the artists Busic was working with pushed him in his current direction. “I own a record company called Magnetic Air. A lot of my artists wanted to do off-stage sales so I got into manufacturing. We primarily do indie bands now and we do some commercial stuff. We did some work for Rob Takac's label Good Charamel.”

CDExperts doesn't actually manufacture anything. The company acts as sort of a middle man between major manufacturers and smaller bands. The company has partnered with a big name (but anonymous) distributor for over 6 years to ensure the highest quality for their customers. They utilize four plants – two in the US, one in Canada, and one in Austria. “Whoever is buying products through us is getting an absolute top-of-the-line product. Every 6, 7, 8 months [the company] upgrades their equipment, and the old equipment gets bought out by small manufacturing guys, so when you deal with small factories, you're dealing with antiquated equipment. With us, it's all state of the art.

“All of our CDs are what's called 'replicated,' in other words we never burn CDRs. We just did an indie package where the band ordered 300 CDs and they're all replicated. They're all the quality as our 1000, 2000 and 5000 CD run.”

When Busic moved to Buffalo he hired Western New York native Katie Hildreth to be the company's production manager. Hildreth then brought Buffalo native Ray Hangen into the fold as the sales manager. The staff might not be numerous, but Busic believes that CDExperts has an advantage because of their small stature. “By being simply a broker we can keep a very low profile, low overhead, and pass on the savings to the bands who we know don't have a whole lot of money. Katie is a great designer, so we offer design services. We also automatically submit artists we're working with into the CDBaby system, and we also put them up on 30-odd web-based download companies. We give the band a certificate from CDBaby with our logo on it, they send it into CDBaby, it's normally a $35 fee to sign up with them but with us it's free.”

Hildreth agrees. “I think that because of the little team we put together we all have a connection to the music industry in some way. [Zoran's] been a band manager, Ray's a drummer, I was a previous president of the Buffalo Music Hall of Fame, as well as with most of my customers outside here I do a lot of freelance work and they're all musicians. I do a lot of promotion and stuff like that. We all enjoy working with musicians and try to make it as pleasant as possible.”

CDExperts business isn't just dedicated to local musicians, though. Other businesses and clubs around the area are free to employ the company for any of their needs as well. They could even make use of the company's DVDExperts sister label which produces, you guessed it, DVDs. The company actually presses any disc-based media, including CD-ROMs and Blu-Ray discs as well. The company plans to reach out to small filmmakers for DVD production as time goes on.

They also offer several options in terms of packaging, While clients can opt for the traditional jewel casing most CDs are sold in, the company sells cardboard casing for “digipacks” as well. They're also experimenting with more environmentally friendly options. “We're exploring a lot of 'green products.' We have a digipack tray that is made entirely out of recycled potato starch – it's actually edible, biodegradable.”

Busic said that the company will do everything they can to fit the needs of their customers, especially in an eco-friendly sense. “What's good about us is we can go anywhere and buy from anybody, whatever the client wants. It's very important that we move as people see the problems we're having planetaraly that we move in that direction also. If someone comes in and they're an amateur designer, we'll do a little tweaking no charge.”

And while the music industry is wrestling with how to handle piracy in the digital age, Hildreth believes that CDExperts' focus on smaller artists helps them avoid those issues. “While you hear about the major labels losing money on CD sales because people are buying downloads, or stealing downloads, I think with indie bands, because they make so much of their money by selling CDs off the stage that we're always going to have business.”