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Comment by i_am_proteus | Hacker News Reader

If a record nets $10 per, and you etch 20 records per week, the hobby pays for itself within a year. If your business happens to grow, you could buy another machine and make more records.

If your business happens to not grow, the capital outlay is less than $10,000.

Seems reasonable, especially if you otherwise have an affinity for vinyl or create your own music.

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That's $10 per, then the buyer needs to pay for shipping, and then taxes. So we're now at least $20 for your etch-a-sketch vinyl.

Before I bought one of these, I insist on being able to play the vinyl and hear it first. So that means you have to be local to me. There are way too many mastering decisions that need to be made correctly for vinyl to sound good. And no, that does not mean being able to take something from your iTunes library mastered for your shitty earbuds.

I do not trust some hobbyist to get any of that right to the point of me willing to pay $10. However, if someone with actual experience with mastering had one of these then I'd be interested, but that dubplate will be way more expensive than $10. A pricetag of $10 tells me the person doing it has no clue about anything involved and has priced themselves too cheap. A person with experience would go broke from the time involved to make any money at $10.

Also, 20 records per week? JeebusChristo that's ambitious. Your sales team would kill your margins at $10 per. Because if you're trying to sell and make the vinyl all by your lonesome, just take the money you were going to invest in getting set up and light it on fire. It'll be faster and much less heartache.

hobbies are spending money irrationally for joys or pleasures of the act of doing that hobby, no always about a business plan, do you have any?

I'm not the one that came up with the idea of selling 20 etched vinyls per week at $10 each concept.

The vocabulary term "net" means profit after expenses. Certainly the retail price would be higher.

Sorry.. but a sales team for 20 album sales a week? That's just what regular artists making a living do. Small labels too, majority of which are one-person operations. At $20 a pop (cheap these days) that's $20k a year in sales, which is doable if you're promoting releases and gigging actively in a local scene. Majority of small runs go into local shops and get sold at merch boots at shows, not sold b2c in a web shop where it needs to be shipped somewhere else. Many don't have bar codes, so they can't get on Amazon.

But more importantly, people working in the music industry are excited about these developments. I think you as well should be, given you're a self-professed vinyl lover. All this means more development in cutting heads (the current ones cost tens of thousands!), in lathe equipment for master cutting, and more modern equipment and capable engineers working at pressing plants, many of which have had trouble hiring younger people. It also means more development in materials engineering for vinyl, biodegradable materials being a new movement.

That's $10 more than you can get for selling your recording in digital format online.

    digital:
    $1
    $2
    $3
    ...

    vinyl:
    -$4990
    -$4980
    -$4970
    ...

If my wildly estimated pricing is accurate, the break even point is 555 records sold. BandCamp looks to be about $4 per EP (and you'd get maybe $3 of that), so this may be a conservative estimate.

Bitcoin mining was also a hobby that paid for itself within a year. And tulip farming...

That sounds like a job not a hobby.

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