Reflections from my two and a half hour meeting with Llyod (neither of us expected it to go that long).
First and foremost, the employees of VMP are people, they have had some recent issues with threats, please keep that in mind; they are fine with criticism of the company but personal attacks are not cool. I don't any of really fall into that category.
Llyod seems to have a good head about directions to go. He definitely is great at communicating. We talked quite a bit about that and where it has been a struggle in the past. I emphasized some staff need to pause before responding or even just run their response past someone else as again they are invested and take things personally when maybe it isn't so much.
We talked about new things versus fixes needed within the company. My emphasis was on perception. I 100% understand them taking on new things to help fund what needs to be done but the consumer doesn't always see that. I, at times, get frustrated that they are say doing Anthology when shipping is still a mess. But things like Anthology help them fund for the fix. That said a new platform through Shopify is coming (as seen with Anthology and mentioned before.) Once that is up and running VMP will have actual inventory control and numbers which you might be able to make a connection on what they would mean in terms of the future of shipping.
Concerning Weyes Blood and Hatchie, this goes with my thought I had when I heard about WB (as upset as I was/am), extrapolate if VMP had stuff missent what that means overall.
They are working on a new way to receive feedback on what is going right and what needs work. It isn't fully fleshed out yet but is in process for the next few months. Once settled it will be announced in some manner.
There are ideas on how to keep the same type of service but bring in some new ways of going about it. I would like to know a little bit more about it before I think it is a good idea. I advocated for the pre-announce model that Classics started off with. The big obstacle he shared about that is some label want their albums not announced or even they pull out right before pressing begins (this mainly affects Essentials). But the new platform will allow for some of this and an actual loyalty program (think tenure and order position). Basically, the new platform will provide a lot of options to try things out, create a more customer-friendly service.
I talked about my idea of having a damage report window. So maybe for three weeks, they collect damage reports and then they can rank them and potentially collect data on if there is an overall issue; SC messing something up (same corner dings, VMP can get a refund for that, or a pressing issue like Stars mostly is). He liked that idea, we also discussed potentially just sending out the damaged part, so if your disc is warped you just get a disc, sleeve damage you get a sleeve. They had someone come in and essentially audit the requests and there was at least one person claiming damage on every item they received. Which is why sending out just the item in the package that has the problem would prevent the abuse of flipping. What is to stop someone from dropping their album and claiming shipping/packaging damage to get a second copy to flip.
I will add more if I remember anything else of import. I think hiring Llyod may be a good turning point for VMP, but we will see and that is what I told him.
