I run Sweet Time fairly similar to our pal Randall up there.
Each record is different and costs have only gone up.
Overall I'm currently at $18 for black vinyl LPs and $20 for color vinyl. I've got one record that's priced at $23 due to it's really low numbers and the extras included. I've just upped my wholesale to $12 on LPs. I was able to get away with $10 or $11 for a while, but as costs have gone up, it's harder to hit that break even point.
With 7inches it gets tougher. I've got them priced between $7 and $8 and wholesale for $5. The costs on singles has almost rendered them obselete at this point which really sucks. Especially since I like to do nice pocket sleeves with mine. I suppose I could find a cheaper sleeve option and bring my costs down slightly but not sure how much of a difference that would really make.

I give bands 20% of the pressing and then sell em at cost if they need more. Each release is different with digital. Some bands like to handle all their digital and some want me to handle it. I apply all digital sales (including streaming & bandcamp sales) towards the overall costs. Once a record breaks even, then I split everything 50/50.

I do OK with managing my own distro. I've got Revolver and Sounds of Subterrania for my main distros and then sell wholesale copies to places like Total Punk, Goner, and Green Noise. I also do like to trade with labels, especially foreign labels like Goodbye Boozy.
Hugely influenced by Estrus whose catalog number style I ripped off.

my label efforts were pretty short-lived compared to those above - ran it as Meatspin Records which was a name that I regretted almost straight away ffs - and did like, an LP, two 7"s and five or so tapes, plus some zines and a book. more or less the same answers as the others though, interesting that the unwritten rules just kinda flow into a label operations like that haha.

made a lot of mistakes with pricing and splits while running the label (a number of factors led me very close to declaring bankruptcy, mostly because of my work situation, but mistimed a lot of releases and accrued an insane credit card debt) so my answers are more like the way i run my current imprint which is personal stuff and bootlegs:

Pricing: Wholesale at about 1.5 x the overall cost price (including pressing/printing/stickers/mailers, accounting for promo copies and band copies), adjusted slightly if it looks like it's too high/low compared to other similar items on local store shelves. Retail in the past I've just kinda made up as an even number, but I think it's best to just match the retail price of the record store that buys the most copies of ya haha

Artist Copies: I always wanted to get to a point where label/artist shared in the production costs and split earnings 50:50, but it never worked out.. easier for artists to just take 20% of the pressing and call it a day, but i found it really strange early in the release cycle to be kinda competing with the artist in a sense?

Trades: I was resistant to trades at first because I was so panicked about recouping costs, but I wish I had the foresight to see that I'd still be carting around 100 copies of the first LP I put out eight years later, so that a trade here and there really wouldn't matter haha.

Influences: I started the label to pick up from where RIP SOCIETY left off in Sydney when it was winding down, and also to add an extra label to the Sydney pool when PARADISE DAILY were doing all the leg work in the city. those two were great at bringing together a bit of a world/community around their label that felt like it put the bands around town on a map in a sense... I wasn't very good at the label side though and kinda fell on my arse with it, but that was definitely the attempt. the idea that you could trust a label to draw a circle around interesting stuff in the city was really inspiring to me, and i think it's sorely missing now (in australia, but in most cities i think!)

Any of the more experienced heads have advice on how best to start a label for a newcomer reading this?? I've only got mistakes to learn from.. like going to the post office and understanding the best way to ship and price records before you just go ahead with recycled cardboard and lose hundreds of dollars on excess postage.. i'm sure there are less buffoon-esque heads in here than mine!

Man, yea the Label / Artist going 50/50 can be a life saver some times. I do that deal on occasion or something similar.
One of my recent releases, the artist lives in another country and can offload way more copies over there than I could, so he got his 20% standard, but also bought 100 extra copies at cost. That really helped with paying the deposit and final costs with the pressing plant.
I've got another band who did 50/50 on their first release and this time around they paid for 1/3.
Makes the accounting a little tricky sometimes when it comes to royalties n such, but overall nice to have them just chip in.

How do you price a record ? Wholesale price and retail price ?
My pricing on both is way too low. I do a lot of 7"s still and I think I've wholesaled every one at a slight loss. When CD sales fell off a cliff -- I started in 2011 and I've never manufactured a CD -- and download sales were obliterated by streaming, it became apparent to me that running an independent label was unsustainable. At least for the music I'm interested in. Consequently, I got better at curtailing losses. With a fairly large back catalog now, I can usually sell more of my old titles on new orders. This helps. I'm uncertain whether the label would have a future without Larry Hardy buying every title upfront and Goner picking stuff up.

