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« on: September 24, 2011, 11:23:44 AM »
I'm gonna address a couple of your points here.
First, from a practical standpoint, it's hard for us to specifically address any of this stuff on termbo because we don't know who anybody is on here. It's just anonymous internet wraiths bitching at us. I can't open the singles club excel doc and pull up your info and say, oh violet time's stuff shipped last month, but prism's stuff hasn't shipped for reason x. Like, there's not much I can do with a "fuck you guys" type of one liner from someone that's not posting under their real name. All I can do is address general concerns.
So, generally, the thing is running behind because every single aspect of putting out records has increased in price by a lot in the last 24 months. When we did the math to price out year two we were counting on selling about 450 subscriptions and making about $3,200 or so. Mind you, that's $3,200 for a years work, that's less than $300 a month profit for the 60 man hours a month needed to do the legwork. We ended up selling about 350 subscriptions, with that amount of scrips sold, best case scenario was we were gonna break even. Then, the cost of shipping, plating and manufacturing records and art increased. At this point the year two singles club will cost us around fifteen hundred bucks by the time it is done. Couple that with some of the long turnarounds for payout (sometimes 5 months or more) by the distros that buy the majority of our stock and we weren't generating enough cash from LP's quickly enough to keep the singles going to press. So, we just put a bunch of our own money in the club to keep it running. I work at a pressing plant and I actually have 50% taken from each of my paychecks and put directly into singles club records to get this thing over with. However, pressing records is expensive, so we can't pump enough money into the club out of our own pockets quickly enough to keep the thing running on time.
Don't think I'm whining, because I'm not. Losing tons of money and constantly fielding angry phone calls and e-mails from people furious about their lost records is par for the course when running an indie label. We all knew that's how this would go when we started CDR. My point is, it's basically gonna take as long as it takes and you're gonna have to deal with it. The other option is we refund everybody's money that is dissatisfied and we immediately go under. That means no more records from us and the singles club stops. That would also mean selling off the CDR studio which would leave Columbus without a decent place for bands to record on the cheap. Which at this point I'm open to if that is what the public demands. But it would basically have to work like everybody get s a refund or no one does.
Currently, we are one single away from this thing being done. So, think on it.
If I'm hearing at least Prim and most of the people complaining in the Singles Club thread tho, I think there's just a lot of frustration about how murky our when what got shipped system is. So, I can work with everybody on that. I could post the whole singles club subscribers list over in the SCY2! thread and spell out what to has shipped to each person and we could run the thing like that till the end. That is how some of the mailorder sections on DIY electronics forums I cruise work. It's a pretty good system.
So, we can have this discussion here and we can let the free market do it's work.
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