The Vinyl Record Mirage - Part 5

How to Get to a Record Deal?

This is part 5 of 6 from this series. This is designed to be an educational resource and if one doesn’t want to learn anything they shouldn’t be reading. I’d request any feedback be kept until the final installment is posted as additional questions might be answered.

Bear in mind requests for any stories here to be removed will be ignored.

The other parts can be read here: Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4

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Part #5: How to get to a record deal.

The last posted part of this article will circle back to this from the first part. “Your band having a vinyl ready viable product (M. II. Point 4): This one I’m going to circle back to after I explain several realities of record pressing and will likely discuss at the end of this article.” After that is discussed, there will also be a glossary of sorts listing out solutions to many of the problems discussed above. Any feedback I receive will go into a potential part 7 if there is anything that wasn’t missed or if somebody requests additional information on something, that will either be another Substack posting or a podcast video depending on what if anything is received.

So, you’re a band (this can also apply to labels looking to expand into record production) looking to get your music onto vinyl. How do you do that? Well, here is a basic checklist. Bear in mind obviously that there are exceptions to this stuff and that those exceptions aren’t likely to be you, as again this is basic surface level stuff.

1. Now that you have all the knowledge from above, you must ask yourself if this is really something you want to deal with and determine that you’re not located somewhere where receiving records is basically impossible.

In March, I had somebody who I worked with for several years with a long running band that plays live, request their deal be terminated because they finally realized that going through the processes required to obtain vinyl records is not in line with the vision they have for their band. While I’m out money from this and a project that we have been working on for 6 years (that this specific band started) almost imploded, the result will be better for everyone in the end. BTW, realizing that this isn’t for you, doesn’t mean that your music will never get pressed onto LP it just means you have to wait until somebody comes into the picture with a desire or ability to do the extra work or go around the issues pertaining to your specific situation. All that realizing this isn’t for you means is that you simply need to stop asking people to press records for your stuff and that you shouldn’t sign up for (one of the solutions I’ll outline later may be applicable for this) vinyl record projects.

2. Make sure your band’s brand is suitable for a vinyl release.

Brand management is a concept that just about all the bedroom bands (along with most non-bedroom bands) I’ve worked with can’t understand and the catch 22 of this is that people are so fickle, even if you learn everything, you will never escape damaged branding. Winter Solace productions will never work with top-tier well-known black metal bands people hype up that are famous for selling a lot because I have made so many mistakes with the labels “brand” through the years and am self-aware enough to know that my personality doesn’t lend itself well to dealing with many of those people. I’m a different kind of vehicle so to speak, better for reissues and working with bands to help them eventually get something done that could in the long-term stand on its own. Sadly, a very small but noisy minority of “down” people have a tendency to get fixated on things I did online they don’t agree with/don’t have the full picture of online and am the subject of a bunch of disputes with people where nobody was really on the same wavelength that I’ll always have noise that follows me everywhere, which is something that many bands don’t want near them. While human nature defaults to rightfully telling these people to fuck off, said noise is also off putting to potential distributors/customers/etc. which can negatively impact the volume of stuff I can press so while “caring what people think” so to speak, isn’t something you should obsess over to any certain degree (or manipulate the perceptions of entirely as if they are puppet strings, like the band Aryan Blood has done since its inception) it is still something you should be conscious of.

If your band has a very large discography (customers like to collect everything a band does) with multiple split releases, constantly releasing new (either new music, recycled songs or re-recording the same songs multiple times) music, demos after albums or you have multiple different projects in multiple different styles (this is different than being a studio musician for hire) then your band is not suited to have records. My experience with bands like this (I’ve worked with several) is that they usually fall apart at the finish line and their smaller following of collectors who must own everything that they do are not enough to justify record production on their own. If people can’t find a way in to your music because your discography is a labyrinth with most of your free time spent acting like a mentally unstable reject running around dumpster fire on PCP blaming the Jews for making the sky blue, then your brand is completely compromised and most of the labels who would invest in that have been burned so many times by people that they are just moving on. While bands like DTL, Hate Forest and others (like Aesir or Sunchariot, who we work with) are very prolific with good label deals, a vast majority of the people who are making CDrs, Tapes, lathe records, pro CDs without any real regard to pacing constantly jumping from one label to next after burning the owner of their previous label do not have chance to get such a deal nor should they be invested in. This type of manic approach will eventually run out of steam and large amounts of potential customers will lose interest quickly, which is not a good track record to make someone commit to putting thousands of dollars into the music you make. People can think what they will about these bands with such large discographies, however somebody I worked with years ago figured out that many of these bands simply compete with each other to see who can have the most releases which usually leads to quantity over quality and a decrease in long term sales leaving their music only for those who consume music mindlessly. The solutions section will feature a solution for labels owners who find themselves stuck in deals with these people.

