Vinylize your music with Qrates
Qrates is a new online service that lets you create and design your own custom vinyl records for your fans.
Vinyl records have been making a massive revival over the past decade that has seen it’s peak in the past year. With such a demand for vinyl it only makes sense that independent artists can get their music on vinyl too, and that’s what Qrates are helping you do.
Qrates lets you produce a batch from 100-1000 vinyl records of your own music. From their website you can also customise your vinyl from everything to the colour and type of record, to the label on the inner disc, to the sleeve design. You can essentially design your very own vinyl record from scratch for your music.
You can add your own custom image to the sleeves and personalise the middle label on the record. You can even go as deep as setting the RPM, choosing the thickness of the sleeve and how it comes packaged. If you’ve never seen a splatter designed record before, Qrates have got you covered, check out that awesomeness that could hold your music below.
Qrates was founded in Tokyo by Yong-bo Bae, Jun Komatsu, Greg Gouty, and Taishi Fukuyama and the team have just made their service available in the US. Fukuyama said: “The team was all involved in music at different levels: label management, distribution, retail, etc. We wanted to build an easier solution for people to release their music on vinyl.
“First, we wanted to offer the possibility to press very small quantities, ensuring that you have the exact quantity you really need to press, avoiding overstock. In order to keep it valuable we also bring the possibility to sell directly to fans and record stores by deciding the retail and wholesale prices. We also bring professional solutions for mastering and shippings and good pressing turnovers. The project owners can then concentrate on A&R and promotion of their music. This has proven to be a good solution for a lot of people who wanted to release or repress their music on vinyl.”
We recently looked at vinylize.it, a company that produced independent vinyl but instead of your own music you can license others’ music from SoundCloud to print.
Head to Qrates now and start designing your first vinyl record.