How many records do you give to the band ? How much do you sell them records if they want more ? Do you give them bandcamp money ?
The band gets about 15% of the pressing. It used to be 20% but sales keep going down. I sell them extra records at cost -- not wholesale price, although on 45s it happens to be the wholesale price as it's usually 25 cents+ below manufacturing costs. Hell of a business model. I don't really do Bandcamp. There's some stuff there, but I'm not big on the digital platforms, especially with streaming. It feels more like a sharecropping arrangement. My grandfather was an itinerant farmer prior to driving long-haul truck with the Teamsters before Carter-era deregulation. He never wanted to go back to those days.

Do you do trades ? How do you manage a distro ?
I'd say ten years ago, there were a lot more labels to trade with. You can trade with underground labels. I mostly trade with the legend from Italy -- Gabriele at Goodbye Boozy. I used to get distro through Revolver, but it stopped making sense since we do 7"s. When UPS manhandled a box of Happy Squid Sampler EPs to them -- and those covers were expensive special orders -- that killed it. You assume all the risk on consignment, record stores aren't interested in 7"s presently, and the numbers aren't there. Hell of a business model. If they made sense, I'd get back on board. Revolver was/is the best of the indie distributors. Their accounting was accurate and they were reliable.

Have you been influenced by a specific label ?
Fast Product from Scotland, Lawrence at In the Red and Eric Friedl at Goner.

Lastly, all my deals are on a handshake and the artists retain all the rights to their work. While I've had a falling out with one or two bands -- 97% of the time we've had a great relationship -- I'd like to think that every band has benefited from working with Spacecase. I assumed all the losses, they kept their integrity, rights to their music and had full control over their work, and on the rare occasions when we did represses, they were paid royalties IN ADVANCE. Overseas releases are near impossible now due to shipping costs and declining sales.

It's becoming incredibly difficult to run a label if you're working class. The label was funded by my work as a draftsman at a cabinet shop and I also restored old cars at a hot rod shop. I wouldn't do it again, but I'm too far to quit. I've lost a lot of money and time, only to find out that my little pocketbooks -- y'know, the collections of my interviews, oral history of The Urinals and Ross Johnson's memoir -- were actually profitable as opposed to vinyl. It's totally backwards.

The record industry is a money extracting machine on all levels. The public relations outlets are going to want $1k to $3k per month to get your release on any music site with modest traffic, Spotify will take your catalog for less than the price of a package of Top Ramen, and the profit margins on vinyl are nearly nonexistent until you sell 500+ copies -- and that's if you're not outlaying money for PR. Countless mags/zines have gone under. All of this is to say, it's really, really bleak -- I'm uncertain what's going to happen, especially when digital will never replace physical formats. If you bought records from us, thanks. If you're looking to start pressing records, don't put yourself into a financial predicament and don't think things will get better. They almost certainly won't. But feel free to make the same mistakes I did.

    Ryan Leach i really enjoyed reading this man, really interesting points and experiences.. thinkin about some of the things you said, and the "hell of a business model" point is kinda stuck in my head now. to your point about what's gonna happen with things getting harder, maybe the whole model needs to change to adjust with the times, y'know? not for everyone, and i think sustainable/successful indies like Total Punk, La Vida, Static Shock, Sorry State, etc are all managing to keep things going well, albeit with diminishing margins... but for a new label, honestly i think the idea of holding onto the idea of being able to sustain an underground label off sales is becoming a kind of impossible mission.

    interest in new underground music is at an all time low, cost price is at an all time high, and sales are flat as hell... which makes me think the only functional model for a new label is small pressings sold close to cost price, low risk low reward type stuff. but i also reckon that people want to buy new records, but are just priced out of the game too. maybe an underground label's best play is to undercut the insane major label pricing structure and start demonstrating that this shit can be an affordable alternative... but i think the major label culture war has kinda been won through 15 years of poptimism and it's a hard struggle to fight back.

    long story shot, loved yr post ryan.. and i dunno if i'm crazy, but i feel like there's gotta be some kind of an answer floating around in here that comes from the fact that a for-profit (however small) DIY label is an outdated business model. gotta be some kinda solution to a crisis like this, smarter mind than mine might be able to find it

        Ryan Leach
        I didn't use bandcamp as a platform to sell records for a very long time and only used it as a place for people to sample releases, but I now use it to sell both physical and digital and its made a huge difference. I'm not here to sing the praises of bandcamp but it is a very useful tool, and people do actually buy digital versions of releases. In this age any little bit helps.

            BARELY HUMAN Well, thanks for the kind words.

