orchidtapes

If this was sarcasm I'd like you to know I at least am a pretty big fan of the music you put out on your label. Like I previously mentioned I did jump on Boring Ecstasy and am stoked to receive it. I will however admit to being a bit scorned over missing out on this Alex G physical pressing....but I at least realize that with the way you run things I will still be able to hear the album for free digitally upon release, and in light of that I will maintain high respect for the label.

Not being sarcastic at all. We hugely appreciate anyone who's taken the time to check out the Alex G song, any of our back catalog of releases, or taken the extra step and purchased any vinyl (or tapes) that we've helped to put out. I would never be snarky or sarcastic about something like that, those kinds of gestures are literally the lifeblood of Orchid Tapes that help us to continue what we're doing and putting out more releases.

I know a lot of people are used to paying a bit less for LPs from "DIY" labels, but this is how it breaks down for us: Between doing music as Foxes in Fiction, occasionally mastering music and running Orchid Tapes, I have no other forms of income at this point. As of the past three months or so, I usually spend about 10+ hours on day-to-day operations related to the label, and a bit more around time periods where we're shipping large amounts of vinyl. We try to spend a lot of time being very fastidious over the physical packages that we send out to people (hand-written notes, stickers, hand-stamped envelopes and tea bags) because this is the kind of stuff that makes the process special to us, and hopefully to the people that buy things from Orchid Tapes. Because this can be such a time consuming process and because of the time required for my other 'jobs', I don't have any time left over to pursue any sort of employment that would provide a regular stream of income for things like food / rent / future Orchid Tapes releases. We put all our releases for free on Bandcamp because it's something we strongly believe in (with all the donations going back into purchasing download credits) so we make basically $0 on digital sales at this point in time.

At this point in time it's just not viable for us to charge any less and still afford to be able to put out physical releases (as well as pay the artists we're releasing music for) and still like, have a place to live and work. Maybe in time when we're a little bit more established and have different avenues figured out for making actual money, we'll be able to charge less. We're not trying to rip anyone off, we're just trying release beautiful things that we can be really proud of and charge what we think is fair to both us as a label, our artists, and the people who are choosing to support us.

Thanks for all the support and kind words everyone, we really appreciate it.