Crowd funding vinyl pressing

I heard about some company that are doing short run vinyl pressing using a crowd funding model. Basically you choose your preorder goal and if you get enough preorders they charge people and press your vinyl. You have to distribute them yourself though.

Anyone tried this? I'm thinking of doing it for my next release, maybe 100 7" singles or something.

Just black vinyl or do they press variants?

innnteresting - do you have any links to this company?

sounds cool but a tad' dangerous, as in to say - one might lose face if you pushed for a large goal and didn't reach it - plus, you wouldn't really want to be hassling people to the extremes come deadline day, still though - interested to hear more info

Its a Japanese company https://qrates.com- apparently they work with some well respected pressing plants so its good quality stuff. You can choose other colours and packaging options, can't remember if they do picture discs.

I know what you mean about losing face. One good thing though, you can buy any remaining vinyls yourself at cost price - which wouldn't be too much of a hit if it was a short run. I'm gonna do it, fuck it.

Yeah this looks very interesting. Thing is, I probably wouldn't even get 20 people interested, especially considering when I posted photos of my last physical release on facebook, everyone said "omg I want one!" and I still haven't had a single bandcamp sale in the six months that they've been available on bandcamp.. Might need to look into getting some actual fans somehow haha

to me its kinda pointless i guess, because if you have enough fans to make it with preorders you can probably just press it up yourself and not lose money. and if you don't you're just gonna look stupid when you won't be able to reach your goal or just have to buy most of the preorders yourself.

Yeah. Most of my physical sales happen at gigs anyway (ie. merch desk at chip gigs). I have a few people who buy my digital releases when they come out, which is nice, but nobody has ordered my physical releases from bandcamp since I did the Rooftop Access handmade 3" CDR thing in 2008..

If I pressed it myself I'd have to do at least 300, which would be an unrealistic goal for me - plus there's a risk, I could lose a lot of money. Doing it through Qrates would be risk free for me and anyone who preorders. I don't mind having to buy the remainder myself - I could always try selling them at gigs, hawking them to local record shops or even just giving them out to local DJs.

Worth a go I reckon - I'll report back with my project so you can all witness my lack of progress and pass judgement.

Yea man, just go for it!

Seem's like a pretty good idea for short runs, i haven't gone through the pricing part, but so far seems like it would be much cheaper than doing a run directly with another pressing company like you said (and perhaps a cheaper way to get more unique looking vinyls without paying crazy extra costs)

The only thing i'm wondering now is how much the pre-orders cost per sale? Surely they're going to have to be fairly premium in order for Qrates to get the necessary money to press them

Also, any left over vinyls you can pass around to Blogs/magazines etc. who require physical copies for reviews

In order to get the necessary pre-orders you could always put on a launch gig, and the price of admission pays for a pre-orders?

It's a wicked site actually and it doesn't have to be pre-order. You can just buy the lot if you want, which is the same as just getting them pressed up yourself obviously. Add in the fact that you can do much smaller runs, it's an awesome thing for the smaller guys trying to make something more.

The cost price ain't cheap but that's understandable - I'm not making any profit, but I'm happy to break even. Here's my breakdown of costs:

  On 5/6/2015 at 2:29 PM, TRiP said:

In order to get the necessary pre-orders you could always put on a launch gig, and the price of admission pays for a pre-orders?

Superb idea :)

Great work on those profit margins, West.

So does the handling fee cover the cost of postage from Japan? Or have you been hit by that at all?

Definitely agree though, if you break even (or not) it'll all be worth it to spread the music and take a further step to the beyond!

Heh, yeah look out Richard Branson!

As far as I can tell handling covers the lot being delivered to me. There's another bit where you have to add your delivery costs to UK, Europe and the east of the world. I just need to go the post office to get some quotes then I'm good to go I think...

Cool idea and good luck, make sure you spam the links on here and I'll check it out

  On 5/9/2015 at 10:52 PM, fletcher said:

Cool idea and good luck, make sure you spam the links on here and I'll check it out

Cheers mate, will do - starting my spam campaign tomorrow.

So, I've just fired up my 30 day campaign - posted the details here http://forum.watmm.com/topic/87541-potential-vinyl-release

I'm reading into this service now and deciding wether its beneficial or not. Are the releases on the front page all that's available for funding? I'm looking to see if there are more releases.

  On 5/6/2015 at 7:29 PM, westhead said:

Heh, yeah look out Richard Branson!

 

As far as I can tell handling covers the lot being delivered to me. There's another bit where you have to add your delivery costs to UK, Europe and the east of the world. I just need to go the post office to get some quotes then I'm good to go I think...

You will find the materials cost and postage will be almost as much as the record itself when it comes to shipping vinyl.

The boxes aren't so bad: http://www.amazon.com/Variable-Depth-Record-Mailers-White/dp/B0034PU6Y8

http://www.4bubble.com/lp-record-mailers-boxes

http://www.vinylrevival.com/packing/

http://wilton-of-london.co.uk/html/products/mailers.html(for that classic Rephlex look)

Postage should be easy to figure out - take the weight of the finished record in the sleeve + the weight and dimensions of the mailer and go the post office or look online for shipping costs within the UK, outside the UK (US, ASIA) and use that as an average.

They need to fix their site a bit. I'd like to see a page of existing funding projects, a separate page for already funded projects. Right now it seems I can only find projects while browsing the tags?

Yeah the site need a bit of work - they're open to feedback though so I can see it improving a lot in the near future. I got put lucky being featured on the homepage - they didn't even notify me it was happening.

For the shipping I got some quotes from Royal Mail, it breaks down like this:

UK 1st class - £0.72

Europe standard - £2.45

International standard - £3.30