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Next they'll record on to tape and burn CD-Rs! I don't see the appeal of spending $5000 to slowly etch vinyl away manually. If this really is a "craze", it exe

Next they'll record on to tape and burn CD-Rs! I don't see the appeal of spending $5000 to slowly etch vinyl away manually. If this really is a "craze", it exemplifies to me how those watching influencers get hypnotoaded into pursuing hobbies that have huge upfront costs.

stogot 2y ago
Ya when I clicked I was hoping it would be under £400
i_am_proteus 2y ago
If a record nets $10 per, and you etch 20 records per week, the hobby pays for itself within a year. If your business happens to grow, you could buy another machine and make more records. If your business happens to not grow, the capital outlay is less than $10,000. Seems reasonable, especially if you otherwise have an affinity for vinyl or create your own music.
- analog31 2y ago
  That's $10 more than you can get for selling your recording in digital format online.
  - itishappy 2y ago
    digital: $1 $2 $3 ... vinyl: -$4990 -$4980 -$4970 ... If my wildly estimated pricing is accurate, the break even point is 555 records sold. BandCamp looks to be about $4 per EP (and you'd get maybe $3 of that), so this may be a conservative estimate.
- dylan604 2y ago
  That's $10 per, then the buyer needs to pay for shipping, and then taxes. So we're now at least $20 for your etch-a-sketch vinyl. Before I bought one of these, I insist on being able to play the vinyl and hear it first. So that means you have to be local to me. There are way too many mastering decisions that need to be made correctly for vinyl to sound good. And no, that does not mean being able to take something from your iTunes library mastered for your shitty earbuds. I do not trust some hobbyist to get any of that right to the point of me willing to pay $10. However, if someone with actual experience with mastering had one of these then I'd be interested, but that dubplate will be way more expensive than $10. A pricetag of $10 tells me the person doing it has no clue about anything involved and has priced themselves too cheap. A person with experience would go broke from the time involved to make any money at $10. Also, 20 records per week? JeebusChristo that's ambitious. Your sales team would kill your margins at $10 per. Because if you're trying to sell and make the vinyl all by your lonesome, just take the money you were going to invest in getting set up and light it on fire. It'll be faster and much less heartache.
  - cjaackie 2y ago
    hobbies are spending money irrationally for joys or pleasures of the act of doing that hobby, no always about a business plan, do you have any?
    - dylan604 2y ago
      I'm not the one that came up with the idea of selling 20 etched vinyls per week at $10 each concept.
  - i_am_proteus 2y ago
    The vocabulary term "net" means profit after expenses. Certainly the retail price would be higher.
  - miunau 2y ago
    Sorry.. but a sales team for 20 album sales a week? That's just what regular artists making a living do. Small labels too, majority of which are one-person operations. At $20 a pop (cheap these days) that's $20k a year in sales, which is doable if you're promoting releases and gigging actively in a local scene. Majority of small runs go into local shops and get sold at merch boots at shows, not sold b2c in a web shop where it needs to be shipped somewhere else. Many don't have bar codes, so they can't get on Amazon. But more importantly, people working in the music industry are excited about these developments. I think you as well should be, given you're a self-professed vinyl lover. All this means more development in cutting heads (the current ones cost tens of thousands!), in lathe equipment for master cutting, and more modern equipment and capable engineers working at pressing plants, many of which have had trouble hiring younger people. It also means more development in materials engineering for vinyl, biodegradable materials being a new movement.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
  Bitcoin mining was also a hobby that paid for itself within a year. And tulip farming...
- bawolff 2y ago
  That sounds like a job not a hobby.
miunau 2y ago
Getting a hundred records pressed is well upwards of a grand just for the records. More than that, not a single soul has ever gotten into releasing small run physical albums for the money. If you have two million, and want one million, start a record label.
- dylan604 2y ago
  > If you have two million, and want one million, start a record label. That's the most tortured version of that phrase that I've ever seen. "If you want to make $1 million with a record label, start with $2 million" is the typical way to use the phrase.
  - miunau 2y ago
    Perhaps it didn't cross your mind that I expressed it in a stilted manner on purpose? What a weird thing to get hung up on anyway
    - dylan604 2y ago
      Your stitled manner loses the nuance of the phrase. Your phrasing makes it sound like you're telling an investor it's going to require $2mil, where the more common phrasing is more of a reality check for a dreamer thinking it's a money making idea. It's only weird if you have no love for well crafted phrases
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - miunau 2y ago
        OK...
wrsh07 2y ago
Idk it seems fairly normal to have a hobby (eg photography, 3d printing, espresso) where you are able to spend thousands. The main issue is that I'm not sure it's easy to get into pressing vinyl - what's the starter kit price?
BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
This whole unhealthy obsession with form over substance (music) really is peak 21th century materialism. Sony's and Philips' engineers must be turning in their graves. Disregarding the hipster crowd, so many of these "fiddlers" also have such a laughably mundane and insipid taste clashing strongly with their proffered love for music that an outside viewer can't help but raise an eyebrow; I mean, when your musical world is made of Steely Dan, Diana Krall, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, etc... It's just the man equivalent of collecting porcelain figurines, but with an ad hoc rationalization (it really sounds better!) to protect the ego. Related to Gear Acquisition Syndrome.
- dylan604 2y ago
  People easily overlook the most important part to me of playing vinyl, and get distracted by the "it sounds better" conversation. To me, it is the physicalness of holding the vinyl, watching/reading the grooves, setting the needle, lifting the needle, rinse/repeat for each track you want to listen (assuming using singles). There's much more satisfaction when you're actively doing things to keep the music playing (even if not a DJing) rather than clicking some infinite stream where you just tune out of even paying attention to the music. Playing vinyl forces your attention. That's when you start to become a real music nerd type by learning which cut of the release a song was on, which side of the vinyl, etc. That might not be what most people care about, and that's fine. They have infinite streaming available for those that just need background noise. But to write vinyl off as a gear acquisition syndrome just screams to me someone doesn't really get it and wants to find a way to mock someone else
  - sambapa 2y ago
    That sounds too easy, real music nerd types carve their own vinyls at home. Realer music nerds build machines that carve vinyls. Realerer music nerds work in mines that supply metal (no pun intended) for those machine parts etc. And I'm just a wanker with Spotify and rate your music that accelerated my taste and education in music 1000x times.
  - rectang 2y ago
    Album art for 12-inch LPs is fabulous. CD packaging with jewel cases was a major step down in experience because of size and also because of the inconvenience of getting the booklets out of the case; good CD packaging experiences were exceedingly rare. Art for streaming is a different medium altogether, as it is behind a screen but potentially dynamic; it can achieve new things, but can't replicate the LP experience any more than photographs can reproduce sculptures.
kiddico 2y ago
I think the appeal is having audio you made or sourced on a medium that is normally reserved for record manufacturers doing a large volume production run...

