Morris Ballen, whose company, Disc Makers, manufactured small runs of high-quality vinyl records, cassettes and CDs, offering a critical service to countless punk rockers, rappers, church choirs and garage bands who made music without the backing of a major label, died on Sept. 21 at his home in Philadelphia. He was 88.
His daughter Anne Ballen Ladenson confirmed the death.
Especially in the days before digital music, independent artists faced a challenge: They needed to get physical copies of their music into the hands of their fans, but they couldn’t afford — and didn’t need — the massive production runs offered by major manufacturers.
Enter Mr. Ballen and Disc Makers. His one-stop shop, in a factory outside Philadelphia, provided everything a musician required, including mastering, graphic design and vinyl (and later cassette and CD) pressing, sometimes just a few hundred units at a time.
He also offered free bar codes, so artists could sell their music in record stores, as well as marketing assistance like posters and fliers.
“Disc Makers gave musicians agency to create something on their own, independently,” said Mick Chorba, the singer-songwriter for the New Jersey-based indie rock band the Successful Failures, who has been using Disc Makers for decades.
The company and its predecessor, the Ballen Record Co., has been around since the 1940s. But it came into its own in the 1980s, as the declining cost of production equipment and the D.I.Y. aesthetic of underground music made Disc Makers a favorite for punk and hip-hop artists.
Henry Rollins, who fronted the punk band Black Flag, was a devoted customer; so were DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince (a.k.a. Will Smith), who were, famously, “in West Philadelphia born and raised.”
Eminem even name checked the company in his 2002 song “Nail in the Coffin”:
Makin’ copies of your covers of cassette singles
To sell them out of the trunk of your Tracer
Spendin’ your whole paychecks at Disc Makers
But Mr. Ballen, who ran the company with his brother, Larry, worked with anyone and everyone.
“There is no such thing as a typical customer,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1996. “You have demos for new bands. You have churches. You have marching bands.”
Mr. Ballen liked to hire musicians; at times, they comprised more than three-quarters of the employee rolls.
“I think he thought their brains were wired differently because they could learn music, they could communicate with people, they could work in teams,” said Jim Foley, whose band Canadian Invasion was a client and who later worked there himself, “and they generally were hustlers.” Mr. Foley is now president of BookBaby, a division of Disc Makers’ parent company, DIY Media Group, focused on independent publishing. There were so many musicians working at the company, in fact, that for over 20 years Disc Makers hosted DM Palooza, a charity music festival featuring their bands.
Over more than 30 years, Mr. Ballen and his brother took the company from under $5 million in revenue to more than $40 million, all while navigating the rapid shifts from vinyl to cassette to CD.
With the rise of digital formats, Disc Makers had to pivot again, adding a distribution arm to get clients’ music onto online platforms. It also added an e-book division.
Today, though, both vinyl and CDs are making a comeback, especially among younger musicians just starting out — the sort of customers who have always formed Disc Makers’ client base.
“Our vinyl revenues at Disc Makers are up 400 percent over the last three years,” Tony van Veen, the chief executive, said in an interview. “This business is growing again.”
Morris Louis Ballen was born on Aug. 10, 1938, in Philadelphia. His father, Ivin, was the founder and owner of the Ballen Record Co. It was very much a family business: His mother, Rose (Ostroff) Ballen, worked in the office, and he and his brother worked there in high school.
By the time he graduated from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1960, with a degree in economics and accounting, he knew he wanted to work for his father.
The Ballen Record Co. began as a label, with its own vinyl press. Especially after it bought Gotham Records, a New York label, from Sam Goody, the music retailer, it was known for its stable of blues, gospel and R&B acts.
The label business was unpredictable in the rapidly changing music landscape of the 1950s, so Ivin Ballen shifted to manufacturing for other labels — first 78s, then 45 r.p.m. singles, and later to LPs and eight-track cassettes. He changed the company’s name to Disc Makers in 1959.
Even that side of the industry could be tough: Among its clients was Cameo-Parkway, which hit it big with Chubby Checker’s “The Twist,” in 1960.
It was “probably the biggest single record we ever manufactured,” Morris Ballen told The Jewish Exponent in 1995. “But when that label collapsed, we collapsed for a while.”
After another downturn in 1980 that briefly pushed the company into Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Mr. Ballen shifted to focus on independent artists. By the end of the 1980s, almost the entirety of Disc Makers’ business was directly with musicians.
Mr. Ballen’s first marriage ended in divorce. Along with his daughter Anne, he is survived by his wife, Lynn; another daughter, Carolyn Ballen Stanish; a stepdaughter, Tracy Steele; and six grandchildren.
It might seem like focusing on a niche market not known for its wealth would be a tough business model, but Mr. Ballen insisted that by keeping his prices low and his quality high, his market extended to anybody with a song in their head and a few dollars in their pocket.
“The whole world’s out there, and they all come in,” he told The Los Angeles Times. “It’s big. Big. Bigger than you can imagine.”
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