Vinyl Me Please (store, exclusives, swaps, etc)

AC Slaughter said:
Here was the answer when I asked about keeping my grandfathered pricing. Also note that my renewal is on 9/30 which why i cant see the bridge discount yet. So the only people that can see it are ones set to renew on 8/30


You'll recieve an email prior to your subsciption renewal containing details on a bridge plan offer, which will give you a significant discount towards your next subscription renewal to help offset the price increase. We hope you'll stick around, but we totally understand if you need to cancel. Don't hesitate to reach out if there's anything at all we can help with moving forward.
Elli
Customer Support Agent
VMP
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I love how they're all "cancel if you want; we don't care!"
 
$43 for a John Mayer record. I can think of very few VMP "Essentials" releases that I would pay $43 for. I am the furthest I've been from the moment I first opened the VMP box my wife got me for Christmas 2017 with Sorcerer by Miles Davis in it. That feeling is completely gone now.
 
siremobunny said:
Because my annual renewal is up in September, they sent me an email offering a discounted renewal for $299 instead of $399...anyone else getting that?

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Mine is up in September and I'm not receiving this. Not sure why, It'll make it much easier for me to decide if I'm staying If I can sign up for a 1 year at the discounted price.
 
Indymisanthrope said:
Take: VMP basically *are* flippers.
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mdmost said:
$43 for a John Mayer record. I can think of very few VMP "Essentials" releases that I would pay $43 for. I am the furthest I've been from the moment I first opened the VMP box my wife got me for Christmas 2017 with Sorcerer by Miles Davis in it. That feeling is completely gone now.
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I was tempted to go with the yearly when this came in but this is setting off massive red flags for me. I'm not entirely sure my investment would actually be that safe.

And if they do have short term cash flow issues I'd imagine the quality of exclusives may take even a hit (or even more of a hit depending on your views on recent releases) so you'd just end up with a shelf full of shiny, coloured vinyl equivalents to dog shit.

For internationals it was always a bargain to be honest but now at those prices it's just a bit too rich.
 
I just did quick dumb math, and it is really startling how much the Grateful Dead box may have screwed them. I imagine as a distributor, their margins are very thin so even conservatively if we were to say each Dead box cost them $300, and they are sitting on say 4,000 boxes...

That's 1.2 million dollars of dead inventory. I work for a distributor significantly larger than VMP, and for us that would be disastrous. For them? Its enough to tank the company, and in the interim lead to them trying to recoup losses through things like increasing prices.
 
  • Go into business with a shady 3rd party scalper
  • Get called out on it
  • “If we ignore this it will go away”
  • It doesn’t go away & cancellations start rolling in.
  • “Shit, we need to cut ties with this guy. But if we do, we’ll lose a lot of profit.”
  • Solution: raise prices on the customers we were already screwing over.
  • Customers: “Goodbye.”
Given the events of the past 72 hours, it seems plainly obvious that this is what’s happening.
 
So instead of a 3 month "rejoin" discount, they're trying a 3 month "please stay joined aka bridge" discount
Crazy to think if you signed up for the domestic version of both of these your subscription costs would be:

$54
April $18
May $18
June $18

$60
July $20
August $20
September $20

$90 (89.25)
October $30
November $30
December $30
 
slabsofvinyl said:
These guys desperately need a COO who knows how to run a business. It’s just embarrassing at this point.
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This is my exact thoughts. Pauly said on Reddit that they underestimated how quickly costs were growing compared to sales. You can't just stumble across something like that one day and decide to almost double prices...that's something that has to be implemented gradually. What a disgrace that this company is such a shit show.
 
I am just catching up, but I have a few thoughts:

1)There's some issue with their relationship with scalpers, timing cannot just be coincidence.

2) The GD Anthology could have been awesome, but instead it is grossly overpriced and is going to be an anchor and albatross on their bottom line

3) Of course they do this before Spirtiualized, which is going to have a huge demand.

4) Now I have to pay for their dumbass business decisions

I'm considering staying through for September because I really want Spirtualized, but no way I sign up for 2 more months without knowing in advance what they will be and them being awesome. I'm pretty much Spirtualized and out at this point.
 
Btsvinylfarm said:
I actually think they're having balance sheet issues. It seems abundantly clear that they need money upfront, which is why there is no pay-as-you-go option for the longer duration subscriptions, and why they invoice you upon order rather than when an item ships. My guess is they're pretty loaded up on debt and have some big liabilities.
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Btsvinylfarm said:
VMP likely is not a company with a robust P&L - they make healthy amounts of revenue, but I can't imagine the business is all that profitable. They also probably have a delicate balance sheet, and that's why they can't offer a pay-when-it-ships model. Probably a lot of outstanding liabilities + they definitely recently went through a new round of financing/capital injection. They need the upfront cashflows to sustain in the near term.

So, something like what has happened this past month is going to hurt them.

Now, I don't know if this will make them fix everything, because I'm simply not sure they're capable of fixing anything. But this clusterfuck, unlike smaller ones of the past, is more likely than ever to hit their wallets.
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Btsvinylfarm said:
Okay but paying back the investment isn't their only cost and not their only outstanding liability, nor should it be their primary focus, either. Their focus should be on profitability growth/margin expansion and securing revenue streams long term.

At 30K unique subs, and let's use $27 per sub per month as an average, that's ~$9.7M in annual revenues from subscriptions.

At 30K subs, that's 360K records on an annual basis. Using $15 as a unit cost (and who knows, because I don't know their licensing structure), that's $5.4M in cost. Then there's the outbound freight cost, let's assume $3/shipped album. That's $1.08M.

I think Storf has mentioned VMP has ~25 employees. This one is a challenge without knowing all the roles and salary/wage structure, or benefits. But for grins, let's assume the CEO, CFO, and 3 other executive levels are taking a $100K salary. Then next 10 employees, maybe assume $60K? For the remaining 10, let's assuming they're full-time hourly at $13/hr? That puts your total salary and wages at just shy of $1.4M. Now, I have no idea if VMP offers health care, 401K, profit/revenue sharing, etc. And I have no idea what the overtime usage is like. We can just tack on a 30% benefit rate and shrug. That's $0.42M.

With all of that, VMP is left with $1.4M in EBITA (a 15% margin, and ~$120K in profit per month) before we tack on any other incurred expenses.

VMP certainly pays for advertising on social media, and has marketing expenses; maybe they contract with an agency for that. Same goes for their web platform (and I'd ask for a refund at this point). They also are paying for warehouse space for excess inventory, basically utilities, basic office supplies and travel expenses for someone like Storf. I can't make informed guesses on what that all adds up to. But it certainly starts to eat away at that EBITA. Taxes, interest on debt, etc...It all adds up. Maybe my assumptions aren't 100% spot on, but I don't think they're way off, either. Point being is that out of that $10M annual revenue, not much is left at the end of the day. And there's likely some months where they run in the red on the income statement.
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Btsvinylfarm said:
Selling out RotMs and having strong revenues doesn't necessarily translate into having healthy profits, cash flows, or even a healthy balance sheet. We did the exercised the other day - VMP can easily be generating $10M+ in annual revenues and be losing month on a month to month basis.

The fact that they aren't actually processing refunds despite confirming them is a HUGE red flag. Either the system is really THAT fucked, or they don't have the money
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I remember speculating on their financial health back during the web integration issues. The price increase announcement isn't surprising to me. I don't think they're a financially healthy organization and this is more evidence. If you have to raise prices above the going market rate, and do not enhance the value proposition and product offerings, you don't have a revenue problem; you have a cost problem (and probably some cash flow/balance sheet issues).
 
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