reid@Glacier.ARPA (Brian Reid) (09/28/85)
Besides my "day job" of being a college professor, I am also the owner of Woodpecker Records, a very small record company. We manufacture high-quality folk music records, primarily for sale in the folk market in New England and the Midwest. Our records are manufactured by the same plant in Arizona that presses Angel records, which is to say the very highest quality. One of the main reasons that I do this is that I enjoy high quality, and I don't settle for anything but the very best. I am holding in my hand now an invoice for mastering and manufacturing LP's that I paid a few months ago. I will type in all of the data from the invoice so that you can see where the money goes. This order was for 1000 records (microscopic by big-time standards, but big enough to get most of the economies of scale). Quantity Description Price Amt 2 12-inch Master lacquers $100.00 $200.00 1 12-inch reference acetate 100.00 100.00 3 12-inch test pressings 13.00 39.00 1 Printing: 20,000 center labels 1010.00 1010.00 2 Mother 95.00 190.00 1 Printing: 10,000 album jackets 2375.00 2375.00 1006 12-inch pressing 0.695 699.17 1006 Rice paper sleeves 0.07 70.42 1006 Labor: insert records 0.02 20.12 2012 Insert catalog and lyric sheet 0.01 20.12 7 Handling 2.00 14.00 1006 Sirco wrap 0.06 60.36 Invoice Amount 4787.19 Shipping 46.88 INVOICE AMOUNT 4834.07 Some comments. I expect to sell 10,000 of these records eventually, so I had the full set of 10,000 jackets and 20,000 center labels printed, because the setup charges for printing are very high. Once the Mother is made, it is almost as cheap on a per-record basis to have 1000 made as 1000000 (the price-per-record for pressing in quantities of a million drops to 61 cents from 69.5 cents. If the printing costs are divided by 10, to pro-rate them for this batch of 1000 records, the sum becomes $1787.57. Of that amount, $528 was a one-time-only charge for mastering the album, and if I expect to sell 10,000 records than I should charge only 10% of that to this batch. That leaves $1312.37 as the pro-rata cost to me of manufacturing these records, which makes them $1.31 apiece. I can assure you that this price, $1.31 each, is about the highest cost of manufacture that you will ever see in a commercial record. Windham Hill has slightly higher costs because they have printed polyethylene inner sleeves, which cost about 20 cents apiece. By comparison, a quick knockoff million-seller LP pressed on recycled vinyl and put in a shabby jacket can be manufactured for about half this cost, about 70 cents per record. Note that publicity costs and studio recording costs are not shown in this accounting. This is purely the cost of manufacturing a record once the master tape is perfect, and before trying to sell any. In my case the studio costs are fairly low because we do straight-through miking and very little postprocessing, but publicity costs are enormous (do you know how much it costs to give a free record album to every radio station that wants one? Well, triple that, because they all insist on 3--one for the station, and 2 for the private collections of the station's owners to help them become motivated to play your record). -- Brian Reid decwrl!glacier!reid Stanford reid@SU-Glacier.ARPA
dday@gymble.UUCP (Dennis Doubleday) (09/30/85)
In article <12329@Glacier.ARPA> reid@Glacier.UUCP (Brian Reid) writes: >Our records are manufactured by the same plant in Arizona that >presses Angel records, which is to say the very highest quality. One of the I enjoyed reading your breakdown of LP production costs. It was very informative and interesting. I can't agree with the above statement, however. I own around 200 Angel LPs and the pressings are almost uniformly of lower quality than DGG, Phillips, and many other European and audiophile labels. (The reason I have bought so many is that Angel is best source of 20th century British music--can't always get EMI.) I would be willing to concede, though, that they are the highest-quality pressings among large American record companies.