Eric Bielsky and Austin Nelson are hoping to make it big in the music world. Like aspiring rockers, the recent college graduates live with "older roommates" – also known as parents – and spend most of their time making music in a cramped room.

They are working toward a dream, albeit one that's changed slightly since their teenage years. The pair spent their high-school days playing in a string of different bands. But they no longer rip solos; instead, they rip CDs.

Leaving the ranks of Charleston's guitar-toting hopefuls, Bielsky and Nelson recently launched Multiverse Media Duplication Inc., where they design and print album covers and burn and package discs. They're also cranking out high-quality CDs and DVDs for area law firms, churches, clinics and small businesses.

Multiverse incorporated in February and has slowly but surely drummed up clients. "We got into this because it had something to do with music," Nelson said. "But there's been a lot of interest from a bunch of different types of clients." The partners said they've been so busy, they haven't had a chance to pick up their own instruments for months.

Both Bielsky and Nelson moved back to Charleston after finishing college in December. Bielsky, who graduated from the University of Wisconsin in Madison, beefed up his business skills doing market-research work in Chile and Argentina. Nelson, a graduate of Berklee College of Music in Boston, developed some decent design chops and dabbled in CD reproduction during the past few years.

The pair hashed out a business plan in December, secured a $30,000 bank loan and promptly sank almost all of the moneyto cutting-edge equipment, including a $5,000 machine to print high-quality images on the top of CDs, a $4,000 device to replicate the contents of a disc en masse and a couple of pricey packaging contraptions. Their office space – two small rooms in Mount Pleasant – came later, as did the advertising, which to date is mostly confined to the walls above urinals in restaurants and bars. "We should have asked for $60,000," Nelson said. "We kind of failed to think about all the overhead."

But like a garage band with expensive instruments, the details are secondary to Multiverse. What matters to these entrepreneurs is that their stuff sounds and looks good. Multiverse's main goal – besides paying the bills and the bank – is to level the steep playing field that is the landscape of the music industry. Bielsky and Nelson, like so many young musicians, grew up playing in places with names like "The Chug," passing out scratchy demo tapes recorded on shoddy equipment and hoping to get noticed by a record-label rep.

Now any dark horse with a dream and a decent recording (and some cash) can get a run of retail-ready discs from Multiverse. Multiverse charges between $16 and $1 a disc, depending on the size of the order and packaging. A band can hire Multiverse to make 1,000 discs with cases, color liner notes and shrink wrap for less than $2,000, about $2 a pop. That sort of service – like the big "local" section in the Millennium Music store on King Street in downtown Charleston – is powerful fertilizer for the area music scene. "With us, they can put out a record every month if they want," Bielsky said. "And they can make $10 off every disc, rather than the $1.50 they'd get if they ever managed to sign with a label."

Andrew Tracy, a local musician who recently started a small recording company dubbed Grandfather Records, said word about Multiverse is spreading fast. "Every recording that I do, I tell them about those guys," Tracy said. "It's pretty cool how it's all working out. Some (bands) aren't even trying to make it, but they still want something high-quality that they can give out to their friends."

Multiverse is also playing to a wider audience: wedding planners who want to offer high-quality digital photo-albums, churches that want their congregations to be able to listen to the choir at home and even real estate companies that can save on printing costs by putting their entire catalogue of property listings on CD or DVD. Multiverse is also drawing interest from law firms, thanks in part to Alex Rosen, a childhood friend of Bielsky who owns Rosen Litigation Technology Consulting.

Rosen, who sets up high-tech presentations for trial attorneys, has recommended Multiverse to a lot of his clients. "(Law firms) can spend the entire day jockeying with the few burners that they probably have in the office, or they can just upload their data to Multiverse, save time and get a much more professional product," Rosen said.

Last month, Multiverse reproduced about 600 discs, a level that is close to break-even, according to Bielsky and Nelson. The startup now has ads running in national music magazines, and once its Web site is up and running, it will be able to handle orders from anywhere. The pair hope to establish a national presence and eventually sink close to $1 million in the next level of CD-burning machinery, a device that can quickly crank out huge orders of 10,000 discs and up.

"If I wasn't doing this, I'd be going to school for graphic design or working at McDonald's," Nelson said. "Right now, we want to be overwhelmed. We're ready."