stogot 2y ago

Ya when I clicked I was hoping it would be under £400

i_am_proteus 2y ago

If a record nets $10 per, and you etch 20 records per week, the hobby pays for itself within a year. If your business happens to grow, you could buy another machine and make more records. If your business happens to not grow, the capital outlay is less than $10,000. Seems reasonable, especially if you otherwise have an affinity for vinyl or create your own music.

analog31 2y ago
That's $10 more than you can get for selling your recording in digital format online.
- itishappy 2y ago
  digital: $1 $2 $3 ... vinyl: -$4990 -$4980 -$4970 ... If my wildly estimated pricing is accurate, the break even point is 555 records sold. BandCamp looks to be about $4 per EP (and you'd get maybe $3 of that), so this may be a conservative estimate.
dylan604 2y ago
That's $10 per, then the buyer needs to pay for shipping, and then taxes. So we're now at least $20 for your etch-a-sketch vinyl. Before I bought one of these, I insist on being able to play the vinyl and hear it first. So that means you have to be local to me. There are way too many mastering decisions that need to be made correctly for vinyl to sound good. And no, that does not mean being able to take something from your iTunes library mastered for your shitty earbuds. I do not trust some hobbyist to get any of that right to the point of me willing to pay $10. However, if someone with actual experience with mastering had one of these then I'd be interested, but that dubplate will be way more expensive than $10. A pricetag of $10 tells me the person doing it has no clue about anything involved and has priced themselves too cheap. A person with experience would go broke from the time involved to make any money at $10. Also, 20 records per week? JeebusChristo that's ambitious. Your sales team would kill your margins at $10 per. Because if you're trying to sell and make the vinyl all by your lonesome, just take the money you were going to invest in getting set up and light it on fire. It'll be faster and much less heartache.
- cjaackie 2y ago
  hobbies are spending money irrationally for joys or pleasures of the act of doing that hobby, no always about a business plan, do you have any?
  - dylan604 2y ago
    I'm not the one that came up with the idea of selling 20 etched vinyls per week at $10 each concept.
- i_am_proteus 2y ago
  The vocabulary term "net" means profit after expenses. Certainly the retail price would be higher.
- miunau 2y ago
  Sorry.. but a sales team for 20 album sales a week? That's just what regular artists making a living do. Small labels too, majority of which are one-person operations. At $20 a pop (cheap these days) that's $20k a year in sales, which is doable if you're promoting releases and gigging actively in a local scene. Majority of small runs go into local shops and get sold at merch boots at shows, not sold b2c in a web shop where it needs to be shipped somewhere else. Many don't have bar codes, so they can't get on Amazon. But more importantly, people working in the music industry are excited about these developments. I think you as well should be, given you're a self-professed vinyl lover. All this means more development in cutting heads (the current ones cost tens of thousands!), in lathe equipment for master cutting, and more modern equipment and capable engineers working at pressing plants, many of which have had trouble hiring younger people. It also means more development in materials engineering for vinyl, biodegradable materials being a new movement.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y ago
Bitcoin mining was also a hobby that paid for itself within a year. And tulip farming...
bawolff 2y ago
That sounds like a job not a hobby.

