Pressing physical albums for the first time?  Not sure where to start?  We got you!

First of all, congrats!  This is a big step towards engaging your fans and making some actual money from your music.  Here are 5 essential steps to pressing your first vinyl, CD, or cassette album:

One: Finish the album

This is honestly the hardest part: putting together a full album’s worth of music that you and your bandmates, managers, closest fans (e.g. family and friends) are happy with.  Carry on!  It’ll be amazing!

Two: Master the finished tracks

For digital and physical albums, mastering is essential, and there are some economical digital tools out there that can help master your tracks for you.  That said, be aware that mastering for vinyl requires additional attention to details, including which tracks you put in what sequence on the album.

Want professional mastering?  You may have a local producer and engineer that can do that job for you.  There are also services like SoundLAB that can really make your music… well… sing!

Three: Choose your manufacturing partner

You may want to support a local vinyl press (more and more available these days which is awesome).  If you don’t go that route, particularly for your very first physical pressing, we recommend Disc Makers.  Why Disc Makers?

We’ve worked with Disc Makers since 2009 (with Rob’s prior job/company), and they have the best self-service templates for building your project step-by-step and customer service out there:  particularly important for your first time out.  They also have in-house art services and production, so your jackets end up looking beautifully and professionally done.  And they have fantastic pricing and turnaround time.

Four: Send in metadata, art, and lossless tracks & pay

For both digital and physical, you’ll need your album artwork available (high resolution jpeg works).  You also need all your metadata (album name, artist name, track names, track length, etc.) and a lossless version of your music.  WAV and FLAC formats are often used here – it’s important to submit your mastered music uncompressed to ensure the highest quality audio post-production.

Best place to start your submissions on Disc Makers here (click Start Your Project)

Oh, and here’s where you pay.  The good news is that you can start inexpensively with 100 CDs for just a few dollars each.  This is a great way to start:  90 for your merch table if touring and 10 to send to Spinney Media, so we can help you connect with fans worldwide who can’t make the concert or who want to support you after seeing you play.  It doesn’t take many sales at $10-15 per CD to make back your manufacturing costs and win some lifelong fans.

Not touring?  Send us more albums 😉  In fact, you can have your manufacturer ship directly to us, and we can affordably dropship albums back to you as you need them.

Five: Go to Spinney Media, subscribe, and send us copies of your album

Yep, here’s the pitch.  If you’re manufacturing, you also need distribution.  You can do it yourself on Bandcamp, Bandzoogle, etc., but that takes a lot of work, time, runs to the post office, customer service, and more.  We’re here to make this part easy. Sign up for a subscription and send us your 10, 100, 1200 units.  We’ll store your inventory, list you on our Marketplace (which you can direct fans to), take orders, ship to fans, provide customer service, and get you paid 100% of your album earnings.  We can also fulfill your Bandcamp orders for you (so you don’t have to).

Got questions?  Reach out anytime to info@spinneymedia.com.