DO IT.

Yes indeed. Very curious indeed to see the maths.

I'm working on a very indie model so won't be advertising in things like MH or Terrorizer to start out with, there's far better ways to send yourself bust. I'll be present a figure for 'promotion', that will include promo packs to be sent out to zines (if the band want some to send out to promoters they can buy them off me at cost which means I'll be able to replenish the promo stock) and an advertising budget, I'll be advertising with more specialist zines and sites to start with. So that means banners on websites and 1/4 ads in zines like ours (advertising in the zine / site is something that we should probably look at at some point)

I'm going to work out pressing costs based on a fairly low runs to start with, if we need more then we can order more, but I would rather be in a position where I have to order more records than have boxes of unsold records filling up my flat.

Recording / mastering costs will be based on recording a 4 track EP, which is what I expect most bands will want to do.

Should I account for merch as well? As merch and special edition releases is something that will need to be tailored to fit each band individually.

I would run the maths through for multiple scenarios (eg. with and without merch, differing revenue shares etc.) and compare. That's by far the best way to interrogate and tease out wrinkles in business plans.

That's what I figured, if nothing else it might be useful for people to see the costs laid out in front of them, especially if they're think of self releasing or starting a similar project.

I'll think up some sort of hypothetical special edition to price up. I'll also include things like badges and stickers in the merch costs, sounds daft but things like that are massively handy for promoting a band.

I'll have a think about pricing up any tag-on services like tour booking / managing. If there's anything else people think I should be looking into let me know.

I'm still chewing this over. I'm a tad bogged down with issue 5 of TBB at the moment but will get some rough figures up asap.

To be perfectly honest I'm starting to think that I'll have neither the cash or the time to take this idea much beyond chat on a forum.

Doomanoid1979, if you read this thread I'd love to hear how you got up and running.

I've been researching this for the past couple of months, writing my dissertation on starting up an indie label. So er here's my 2 cents...

The model you've carved out in this thread is pretty much the same as I'm going for contracts are set up for one album/ep at a time taking a 50/50 split etc.

I think its important to branch out from the label and like you said look into other revenues such as tours and merch etc in an ethical way as just selling small amounts of records for a band obviously as you said will not bring much revenue and although not looking for serious cash, you need to be able to spend the time needed to get things off the ground, which would obviously not be available if you had to work full time to support yourself and the label. So in order to fund the project the label will either need to a) have loads of small releases or b) have fewer releases but spend more time on each band.

I think that what most bands could really do with these days is the later and the label acting as an all round management/promotion/financeer, basically sorting out more or less (depending on the competence of the band) everything that isn't making music, that you leave entirely up to them.

In order to spend this amount of time with a band but still only selling small/medium scale amounts of records I think it's fair to take a split with other revenues with the band and to have individual %'s for each item of revenue depending on the work you put in and how that relates to the sourced revenue.

a rough idea of what I'm going for is to have essentially two splits between the band: labels split and managers split
The label is essentially offering cash; manager offering time and some amount of expertise/knowledge.

The split from the label side is the one with the biggest risk (the $) so they take the biggest split 50/50 on the net profits from the physical sales and mechanical royalties from the PPL for airplay + merch which is funded by the label (and the band could buy at cost, to sell at their own gigs and keep 100%).

As a the manager role you put time and effort into getting the band heard, gigs and general organization (admin, accounting, IT etc) for this you take somewhere like 10-20% from other streams of revenue which have not been funded by you as such (no recording or manufacture costs; although obviously there will be marketing costs but they are needed for promotion of records anyway) however you've spent a lot of time and effort and they wouldn't have come to pass without you. This would include PRS income, sync deals that were sought after by yourself, tours set up by you and digital sales. This could then be split with individual %'s worked for each revenue item depending on the time/effort spent relating to it.

Obviously there needs to consideration of overlap of marketing costs, if these can be kept low then it's not a problem but with a high cost high profile marketing campaign, if the majority of income comes from digital sales then a higher share will be needed to balance the risk of investment.


Although this is pretty much the foundation of the label I think looking into new ways of generating revenue from music is the way forward, as these days it seems to be only limited runs/ special edition releases that are continuing to sell. Someone mentioned earlier having a download site and having affiliated advertising on it, I reckon this is an excellent idea as it's a way of generating cash from essentially file-sharing, which is never gonna stop. A good comparison I think is 4OD, where channel 4 have avoided loosing revenue from people streaming shows by offering them for free in high-quality but with advertising at the start and middle.



er thats a bit of a rant but Ive been thinking about this for quite some time now

Rant away, I'm really interested in the dynamics of running a label (as is Enos). Your proposal sounds pretty solid. Have you done the maths on it? Do you have a proper business case yet? Where will you get the initial investment to get started, or will you try and bootstrap? Lots of questions!

I've been cobbling together a download manager web application for bands/labels that uses paypal and will kick off a download when a customer purchases something (CD, Vinyl, t-shirt, whatever you want). It's pretty basic but also flexible. It's also not finished yet:) Not sure if it offers that much that that Bandcamp doesn't, other than the fact that I can customise it however I want! Anyway, if it will help you start your label then you're welcome to use it (on a sort of guinea pig basis).

Anyway, let me know if there's anything else I (we) can do to help.

Good stuff!

I just haven't got the money to invest in a label at the moment. I've got a few ideas that I'm going to try out on the Enos record, but that's going to be a push as it is, there's noway I'd be able to give any other bands the attention they need.

I think that going down the route of having less bands who you can concentrate on is the best way, 'boutique' labels are doing pretty well at the moment. Offering services in the way Record Union do is another winner, but that is different to running a label, however I don't see any reason why you couldn't do the two things at the same time. Once you have the infrastructure of your label set up there is no reason why you can't then offer, for a small fee, to use that to get bands on Spotify or whatever. The money that would come in from that would put money in the kitty to support the handful of bands you have on the label.

I have a few ideas, once I've got rid of the shop I'll have time (and headspace) to think properly. However, setting up a label for anything other than my own band is, at the moment, financially speaking, a non-starter for me.

There's quite an interesting article on the BBC website today, click here to read the full article.