miunau 2y ago

Getting a hundred records pressed is well upwards of a grand just for the records. More than that, not a single soul has ever gotten into releasing small run physical albums for the money. If you have two million, and want one million, start a record label.

dylan604 2y ago
> If you have two million, and want one million, start a record label. That's the most tortured version of that phrase that I've ever seen. "If you want to make $1 million with a record label, start with $2 million" is the typical way to use the phrase.
- miunau 2y ago
  Perhaps it didn't cross your mind that I expressed it in a stilted manner on purpose? What a weird thing to get hung up on anyway
  - dylan604 2y ago
    Your stitled manner loses the nuance of the phrase. Your phrasing makes it sound like you're telling an investor it's going to require $2mil, where the more common phrasing is more of a reality check for a dreamer thinking it's a money making idea. It's only weird if you have no love for well crafted phrases
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - miunau 2y ago
      OK...

wrsh07 2y ago

Idk it seems fairly normal to have a hobby (eg photography, 3d printing, espresso) where you are able to spend thousands. The main issue is that I'm not sure it's easy to get into pressing vinyl - what's the starter kit price?

BoingBoomTschak 2y ago

This whole unhealthy obsession with form over substance (music) really is peak 21th century materialism. Sony's and Philips' engineers must be turning in their graves. Disregarding the hipster crowd, so many of these "fiddlers" also have such a laughably mundane and insipid taste clashing strongly with their proffered love for music that an outside viewer can't help but raise an eyebrow; I mean, when your musical world is made of Steely Dan, Diana Krall, Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd, etc... It's just the man equivalent of collecting porcelain figurines, but with an ad hoc rationalization (it really sounds better!) to protect the ego. Related to Gear Acquisition Syndrome.

dylan604 2y ago
People easily overlook the most important part to me of playing vinyl, and get distracted by the "it sounds better" conversation. To me, it is the physicalness of holding the vinyl, watching/reading the grooves, setting the needle, lifting the needle, rinse/repeat for each track you want to listen (assuming using singles). There's much more satisfaction when you're actively doing things to keep the music playing (even if not a DJing) rather than clicking some infinite stream where you just tune out of even paying attention to the music. Playing vinyl forces your attention. That's when you start to become a real music nerd type by learning which cut of the release a song was on, which side of the vinyl, etc. That might not be what most people care about, and that's fine. They have infinite streaming available for those that just need background noise. But to write vinyl off as a gear acquisition syndrome just screams to me someone doesn't really get it and wants to find a way to mock someone else
- sambapa 2y ago
  That sounds too easy, real music nerd types carve their own vinyls at home. Realer music nerds build machines that carve vinyls. Realerer music nerds work in mines that supply metal (no pun intended) for those machine parts etc. And I'm just a wanker with Spotify and rate your music that accelerated my taste and education in music 1000x times.
- rectang 2y ago
  Album art for 12-inch LPs is fabulous. CD packaging with jewel cases was a major step down in experience because of size and also because of the inconvenience of getting the booklets out of the case; good CD packaging experiences were exceedingly rare. Art for streaming is a different medium altogether, as it is behind a screen but potentially dynamic; it can achieve new things, but can't replicate the LP experience any more than photographs can reproduce sculptures.

kiddico 2y ago

I think the appeal is having audio you made or sourced on a medium that is normally reserved for record manufacturers doing a large volume production run...