Having a bad reputation is not a good thing as labels (just like bands, graphics artists, audio technicians or anybody) talk to each other and chances are if you cost somebody a bunch of money doing something stupid, they’re going to tell others in private even if they are reimbursed. I will never press a record for somebody who is active if I haven’t done another less expensive project with them first after years of suffering large losses and other labels I know have similar procedures in place that work for them as well. This is also something that is basically impossible to fix unless you basically just spend years retooling to a point where you do everything yourself, it’s the same for labels and the same for life really which is why this is something that you have to care at the beginning of your journey to attain long term results. An overall theme for life that I found after educating myself about investing is that anything in the short term is bad and that the focus needs to be for long term thinking, which is the worthwhile approach here.

3. Have your goals clearly defined so you have an idea of what you’re doing.

Steven Pressler’s “The War of Art” is a good leaping point to figure out how to basically be an artist, even if you read it later like I did as it basically is a roadmap to teach you all the stuff you learned through years of hardship. If you don’t have any actual vision, then anything you put out will just be this willy-nilly product that isn’t taken seriously on its release because it doesn’t build any sort of workable foundation. The result of these things in the long term is they just get put into boxes in a storage area somewhere and are lost in time or stolen by someone else (thus ripping you off) years later. Having a proper vision puts some kind of framework in place to eventually get you what you want, primarily by actual defining what it is you want so you can be working with the right people in the right areas. The best example of this is just about every band who doesn’t want their product to be associated with NSBM, why they want this is irrelevant for the sake of argument, but basically, they determine that they don’t want any overlap with NSBM and thus take action to avoid overlap. People who are employed as “Futurists” by places like Google are paid obscene amounts of money to basically look into the future, observe a potential outcome and then define what steps have to take place for it to occur. If you want something you must determine the steps to get it, then proceed to take the steps or otherwise do whatever you need to do to get it. I would be very curious to see a study of some kind done to determine how this basic concept of discipline is lost on society and in what numbers, but I think the amount of people whining about stuff they don’t have everywhere is a clue that the numbers will be quite high.

4. Make sure your business end/reputation fits with what label that you want to press your music onto LP and that you put that label on a pedestal.

This is a tie in from above, but a break is the logical step because at this point the assumption is that you have some clue of what you want and how to get it. A way to distill this down is to basically say that if you want to have somebody do something for you, they need to know what they are doing to a level where the action can be executed. The main things that move this process along are good honest communication and similarities/common ground. If you’re working with somebody who never shows up, communicates and that you have absolutely nothing in common with it will basically go nowhere. So many people don’t have a firm grasp of what they want and then end up in situations where they aren’t interested in what is going on around them simply because they can’t be honest with themselves, which is what leads to a lot of unhappiness eventually dooming projects to negative outcomes. This is equally a responsibility for both sides, however usually the person who initiates the start of something is the main one responsible for making sure this is all working out the way it’s supposed to and then leaving if they are not on the same page as everyone else.

So how does this relate to labels/bands/record deals? Well, just about everyone I’ve ever had brag about professionalism usually doesn’t have the mental ability to fully grasp how unprofessional they are being and that they themselves are usually at least partially the cause of whatever problem they are upset about. To get your music pressed onto LP, you are basically asking somebody to spend over a thousand dollars into your art form so you should be at the bare minimum on the same page and be able to have proper conversations about the subject. A label should be able to coach you to get you to the point of being able to get your music pressed onto a record and if you are to difficult to work with, that can’t happen. This also extends to the people you work with around you and if somebody involved in the process is not on the page as everyone else it’s going to be a problem that the defined leader (if multiple people who have played in your band have threatened to kill or harm me like various members of Aryanwulf have done, I will not press your music) has to deal with. It is perfectly reasonable for labels/bands to cancel/shelve projects or withhold investment if somebody isn’t getting what they want out of the deal because these things are important enough to justify it. Usually for a band to really take off they must have a stable long-term arrangement with one single label with multiple releases/records to recoup monetary investments which is a concept a lot of people don’t have a grasp of and if that type of label/band partnership is either unstable or not on the same page, it is a waste of time. Anything worth doing is not easy and many people do not have the ability to get done things that are hard despite what they say or even think.

5. You must be patient with your ego & O.C.D in check to get stuff done.

As evident by a lot of what was described above, vinyl record production can take a long time and people are not prepared for what must happen for it to occur. Being able to wait for what you want is a trademark of adulthood and central to (compounding interest) wealth building, as is adapting to the environment around you. In the case of music production, this means that you must be both patient and understanding that beggars can’t be choosers when it comes to some of this. There is limitations to vinyl record production, most bands aren’t a big enough draw to go around some of them (the ones that are BTW, are not fixated on them) and there exists metaphorical graveyards of stuff that is basically rotting for eternity because somebody can’t get off one little detail that makes sense only to them. The more people involved in something further complicate everything which requires again a certain discipline because plans must be able to change if something isn’t working out.

