Rants // Can You Afford to Release Your Album on Vinyl?

Original thread by Posthuman

I work for a small vinyl pressing plant, our customers are mostly independent artists doing small-run pressings. My job is advising people on how it all works.

Here’s a short thread outlining the very basic costs of pressing and releasing an album:

There are two basic rules of thumb for being able to afford to press vinyl.

If you have 75 fans who will buy an album for $20 off bandcamp or at gigs/merch stalls, you can afford to press a record. If you have 250 fans who will buy your album from shops at $20, you can afford to press & distribute.

Much of the cost of pressing records is in the setup. First the music is cut to a lacquer, one per side. Lacquers are then processed in chemical baths via electrolysis into stampers (also called metalwork or plates). This process is manual, time consuming & expensive – it’s the bulk of the cost.

These stampers are then used on the hydraulic press to run off “test pressings” usually 5 copies just one white labels (no artwork), just to check there are no problems. After they have been sent to the customer, checked & approved, the main run of vinyl is then pressed.

At our plant, the cost of pressing 100 records, with colour centre labels, printed sleeves, all setup costs & shipping to the US is $1124. This includes mastering for vinyl (which talking about could take up a whole hundred other posts! it’s very different to digital masters).

If you were to sell these records for $20 each on Bandcamp, you would get about $17 per sale on each after Bandcamp & processing fees. To break even on the $1124 outlay would take approximately 75 Bandcamp sales. This is why 75 fans is the magic number for self-release.

Selling to a distributor, who would then sell onto shops works differently. They would buy from you at wholesale price, then mark up to “dealer price” to the shops, who then mark up to retail. For a record to retail for around $20 in the shop, you’d be selling to distribution for around $8.

This is why you’d need to press more records to get the per-unit cost down. Breakeven at these prices is around 250 sales, if using our plant. Shop around! Other plants may be cheaper Obviously this goes down if you are say, selling 100 from your Bandcamp, and then the other 200 to distribution.

There are other factors that you can add – coloured vinyl, or effects like marbling, splatters, artwork inserts, stickers, shrinkwrap etc. These things cost extra, but you can offset them by raising the retail price of your records. When doing small bespoke runs, details & extras matter.

A single record can hold about 40-45 minutes worth of music (at 33rpm) at decent enough quality for home listening. Pushing more than that means quieter pressings, lower quality / more apparent surface noise – and over 25 mins a side a lot of plants will simply refuse to cut.

This is just a rule-of-thumb guide to costs. There’s obviously a LOT more to pressing vinyl, from all the technical stuff on mastering & cutting, to advice on how to ship records to customers, things like tax & import duties.