So in the last post I said I wanted to explain how I ran Distro-y and give you a look into how it was run and I continue to run it. I look it as a hobby I do just like posting punk news on D-Beat Beater and doing BJJ another hobby of mine. Some hobbies cost more than others. So I wanted to give people who care a look into what are the running cost of Distro-y and how I do stuff and why I do it as maybe a way for people to learn and make others think.
I started the distro as something small that could be kept at bottom of a wardrobe but things change which meant needing more space so teamed up with another Irish label Art For Blind also based in Sligo, and rented an art studio designated for music, which my share costs €75.00 a month (€900 a year). The studio is on my way home from work so if I finish work at a reasonable time I can quickly grab a few orders and ship them that day as the post office is also on my way home thats why people in Ireland get next day delivery and I make Amazon look slow. Buying crappy laptops and external hard drives that broke meant, I kept losing files so I wanted access to all music files so I pay for cloud storage (Google Drive) to store all those big WAV files which is €2.00 a month (€24 a year) and I can access them off my phone and share them where ever I want and don’t have to worry about losing the files when my computer broke again.
Websites/Domains/Hosting so for me to run this blog for Distroyrecords.com costs me €10.00 a year for the website domain. I used to host the distro on webshop system called prestashop and needed hosting to do this cost €75.00 however I no longer use that system but still pay hosting for this blog and other projects D-Beat Beater and some more stuff
I stopped using prestashop as the version I was using became outdated, and the newer version didnt work well for me so I switched to Shopify which the Distrotable.com store is ran off at the moment and that cost $29 or €26.3 a month ( €315.60 a year) which I hate the idea to pay, I decided to switch to Shopify 18months ago due to issues with my own webshop crashing and having to take countless hours trying to figure out how fix it, plus Shopify was optimised for your phone which I think more than a quarter of online orders come from these days for me, there is also an app which enabled me to run the store easily from my phone. I used to also pay for other services such as bandcamp for labels which I thought was a good idea at the time but regret it big time now and another service Haulix which would send digital promos to reviewers. But no longer use them services.
So in review how much would it costs for me to run my little label:
Rent: €900.00
Shopify: €315.60
Website/Domains/Google Drive: €109.00
Annual running costs for Distro-y: €1,324.60
That’s before I bought in distro stock and released records and whatever else most of this money came out of my own pocket, as I said a hobby. This was a post about costs of running stuff for a small time label and a post to say support those who try t do stuff for the scene it doesnt have to be with money but a thank you goes a long way when it comes to effort. I still plan on not changing any of those overheads as I progress to the next stage of Distro-y which I want to progress to something more than a distro and label. I started Distro-y to help bands and to help archive music and that’s where we will go to next stage.
I hope you found this as a bit of an insight and if people want to comment and stuff I do/did to run the label message me at alex@distroyrecords.com
Thanks for reading – Alex
Thanks for all your efforts, Alex, underground music would be lost without people like yourself providing access to bands who might otherwise struggle to get their music out there. Keep up the good work.
Fair play Alex, I knew it was pricey to run a label but was not aware of all the costs incurred. Keep making Amazon look slow ;]