The guy above from #1 of this part told me when he cancelled his deal that he didn’t feel like waiting 2 years for his releases to get done, this is a perfectly reasonable assumption to have and I actually lose interest in producing certain projects if they sit on the shelf for over a year, however this guy would constantly get mixed up with people who move like snails or agree to take part in complex projects (like splits or stuff requiring commissioned artwork) that can’t get done quickly. I have currently multiple projects shelved due to issues with the requirements of the project being too complex to get done with the factories having to change multiple times, which is not the fault of anybody involved in the process and people must find ways to cope with that. Extremely incredulous delays where the projects can be stalled for several years (you see this a lot with splits, projects requiring commissioned artwork/mastering, custom effects and/or anything else with a lot of people/moving parts) or in some cases hopelessly locked up with no release date are common with UGBM releases and the chances of this happening are exponentially higher with record production. More problems arise from stuff being done incorrectly that must be corrected (usually at a large expense) later, because in some instances the project must be paused for an entire calendar year to write off bad expenses. This is why being long-term focused with proper forbearance is a must, because there are usually a lot more people involved in record projects than in other formats.

Now before I get to the other two points, I’m going to share a story about somebody who I gave a record deal to that simply wasn’t ready for what I wanted to do and how it impacted me negatively. This person would be Marko Balkis of 1389, who is basically a living meme that I felt bad for and thought if the right amount of money were put into his music, he could release something that would sanitize his reputation in one swoop. I paid him in advance probably roughly $400 USD in royalties (which for a band with a discography like his located in that part of Europe is quite a lot of money) to allow for him to move to another part of Croatia for work, paid 200 Euros for a different artist than who we currently use to make a higher end painting for an album cover, got him a split seven inch lined up with a band that was very famous, had his album professionally mastered at a studio in London with an SSL console (Abby Road type of production) which was another 250 Euros and got another larger label involved for co-production to enhance the final product. In return for this, Marko self-destructed at the finish line choosing to return the royalties I paid him because I requested that he stop constantly releasing stuff under the name 1389, he declined the split 7 inch after he claimed to have gotten a song from the other band because he didn’t like the guy, refused to endorse the mastering (I would subsequently have to fire this technician because he misled me on the basic concept of panning the sound, which I had to learn about on an internet forum) because the guy basically overworked the raw production without fixing the basic things I wanted fixed, became upset with the bigger label involved because that labels owner refused to respond to messages sent to him about releasing other projects and nobody bought the final product. This is one of three “black hole” deals that went bad within the same two-to-four-year time span that I regret doing entirely. I released a cassette version of his album with a different cover to cut losses which I then had to pull (reimbursing the other larger company who helped me who simply liquidated the cassettes through his warehouse) after I was informed Marko intended to have another company release the album with the original very poorly recorded source. I doubled down on my stupidity a year or so later after firing the engineer who failed to correctly master the CD and then releasing the album as a CD with the expensive cover art using the original source (which I ended up having to recycle at a massive loss because of low sales) to further recoup losses before I eventually just gave up like I originally should have done. Other people who knew Marko in person told me they suspected serious mental impairment and at present day after turning all his bands into a consistently de-platformed YouTube project with the most releases possible, simply can’t function or build a coherent band. I will never invest that kind of money in something ever again as it would’ve been cheaper to simply cut losses and move on, which I should’ve done but couldn’t keep my ego in check to do that.

Part of the reason behind telling this story, writing all these articles or making all these podcast videos is so that people can learn from some of these mistakes and hopefully realize that it’s okay to stand up to these people. There are two morals to this story; one, some people simply can’t be helped or educated so they should not be placated as they are or should be somebody else’s problem (multiple people told me 1389 should likely be released by Asrar if his music had any monetary value) and two, the ego is the enemy. My ego was stuck on this idea of basically paying enough money to elevate somebody who could care less if they were elevated because I didn’t want to face the fact that my friend who I worked with for a decade was not meant to go in the direction I was meant to go in. The ego is a muscle designed to prevent you from accepting or noticing change, it does this by basically having a tantrum like a child.

