Bandcamp’s Vinyl Pressing Service is a low-risk, hassle-free way to get your music pressed to vinyl through a fan-powered fundraising campaign. You control the vinyl color, weight, jacket style, and more, and your fans’ orders fund the pressing. Bandcamp handles all shipping, handling, postage, and customer support, including sending out replacements for lost or damaged orders.
To get started, you just need a published album on Bandcamp.. You don’t need vinyl-mastered audio or print-ready art until your pressing is funded.
We assign you a dedicated vinyl support representative to help you in the different stages of your project – a real, live human here at Bandcamp who can advise you on the design of your record and jacket, how to set up your campaign, and how best to promote it. This same person will guide your record through all the different stages of manufacturing, help coordinate fulfilment, and make sure you receive any profits your campaign earns in a timely manner.
If you want to take a deeper dive, read on, or just jump to the section you have questions about.
- When does it make sense to use Bandcamp’s vinyl pressing service?
- What does Bandcamp do? Which parts are up to me?
- Are the costs competitive with other services?
- What’s the typical timeline? What are the steps along the way?
When does it make sense to use Bandcamp’s vinyl pressing service?
We designed the pressing service for artists who want to press vinyl but:
- prefer to fund it from confirmed orders as opposed to out-of-pocket
- don’t want the hassle of managing production and fulfillment
- don’t want to risk pressing too many (or too few) records
More than 50 artists have used the service so far, and more than 75% of those artists have run successful campaigns. Some used the service to press vinyl for the first time and wanted to minimize financial risk. Others had pressed vinyl on before and wanted to use the service to avoid the headache of production delays or the hassles associated with shipping and storing vinyl LPs and fulfilling orders.
What does Bandcamp do? What parts are up to me?
To run a vinyl campaign on Bandcamp, you will need to specify what sort of record you want to make, set up some irresistible pledge levels, promote your campaign via every means at your disposal, and, if your campaign succeeds, supply the artwork and the audio.
Bandcamp will do the rest. We process payments, manage production, send you test pressings to approve, and mail your records out to pledgers. We also take care of all customer support — expired credit cards, changes of shipping address, missing orders, replacements, you name it. And when there’s profit, we make sure you get paid.
Are the production costs for the Bandcamp Vinyl Pressing Service competitive with other vinyl producers?
Yes. We work with a respected broker and pressing plant and have competitive costs, particularly for the quality of the work that’s produced.
The initial production costs you see in the campaign editor are for a minimum pressing of 250 records. Volume discounts apply when more than 500, 1,000, or 5000 records are pressed, and per-unit costs will go down accordingly when you hit those thresholds.
What’s the typical timeline? What are the steps along the way?
A typical campaign, from initial setup to getting records into the hands of fans, takes between 100 and 120 days: 30 days for your campaign, and 70-90 days for production and fulfillment. There are some things you can do to speed this up, but that's the average timeline. To get started, you just need to have an album on Bandcamp (pre-orders are fine), with the usual download-quality audio and web-quality album art. You do NOT need vinyl-mastered audio and print-quality art to start a campaign.
Campaign setup
If the Bandcamp Vinyl Pressing Service is enabled for your account, you’ll see a drop-down in the +add menu that says “vinyl campaign.” This takes you to the campaign editor. Once you’re there:
- Select the album you want to press.
- Choose the size, color, and jacket style for your album.
- Set the financial goals of the campaign and your different pledge tiers.
- Write a compelling description for your campaign, and add mockup-quality artwork for your center label. (We use this along with your regular album art to create a preview of the vinyl album for pledgers.)
When you have finished setting up your album and your campaign, submit it to Bandcamp. Your vinyl support representative will review the campaign within 5-7 days, and if we have recommendations, we will notify you by email. Once your campaign has been reviewed and approved by Bandcamp, you can publish it. When you click the publish button, your campaign page will be visible to the public, and we will automatically notify your fans and followers.
Live Campaign
Your campaign will run for thirty days. While it’s running, we strongly recommend you let all your fans know about it. Post on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, TikTok or any other place you have an enthusiastic following. You can also message your fans and followers on Bandcamp via the updates tab of your campaign page.
Profit
You will earn a profit when your campaign raises more than your minimum goal. The more you exceed your goal, the more profit you’ll make. If your campaign succeeds, we charge the pledgers and send you your profit via PayPal, usually ten or so days after the campaign closes.
Higher pledge levels are one of the defining features of Bandcamp’s Vinyl Pressing Service. These allow you to raise much more money than simply by selling records and are a crucial tool for hitting, and surpassing, your goal.
Production
Once your campaign is successfully funded, you need to get your production quality audio and art assets ready. We strongly recommend having your audio mastered for vinyl, and we also recommend that you employ the services of a graphic designer for your jacket art, center labels, and any other printed material (like liners or inserts).
Test Pressings
The vinyl pressing plant produces test pressings so that you can verify that the record they’re planning to manufacture matches your expectations. We typically send these to you within two or three weeks of you submitting your audio. If you haven’t approved test pressings before, your vinyl support representative will guide you through the process. These pressings are yours to keep, and you can even order a few extra as rewards for your higher pledge levels.
Art Proofs
The plant will also run quality checks on the art you submit and generate proofs in the form of PDFs. You’ll want to review these art proofs carefully and make sure that everything is just right.
Full Production Go-ahead
Once you’ve approved both the test pressings and art proofs, we give the full production go-ahead, which means getting the project onto the plant’s production schedule and getting you an ETA for the press date.
Fulfillment
We will email your fans to update them with a delivery estimate as soon as we have the production ETA, and we’ll also remind them to make sure their shipping addresses are up to date.
A few days after the press date, your records will be shipped to our fulfillment centers in California and the UK. As soon as they arrive at our fulfillment centers, we’ll mail the vinyl records to individual pledgers, and send all extra copies sent to you.
All done!
The pledgers’ records are in the mail. The extra copies are on their way to you. If pledgers contact you with questions or concerns about the campaign, you can just send them on to us.