A while back, we mentioned starting a Vinyl Collective cooperative imprint where shareholders could buy in and in part help us decide which records would come out on this label. This label would give record collectors an opportunity to be involved in running a vinyl imprint without taking much of a risk.

I am working out the details, but here are the basic principles. And feel free to offer suggestions and a name for the label. I like “The Collective”, “Cooperative Records”, or Armchair Mogul. (Click the Link to Read More)

We would offer 100 shares at around $50 to $60 each. This would raise between $5,000 and $6,000 to work with which would give us enough money to press 2 albums at 1,000 copies apiece. Each shareholder would be given a copy of the rarest variation of the pressing for both records. They are promised at least 2 rare records, but if things go well, the revenue brought in for sales of the records would go to pressing new releases and in theory this initial investment of $50/$60 could possibly bring in 50 records for each shareholder.

We would appoint 10 board members (I already have them in mind so please do not ask to be a board member).

Each pressing of 1000, We would press 200 copies of 1 color and 800 copies of another color. We would give the participating band and label each 10 percent of the pressing so things would break down in the following manner:

200 pressing (100 to shareholders, 10 to board members, 20 to band, 20 to label, 10 to Vinyl Collective, and 40 for sale on VC) 800 pressing (10 percent to the band, 10 percent to the label, the remainder would be sold to distributors and on VC)

That leaves almost 600 copies left for sale from each pressing. The idea is that the revenue from selling these records wholesale and retail on Vinyl Collective would a. go towards pressing new records and b. go towards making a few bucks for Vinyl Collective.

With the help of 100 shareholders to spread the word, I think it shouldn’t be too hard to sell through each of the pressings.

So now the hard part, how do we select bands? This could get weird, but my thought was that if we had 10 board members, we would assign shareholders to each of the board members (10 per board member). The shareholders could make suggestions (3 per induction period) to the board members who would collect these suggestions. Then we would find a site to put all the suggestions on where we could vote on which records we would do. It would be great to allow voters to pick a number 1 choice, a number 2 choice, and a number 3 choice where each vote 1, 2, or 3 would add varying points towards those releases. If that release either reaches a certain threshold or is #1 and #2, those would be the records we would attempt to press on vinyl. We of course will need to speak to the respective labels and get permission to put it out on vinyl.

I really want to make sure we establish a few rules. 2 on the top of my head are that the release should have never before been released on vinyl. And I think it is important that the record fits on a single LP. The addition of a 2nd LP throws our numbers off quite a bit.

We would keep track of sales and when we have sold enough copies to press another record, we do the inducting/voting process over again.