advice on doing a vinyl run

coldfuture · Post by **coldfuture** » Tue May 18, 2010 9:12 pm

patrick bateman wrote:okay, so first up you need to take the decision if you want to sell the records to each store yourself, or if you want to use a distributor.

Doing it yourself means you need to get in touch with each and every store and make agreements, and send them the records yourself.

Doing it through a distributor means you need to get an agreement with a distributor who sells your records for you.

Is the plan to only do runs of your own music and only as whitelabel?
How many do you plan to print of each release?

It will probably be a good bit of my own music, tho I have a couple of friends here whom I also believe in quite a bit. They do some amazing techno music with some real grit to it.

Yes I think it will be like a stamped white label sort of thing.. I love that aesthetic quite a bit.

I was thinking somewhere between 3-500 per release? Does that sound right?

coldfuture · Post by **coldfuture** » Tue May 18, 2010 9:16 pm

Thanks for the reply Steevio. Yeah the USA is a mystery as far as this goes, its hard to get around here as the sheer land mass is voluminous!

Its hard to know from city to city even whats going on or what the local character is.

I suppose all I can do is try and figure this thing out.

patrick bateman · Post by **patrick bateman** » Tue May 18, 2010 9:35 pm

victorjohn wrote:
I was thinking somewhere between 3-500 per release? Does that sound right?

Let me say it like this. I was playing with a quite big artist from LA last weekend in Copenhagen, and he told me that he also does only 3-4-500 of many of his releases, so maybe 500 is a bit optimistic...

Roual · Post by **Roual** » Tue May 18, 2010 11:34 pm

my advice is to contact some distributors in Europe.

ask them for advice and whether they'd be interesting taking your label.

get your stock pressed up in europe and the distributor will ship back to USA for you at a cost.

You won't make any or much money, but it gives you the opportunity to get your name out there.

If you need any advice on distributors or vinyl pressers then i'm happy to oblige via pm

there's only 3 decent pressers in Europe: MPO, Record Industries and Vinyl Factory. Each of these have problems, but they're the best for quality of product and service.

Although they all suffer from problems from time to time

tone-def · Post by **tone-def** » Wed May 19, 2010 12:47 am

Roual wrote: there's only 3 decent pressers in Europe: MPO, Record Industries and Vinyl Factory. Each of these have problems, but they're the best for quality of product and service.

i've only heard bad things about MPO. i'm sure there are some smaller less known pressers about who can do a good job.

patrick bateman · Post by **patrick bateman** » Wed May 19, 2010 6:52 am

tone-def wrote:
Roual wrote: there's only 3 decent pressers in Europe: MPO, Record Industries and Vinyl Factory. Each of these have problems, but they're the best for quality of product and service.
i've only heard bad things about MPO. i'm sure there are some smaller less known pressers about who can do a good job.

And I have only had problems with MPO, switched after 5 releases.

Optimal is great, so is Pallas and quite few others in Germany. Search on this forum, been discussed a few times before. Also distributors been discussed before.

Kompakt. Was, InterGroover, Straight are some of the bigger ones, maybe try and see if your music would fit some of the smaller ones.
If you're going for a distributor, you need to have the first 3 releases ready, a business plan, artwork, idea and so forth ready to present to them.

You could also do 200 copies, and see if you could make a deal with 2 stores (decks, juno, freebase etc etc)...

steevio · Post by **steevio** » Wed May 19, 2010 10:24 am

i agree with patrick, 500 is way optimistic.

a few years ago you could shift 500 - 1000 easily, but not now.

i'd start with 200, and get a repress if they seem to be selling ok. it costs a little extra for set-up each time you repress (with my pressing plant its only £35 )

i dont agree about there only being 3 good PP's in Europe, my plant Portalspace in London is very high quality, but its not cheap,
but whats the point in cutting corners on something thats effectively an art project for the love, its certainly not going to make you any money.

http://www.thevinylfactory.com/vf-manufacturing

Portalspace is the old EMI plant, top of the range.

Freebase Record shop in Frankfurt are really good to deal with, they'll buy vinyl from you directly, and they shift alot for me.
my distributor Kompakt are also very easy to deal with but will only sell what they really like, and have cut back their roster recently.

you could also try Baked Goods Distribution

http://www.baked-goods.com/

PsyTox · Post by **PsyTox** » Wed May 19, 2010 10:49 am

speaking in terms of costs, try pressing 300 as this is currently the amount that will get you the best "price per unit" vs getting most of your records sold. 200 is almost impossible to make breakeven.

Either way, get a distributor unless you feel you can sell them in your area. Try and get a german one, usually very good (deutsche grünlichkeit

) and a vast potential market. Finding a distri can be a long and hard journey but if you find a good one it'll be a massive surplus for you and your label.

Good luck with the vinyl, you'll notice it's a blast when you get your first "own" record in your hands, proud moment