With 'Incubi and Succubi' the pressing cost something around £1500, all inclusive, with a 3mm full-colour sleeve. This was in 2014 and was for a single run of 300 copies, many of which are still in boxes throughout the house.
Given that a stamper has to be made for pressing, the breakeven is around 250 unless there has been some kind of technological breakthrough. i.e. you can order less than 250 copies, but the price won't go down significantly because the bulk of the cost is in the preparation.
The pressing firm I went with didn't want to go much over 20 minutes a side and I had to drop the extended instrumental track and change the track order to get the numbers to work out.

That does seem like a lot of money, and a high percentage of them needing to be sold to break even too... Would you say that it is therefore not financially viable to print in more obscure media formats, or do you think there'll be a time when it will be something you can do without haemorrhaging money?

I've always been curious of how well it works from a economics standpoint, as as much as records are cool, whether there is an ability to convert that interest into a sustainable profit has intrigued me.

That was before Brexit kicked the pound in the nuts so it might be even more now. Bizarrely, with one of my work colleagues, their kid managed to get a 100-unit run but I don't know how much it cost. You might be able to shave costs by just having a white sleeve instead of a nice colour printing, Tucker A&M Foundation did something like that on their album.

Cassette will be a lot cheaper because you skip the whole business of having a master disc physically cut by a skilled technician and electroplated until it can be put into a record press. I haven't looked into that, though a casual search on google turns up someone in the UK who will do a run of 100 C60 cassettes for about £170 + VAT including a single-sided colour inlay.

3D printing records is a subject of interest too, that could enable some very interesting print-on-demand stuff, but the resolution needed to make it work is still a ways off, I believe.

OK, this is interesting. If they've managed to remove a chunk of the cutting/electroplating stage, it could make pressing a fair bit cheaper.
https://pitchfork.com/news/high-def.....-as-next-year/

I could have *swarn* I typed up a reply for this, but for some reason it's gone. I'll go again

With this data, I think at the moment, it's not financially viable for us to print records to LP and sell them simply due to the cost of pressing, the cost you'd need to sell them at, and the amount of people willing to buy. I also think cost-cutting measures like plain white sleeves would deter people from making the purchase.

When it comes to 3D printing, as someone who's tried to have stuff 3D printed, it's not wonder-goods. There are tones of limitations to what thermoplastics can do. They are very soft, very brittle and I think they could even ruin the stylus's on record players. Resolution of the audio might be inaccurate as well, but I couldn't be sure.

In that Pitchfork article, the words "higher volume" do concern me with the concepts of CD and Digital brickwalling occouring in them which, thankfully have been avoided in current formats.

Cassette however, I think might be more financially viable, again, I don't know what the equivalent in CD is, but as a retrotec, I think that one could be a more... easily dabbled form of it.

3D-printing vinyl has been done experimentally around 2013, but the low resolution caused a weird swooping noise and it wasn't able to reproduce anything about about 3KHz. But the fact that it worked at all was quite impressive. I keep looking occasionally to see if the state of the art has advanced - looks like the HD Vinyl people are closest, but their approach is still aimed at cutting the master for pressing rather than being able to cheaply and easily do short-run duplication.

As for the 'higher volume' thing, that's an artifact of vinyl. The louder the signal, the wider the grooves need to be and the less run-time you get per side. This is why the highest quality pressings are split across two disks, so they can have 16 minutes a side but at far higher quality. If you need to pack lots of music in a single side, e.g. Spock's Beard's "The Great Nothing" which is 27 minutes long, you have to reduce the volume of the recording to fit it in at all. But if you reduce the volume you get closer to the noise floor so there's more audible hiss. I would be fascinated to know how the HD-Vinyl people are working around that.

Vinyl is expensive. I've only had one album pressed out of the 14 (?) I've recorded. It was only economically feasible because I'd inherited some money from my uncle. I'm not likely to do it again unless a miracle happens and I somehow end up idle-rich. I had hoped that with vinyl being trendy I might have sold enough to recover some of the costs, but it's been a handful of sales a year.

I've never had CDs duplicated. Personally I buy a stack of thermal-printable CD-Rs, and duplicate them myself on-demand using a Casio CW-75 labeller and an Acard duplicator which I got off ebay years ago. I duplicate a run of 20-30 for taking to Anthrocon, Confuzzled etc. I get a run of 100 booklets printed to make it look nicer, using a firm in Bristol called Short Run. It's about £100 for 100 4-page booklets.

Thanks for the feature! ^^

No problemo!