[musictlk] planning to start a record label

[Kevin Reeves]

I hate to be a wet blanket on some of this, but allow me to speak candidly as a consumer and a musician who sells records.
It is not the record label who ships CD's and processes payments. That is the distributer's job. With services like CD Baby and Tune core, musicians already have a distributer at there fingertips. There is no advantage to shipping CD's yourself and processing credit cards. Yes, it may seem as though you keep all the profits, but online payment gateways are very expensive per month. Also, you would be unable to get your musicians into iTunes, Amazon, etc because of lack of track record. None of us can get our music there without the help of the above mentioned services. Also, you lose out on the discoverability of your musicians being listed with all of the digital delivery options that the above mentioned services provide. If no one can find you, no one will buy and 100 percent of 0 is still 0.
Also,  a publisher does not sell CD's either. Publishers deal with the ownership of someone's catalog. They're the ones who get music cut by other artists, secure sync rights for television, etc.
If you really want to set up a label and function as such, then you're object is to fund the making of records. In a sense, you loan money to an artist for them to make their album, which includes recording, mixing, mastering, artwork and layout, pressing if you so choose, and submitting to retailers. Then, you take a cut from those sales to pay yourself back. That's called recoupable income. Lastly, with the advent of streaming services like Spotify, RDO, Mog, Rhapsody, etc, the game is changing yet again. People are moving to a subscription model for their musical entertainment, which means that artists make about 4 cents per stream of a song. In short, my advice, don't reinvent the wheel. It's way harder than it's worth and the return on investment isn't worth the effort. Again, I'm not trying to be a wet blanket, but I'm telling you like it is. I deal with this stuff on a daily basis as a musician, producer, writer, etc. Good luck.

Kevin