New pricing policy

Hi everyone,

It’s been way too long since the last news here. Time to go back to something more regular !
There’s been an update in the pricing on all the VOTU releases, and part of the distribution records. As you may have noticed, the cost of vinyl records has increased a lot in the past years. It’s due to the production cost that increased, but there’s also a part due to the increase of sales, and vinyl record coming back in trend.

As you may (or may not) know, VOTU records is run solely by me, on my own money, outside of my day to day job. The goal is to break even to be able to continue releasing records in the future (which is not often easy), as the whole point of this label is to help bands get their music heard.
But lately, I felt I took way too much time computing how to cut the losses, participating in this increase of prices, which is counter productive when the idea is to allow as many people as possible to listen to the bands on this label.

This is where the new pricing policy comes from. You can now choose between 3 prices on the website :
– the normal price : this is the price that the record is supposed to be sold, allowing to break even without needing to sell all the pressing. As mentioned before, all the profits from the label are reinvested in new releases (at the moment, all the benefits from 1 release are mostly covering the losses from the other releases)
– the solidarity price : this is a reduced price, that allows you to be able to buy the release even if you can’t afford the normal price. No need to give a any kind of proof for this, the system is based on trust
– the support price : this is a slightly higher price, in case you want to show extra support to the label and can afford to pay extra euros on the record.

I hope this will help all of you who are having rougher times to still be able to enjoy the music released on VOTU, I’m open to any suggestion in case you see ways to improve this process.