Roadkilled. Why we failed to put some lovely music on an old fashioned piece of plastic.

Thanks to everyone who supported our campaign to put Roadkill on vinyl! Unfortunately we failed in raising the total amount of 5000 Euros that we asked for to produce and ship 500 vinyl records. We got some emails and messages full of questions why this campaign did not succeed. We think there are lots of points and we want to be as honest and transparent as possible.

Just blame the interwebs. Not.
It would be easy to say that there are just not enough people who want this record on vinyl, that there are not enough people who are willing to pay for such a thing, that vinyl is finally dead, bla bla bla. But that is just not true. We raised almost 2000 Euros, 2/3rd of the amount was raised just within a few days. At the beginning of the campaign we were confident that it would work out just fine. Well, it did’nt in the end. Obviously. Since the crowdfunding model follows the all or nothing concept, everyone will get his or her money back and we end up with zero and have to admit that the whole campaign failed. That’s a matter of fact.

So, why did the campaign fail?
The amount of 5000 Euros was too much! Maybe. The production of the 500 vinyl records would have been 1500 Euros in total. If we would have asked for this amount, we would have been successful. The mastering, which is needed, would have cost us an extra of 500 Euros, that we would have raised aswell (almost). But we asked for more. What? Greedy bastards?! Since the production and shipping is a total mess for the environment we wanted to give one euro for each record to the FSC (who take care of reforestation). That’s another 500 Euros. And we also wanted to guarantee CO2 neutral cartons (that we put the records in for shipping) and also the shipping should be CO2 neutral, we believe. Another 250 Euro. Since it is almost impossible to tell in advance where the records will go to (what country) we had to calculate an average shipping fee, that our partner Startnext asked us to integrate in the funding amount. Without adding the shipping costs to the campaign they would not support us. So, the total amount almost doubled because of the shipping costs. One Euro for every record we wanted to keep for us, to support our upcoming AAAHH Records workshop. Maybe that was a mistake. It had nothing to do with the record and increased the total amound, which is unnecessary. Our fault. Speaking of faults: We started the campaign well, but kind of left it alone after a while. We should have thought about some things to keep up and push the attention that the web gave us in the beginning. More Twitter, more Facebook, etc. But: We just don’t want to spam the people. We decided that one newsletter to all our fans and a few days of tweeting and posting is enough. Maybe we should have been more “professional” when it came to promoting the campaign. We have to find the right balance when it comes to promotion.

That’s it? What’s next?
We learned a lot during this campaign experiment. And this is exactly what it is. The whole label project that you know as aaahh records is a experiment for us and we love to try new things. Next time we do such a crowdfunding thing we will go for the needed production costs only, to lower the total amount (but we will still go for a green way of doing it!) and most importantly we will host such a campaign on our own site! We already plan to implement a plugin/software that will allow us to do that. Another good point would be to think about funding a new record. Roadkill was perfectly suitable for a vinyl release, because it feels like a concept album but it also feels quite old. Maybe there will be a new record by Entertainment For The Braindead soon, that will also have a vinyl feel to it. We will let you know when or how we will do this. So far we can only thank everyone who supported us and ask you to be patient until we finally make this thing happing. Next time we’ll do it right!

Feel free to comment on this! Let us know what you think and tell us what we can do better next time.

Thanks to everyone who supported our campaign to put Roadkill on vinyl! Unfortunately we failed in raising the total amount of 5000 Euros that we asked for to produce and...