The Price of Everything, and Especially Vinyl Records, Goes Up

A sort-of apology for that expensive-ass record on our Bandcamp

Inflation! You heard of this? It’s everywhere. Beer prices: up. Egg prices: way up. Designer sneaker prices: eh, those have actually come down a little.

If you’re like most musicians, surviving exclusively on your beer-and-scrambled-egg diet, then inflation has already been savage. But other costs you maybe weren’t expecting to go up quite so much have been even more of a bear. Like: the cost of making vinyl records.

We last made records in March 2020, right before covid. At that time, a run of 200 copies rang us about $2200 CAD. We splurged on coloured vinyl, but cut corners (literally?) on a fold-over cover rather than a full jacket, so it’s fair to say this amount represents more-or-less the least a band could pay for a run of records at that time.

Fast forward three years, and the same quote has skyrocketed all the way up to [checks email] $3046.40! That’s a pretty stunning almost-40% increase in only a few years.

(This total might not be exhaustively representative, but we did obtain quotes from at least five vendors, and they were all within this ballpark, so I’ll stand by it.)

I’m not going to get into what might be driving such an outsized price hike; suffice to say, it’s some combination of supply chain bottlenecks (remember when one of the world’s only vinyl plate manufacturers burned down not that long ago?), increased demand, and general inflation-related expense incursions by vinyl plants being passed on to customers.

The downstream effect for a band with a modest audience like us was that, uh, we couldn’t afford it anymore. (We probably couldn’t afford it before, either, but shh). Selling at an already-pushing-it $25 per unit, we would need to clear 121 units out of 200 to start breaking even.

However! We really wanted to have at least a few records around for (ourselves and) our vinyl-enthusiast supporters, so we decided to go the hand-lathing route. A hand-lathed record is basically a record that is produced by having the grooves cut into wax by a manually-operated machine, as opposed to pressed into wax by a machine-mounted master plate.

As you can imagine, having someone babysit a machine while it essentially plays your record onto a piece of vinyl is not the most time-efficient production technique from a human labour standpoint, and the price reflects this. However, as a means of producing smaller quantities of records without having to get a master plate produced, it makes the price-per-unit more manageable at smaller production points.

Still, we knew these records were going to be eye-wateringly expensive for our supporters. But we made the judgment call that it would be easier to sell 20 records at $40 than 120 records at $25. Time will tell on that front, I guess, but so far, about a week into sales, we’re moving enough to be happy with our decision.

(Update: we’re down to only a handful of copies of our very small initial {only?} run of 30, so it seems this strategy was indeed the right one {for us}.)

And indeed, at almost $33 per unit after vinyl production and printing are taken into account, even at $40 we are barely covering our costs. This project exists simply to give our supporters a little vinyl hype.

In order to keep the price point as low as possible, we went full DIY on the packaging, meaning we printed, cut, and glued our own sleeves, labels, and liner sheets (with the help of the indefatigably good natured Reza of PrintPrint). This ended up being an interesting and (sometimes) fun project, and I learned a lot in the process about print layout and physical merchandising (again, while driving Reza absolutely insane with questions and mistakes). I’ll do a follow-up post soon on our process for this, in case it helps anyone going down the same road from making a few of my beginnerish mistakes.

Oh, and if you’re interested in getting some records lathed, I highly recommend Tyler at Audio Geography in Rhode Island. Even though we’re all the way over on the other coast in another country, his options provided the best price point for us (being able to snug up 7 songs onto a 10” record helped, and it not something other lathers were willing or able to do), and even his shipping rates to Canada were very reasonable. Thanks Tyler!