6. You must make sure whatever you turn in for a vinyl pressing is something that can and should be pressed onto LP.

While I’m not going to rehash run times for formats or why you can’t use samples again, the idea that an album must be written with vinyl being the end goal in mind is important. The only things that should be pressed onto LP are full length albums, ideally that can fit onto a single record. DLPs are very expensive and are usually only reserved for Doom/Post/Atmospheric based styles of music which are a different audience, compilations or a means to an end for longer projects with bad pre-production costs. Pic LPs should only be done for represses or things that have some type of pictorial significance, the same could be said for live albums (significant concerts) however certain people (me included) dislike live music. 7”, 10”, Single sided 12” & 45 RPM 12” generally don’t sell enough to justify costs (a repeat from earlier) and ideally the music on these releases should be the best of the best out of the bands material so extra music should be recorded. Split releases, rehearsals, demos, studio outtakes, spoken word interviews, poor recorded live music, experimental releases, ambient one offs or anything that can’t be pressed in at least 100 units should not be released onto LP.

Split releases onto records I want to talk about briefly because of their overall difficulties in getting done and state that many people don’t usually buy these. I’ve likely produced more splits than I have been interested in purchasing for personal use and these are usually just made from poor decisions. There large amount of people involved with these just further compound the long manufacturing times as it is very easy to fall into a maze of delays because one of the in some cases multiple parties involved isn’t ready when all the others are. Split DLPs are especially the worst because they are usually the result of bad decisions that should not have been pressed onto a vinyl record to begin with. Split 7” releases were originally done prior the internet to help with promotion (like samplers) but have become priced out of existence. In general, split releases are basically oversaturated in the digital age and if two people are adamant that they want to play on a record together, the best idea is to simply do a project together or just make albums (DTL does this) with a completely different line up released under one of the band names. The only exception to this would be reissues of splits where the band basically changed their name, however that can be best resolved by simply releasing everything under one band name and mentioning the name change in the linger notes. As of March 22^nd, 2026 I have two remaining split LP projects that I agreed to do (with one of which likely to be cancelled) and then after that I will not be releasing splits onto vinyl again, I suspect also given most of the turnaround times many labels have right now that others who haven’t already will likely follow suit. I remember offering people money, the ability to do a split with an older really well known band and contacting just about everyone on my contact list to get 10 minutes’ worth of music for a split project delayed for years with absolutely no takes and not getting any interest in the project so there is not the interest in these split recordings that would appear to justify any demand for them.

7. You as a band need to care about the result of the release.

I’ve met so many bands that just get their music recorded, have it for themselves and then are not at all concerned with the finished product, which is the exact opposite of what needs to take place with an expensive record pressing. I’m not saying this is a bad idea as this is why I don’t mass produce or even release (publicly or privately) many of my electronic recordings, however it’s a big problem if you agree to let somebody else pay to press something you made. While every label should promote their products, customers generally only want to have a direct connection with the bands as labels/producers are always the bad guy inhibiting art by putting restrictions on it. Many of the popular YouTube channels will also only work directly with bands who contact them. This is why you must have a promotable product to market which is something that I used to think was a rare thing out there, but the reality is that people simply must have the genuine drive to get out of their comfort zones to market their music. You do not need a specific talent or specific ad budget; you just have a desire to make a genuine effort at both putting your stuff out there and to connect with people by being who you genuinely are. Playing live/being sold at shows also helps a lot but isn’t a requirement as I’ve had very few bands in my almost 20 years of doing this that play live, only been to one UGBM concert in my life and enough people know who I am for me to be content.

The bands being able to work with distributors and being loyal to a specific label is a must as many people who run distros/shops (or retail customers) won’t care about stocking your music unless the band specifically endorses the release and instructs people to get wholesale/retail copies directly from the label that released it. A caveat to this is that there are some vendors out there that won’t stock something they genuinely want unless any chance of them being able to press their own version is completely out of their minds which must go back to the band’s pr/press. This is also why label hopping is bad because the guy who gets burned on distribution because everyone can’t get along with each other isn’t going to stick around in the long term. Other formats, region specific licensing etc. need to be coordinated with both the band and the label, unless the label didn’t pay for any of the mastering/artwork or expended a lot of effort into the release, as ideally the goal of the vinyl project is to make something significant enough that it could be permanently attached to a single labels catalogue. People can disagree with labels owning stuff all they want to, but there is a reason this takes place and record production needs to be at the level where the significance of the product can be factored into its longevity.

You can still do all this stuff, knowing everything word for word from the articles I’ve written, and the project does not work out. If this takes place, the band should understand that their records becoming indefinite deadstock is their responsibility to prevent as the label is going to basically cut losses and likely reassess producing records for that band in the future. If I get stuck with a bunch of records nobody buys for a band, I am not going to press them again as we are not a vehicle suited for catering to that band’s followers. This means that the band should explore buying back any deadstock or facilitating another party obtaining it, which is where “official distribution” comes from.