Can you afford a vinyl record pressing?

I’ve been getting a lot of questions regarding vinyl production lately, as I work through some vinyl mastering projects.

Vinyl mastering and vinyl production can be kind of a confusing and expensive process, especially if it’s your first time doing it. I’ll get into how the technical production of vinyl records works at a future date. Before you get into the technical side, though, it’s important to fully understand all of the different the costs associated with putting your music out on this type of medium.

That’s why I thought I’d put together a little sheet to help explain why vinyl records cost as much as they do at the merch table, and where all that money is going.

It’s called Can You Afford a Vinyl Record Pressing?

Running the numbers on vinyl, and new vinyl production innovations

It’s really important to run the numbers before you commit to putting your music out on vinyl.  The objective is to end up with a high quality product that you can at least have a chance to break even on, for the first pressing.  But, if you don’t get precise with your numbers, you can easily waste a whole lot of money.

The good news is that the manufacturing costs for vinyl have gone down significantly in recent years, as the old lathe tech has been dusted off and modernized.

And, it’s really exciting that the minimum order sizes have gotten so reasonable as well.  This makes it much more affordable and approachable for smaller artists to do vinyl.  

If you can get really precise with the financials, it’s actually possible today to break even or make a little money when doing a small run of only 100 records, without also sacrificing quality on the manufacturing process.  Crazy.

Copy or download the sheet at the link, and you can play around with all the numbers, to get a feel for whether this makes sense to do for your musical work.

I’ve also included some technical production recommendations for how to do the pressing as well.

If you can make it work, there’s nothing quite like pulling your very own record out of the sleeve for the first time.