            I get what you're saying, but I think I've been modestly successful. What I mean is I've put out about 60 records now, did everything how I wanted to and some of the titles -- especially The Klitz, Red Lights and even Unda Fluxit -- I felt were somewhat important. I got to know what I could and couldn't get away with at different times -- projections on sales, whether I could undertake a suicide mission at that moment -- the last one was a wonderful Nudge Squidfish LP that sold the approximate 75 copies I projected, mostly to people from Columbus, Ohio, over the age of 55. I knowingly put out records I'm going to take a hit on. Stuff very few others would take on. Again, I've done it totally on my own terms and you're going to a pay price for that. I think the important thing to remember is that price wouldn't be so severe had you or I been pressing records in 1991.

            BARELY HUMAN interest in new underground music is at an all time low, cost price is at an all time high, and sales are flat as hell.

            That's 100% correct. However, things aren't always what they seem in this business. For example, some labels probably aren't as profitable as one thinks or they're simply backed by inherited wealth or money made during one of our economic bubbles. If they're doing good work and acting fairly, god bless them. But even my friends who made good money in the biz are scaling back on new music. It's hard as hell to break new bands. It's a sign of the times; things generally make less sense now. Especially when bottlenecking on plants took their toll, archival releases weren't necessarily timely -- the band probably no longer existed. The group/album are known quantities so the need for promotion isn't as high. Some of the same people who likely think 45s are dead will pay top dollar for an original "30 Second Over Tokyo" pressing. No one's to blame here. As everyone knows, the business model died starting around 1999.

            BARELY HUMAN long story shot, loved yr post ryan.. and i dunno if i'm crazy, but i feel like there's gotta be some kind of an answer floating around in here that comes from the fact that a for-profit (however small) DIY label is an outdated business model. gotta be some kinda solution to a crisis like this, smarter mind than mine might be able to find it

            An early alternative that I'm aware of us was proposed by economist Dean Baker in the early 2000s. By that point, journalism was in collapse -- that's played a part in the decline of music -- and he proposed a voucher system. At tax time, every U.S. citizen could use a $100 voucher to support a non-profit news outlet or band or art ensemble of his/her choosing. I know about this because I went to grad school for political economy of media (mass comm) and I was reading and interviewing people like Robert McChesney and Noam Chomsky. They had both advocated for the proposal and Liz Pelly touches on it briefly in her recent book on Spotify.

            I don't think there's a way out of it because the digital realm is mostly a sharecropping model. Yanis Varoufakis has dubbed it "Technofeudalism," an idea inspired by McKenzie Werk's recent book, Capitalism is Dead: Is this Something Worse? As everyone knows, Spotify and their ilk are in the business of advertising, the commodification of personal data, payola and promoting neo-Muzak. That's where the emphasis now seems to be with music.

            It's possible there isn't a straightforward solution, but some of the recent transitioning away from all vinyl to books (which are profitable) and heavy archival releases can act as short-term palliatives.

            In my opinion, you can't talk about really reviving underground music unless its accompanied by the return of journalism. You need Forced Exposure or better yet a 21st century Slash or NY Rocker that has an emphasis on new music. You need men and women like Steve Albini. I'm not talking about his studio work here, but whether I agreed with him or not, Albini knew how the sausage was made, stayed consistent and didn't care if his ideas were well received or not. To this day, his piece in (I think) The Baffler on a newly signed major label band -- where he breaks down how their advance is blown -- is legendary. I knew people who were getting signed them -- it happened all the time. You need people who can call out the bullshit so overtly apparent -- hard to do when PR now controls most of what gets covered in even mid-scale media outlets.

                  Randall I should've emphasized streaming more there -- I kind of lumped them together. Bandcamp has brought in a few sales here and there and people have mentioned to me that I undervalue it. Streaming is a joke, just not a funny one.

                  I'll add that being in, say, Larry Hardy or Eric Friedl's shoes is much harder than being in mine. You can take a Debordian position when you don't have people relying on you to make payroll.

                    9 days later

                    for the one 7 inch I put out I didn't know what the hell I was doing. I gave the band about 150 records for them to sell at shows, though they kicked money my way for shipping and handling which was super nice. also sold to stores and distro at too low a price probably.

                    overall, I lost some money, which I expected. at the time I didn't care cause it was 2020 and I thought we were all going to die soon anyway. I still don't really care because now I know how to handle it next time (and the band was fucking sick and still is).

                    8 days later

                    Mostly try to roll with a SST-meets-Crypt-meets-“tax scam label” business model. Works ok for me. Pre-orders help a lot too.
                    nuthin.bandcamp.com Be nice and the records will release.

                      michael bateman Mostly try to roll with a SST-meets-Crypt-meets-“tax scam label” business model. Works ok for me.

                      "Tax scam" component of running a label is a really underrated quality hey? Peeling back a tax bill by printing a book or pressing a 7" at the end of the financial year always feels a bit cheeky somehow, but hey, it works...