Dead C
Well-Known Member
Look at that reddit gold highlighting those new comments
Vinyl Me Please (store, exclusives, swaps, etc)
- Thread starter Captainfog
- Start date
Look at that reddit gold highlighting those new comments
Ethos99
Well-Known Member
Good points however you're basing your math off one track (essentials) and not counting the other two tracks and all the exclusives they sell each month.
And not to nitpick but i guessed $13 a record for a reason and then you rounded up 2 bucks. Independent record stores pay around ~$13 for a single disc album. They (VMP) commission the pressing so I'm sure their costs are less.
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fyi, 1598 squared is 2553604.
Btsvinylfarm
Active Member
No, 30K is what I'm using for all subs, all tracks. The most recent information we have is that VMP does ~$10M/year in revenues. My math works to that (I didn't add in exclusives and other items they sell, but you'd also tack on an iterative material cost).
VMP isn't an independent record store, though. They're a label. They have licensing fees and the whole 9 yards, and then they have to inventory it, stock it, etc. $15/album is fair if not short.
spilledleche
Well-Known Member
I've actually been working on something with a customer lately that has made me think of how VMP is doing this. A lot of inventory systems work on the principle that you can overdraw from stock on the premise that the item will be replenished. For instance, a plumber could say they need 5 toilets for a job but the inventory only has 2 in stock. That's fine - you take the 2, order 3 more for the job and additional to bring your stock level up to whatever you want to keep in inventory and move along.
However, VMP's entire business model is centered entirely around scarcity. That doesn't really jive with a lot of these types of systems from my experience. Because their entire inventory is essentially dead stock to be depleted and not replenished, they should be using a model where you place items on hold until fulfillment but also immediately deduct them from your stock count. But it feels like they run on a model of allowing overdraw and then just deal with the consequences after the fact.
I have to imagine that they have some amazing conversations with Saddle Creek on this kind of stuff and that SC are also heavily to blame for a lot of this, but VMP is just so much more dislikable at this point.
Btsvinylfarm
Active Member
Ethos99
Well-Known Member
Not a bad idea, order them all and pick the flattest one that's on the bottom!
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Ethos99
Well-Known Member
No, my Blossom is still sitting by itself on someone else's shelf although VMP says its mine.
Ethos99
Well-Known Member
Yes but some of the costs are fixed and dont change based on how many records they sell (Labor, etc).
2018 revenue was 12.4M based on this article https://www.inc.com/magazine/201809/yasmin-gagne/2018-inc5000-vinyl-me-please.html and Crunchbase.com.
Yes but a label can create and distribute a record to an independent record store (their customer) for about $13 with licensing and everything and make money. Very Meaty Pizza should be able to do the same.
Btsvinylfarm
Active Member
I mean, I can re-run the numbers for account for that (and include exclusives, rising, etc) in my estimates, but you'll still have flow through on material costs. It pads the bottom line a bit, but not that much.
Yeah but A) most labels don't require getting 3rd party license agreements for their albums since they already own the rights and B) VMP's runs are very likely smaller (thus more costly) than a major label's output. For something like Demon Days and others where maybe 15K+ got pressed, then sure. But a lot of VMP's stuff is smaller and thus more costly on a per-unit basis. They don't get the benefit of scale with a lot of these titles.
And none of this factors in how the Classics track is almost definitely the most costly for them - pressing at QRP isn't cheap and neither is enlisting RKS to cut, or getting Blue Note/Columbia/Stax/etc licenses.
Dead C
Well-Known Member
I just keep thinking about how people got mad about me telling them that the migration was going to be a guaranteed shitshow on reddit, so they should watch their VMP accounts for any issues or changes.
I'm alarmist, you know.
Also, every time I see @CCKrone post on here, I have 2 thoughts go through my head. The first is that I usually agree with the comment and I think you're spot on. The other thought, you probably already know, if you remember responding to me on the old forum when I said to get back to me in a few weeks and you guaranteed that your positive feelings about VMP would never change, while defending them and suggesting that everyone else was overreacting, but you're more... I don't know... realistic or less entitled or something to that effect.
It didn't even take that long and you were justifiably and effectively punching them in the throat on the forum cancelation announcement thread. #Darkside
Not to put you on blast, but I mention this for a couple of reasons. The first is that I like seeing your comments now and it's an elephant for me, even if it's only in my room. The second is because I remember making a comment at one point on the old forum myself, defending Storf on something where it felt like people were getting worked up and going at him a little hard for whatever it was. A lot of us probably have at one point or another, before recognizing the magnitude of how much they actually do fuck everyone over.
We all keep discussing this weird dynamic at play and the gaslighting and sychophants, but, while these tactics are greasy and adolescent, they've proven fairly effective at convincing members to gaslight each other without realizing it. If we weren't us, we'd probably look crazy to us. Nobody could reasonably be expected to anticipate the levels of incompetence and lack of respect for their customers that they've gone on to display without experiencing it first hand. VMP knows that there's always going to be new members with good intentions showing up wanting to discuss records and being greeted with what appears on it's face to be entitled maniacs overreacting to a simple record delay. They kind of bank on that idea that there is an endless supply of new customers that will be understandably skeptical of the rantings of a bunch of angry redditors.
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Ethos99
Well-Known Member
I think its those large runs that support everything else. I remember when they had the queen artwork f'up and storf said they were repackaging 20K orders. Cant remember how long after that it took to sell out but that run must have been 25-30k i would imagine.
As fun as this is to talk about, neither of us have enough info to say definitively. Very interesting discussion though. I have to admit the business side is more interesting to me than the music side sometimes.
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scotthilk
Well-Known Member
AnthonyI
Well-Known Member
Guaranteed that's what they think, but this is a means to an end. If as a company you can't retain customers it's only a question of time.
Dead C
Well-Known Member
tonythegamer
Well-Known Member
That’d be a really generous PIF considering how much this ones going for on discogs
Indymisanthrope
Well-Known Member
7 months since I canceled, and I've never gotten a single other email from them. I got unsubscribed from EVERYthing, apparently.
FWIW, the Business Insider story in March of 2018 said they had about 30k active subs across 25k people, and that they shipped about 430k records in 2017. But that was also when they were running a much bigger store, so I don't know that it informs your calculations very much now. Either way, I'd guess that the 30k/25k figures are higher now than they were when those figures were floated for that story 2 years ago, especially with the exclusives factored in.
MikeH
Well-Known Member
To be honest, I'd be surprised if anybody at VMP outside of Storf and Pauly know how much of a shit show it was. Nobody there communicates with anybody else.
Dead C
Well-Known Member
Maybe they should shift their (un)official VMP correspondence over to the YouTube comment section before relocating to 4Chan
BTW, searching Google images for "fucking amateurs"... NSFW