vinyl.st-plan

Proposition
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Vinyl is making a comeback, sales have grown every year in the UK for the last 9 years.  
50% YoY growth in 2015 UK.  Turntables were the most popular audio item sold on 
Amazon during the run up to Christmas 2015.

People now  discover music through digital services, the common way to bookmark this 
music is with playlists.  We make it easy to go from playlist to physical vinyl.
Shipping can form a large percentage of the total price for vinyl (typically 10-50%)
so we help to find sellers who can combine shipping for multiple items.
We act as a price comparison site, but as well as finding you the best deal, we remove
friction in the buying process by going straight from where your wishlist is right now.

There is no service to help you quickly find the best seller or combination of sellers 
for your vinyl at the moment.  Buyers currently have to go and check multiple sites to 
find the best price, which can vary quite a lot, and can be seriously time consuming when 
you have to manually parse different shipping costs, currencies and combination options.

Market
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* Approx $350M vinyl sold in US in 2014 (Neilson Soundscan)
  ** Speculated that soundscan may only cover 15% of the market

* Poll shows 35 to 44 year olds to be the largest consumer group (28.5%), younger buyers 
are also seeing the appeal of the format, with over a third (35.3%) aged under 35.  Just under 
half of respondents were married, and men made up the majority of the self-selecting sample (87.4%).

* Customer Segments
  ** DJs - buying new 12”s - need them fast, they may not have a prior digital release
  ** Collector - multiple purchases at a time, often rare and second hand
  ** Fan - multiple purchases at a time, mostly new - 2/month
  ** Occasional - approx 5 purchases / year

Revenue Streams
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* Affiliate schemes with existing vinyl retailers
* Marketplace for labels to sell direct to fans, bypassing existing retailers
* Marketplace extended to tickets and other merchandise
* Demand data for labels
* Selling pre-orders
* Crowd-funding represses or new releases

Risks
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* Growth of vinyl market is constrained by number of pressing plants
* People are not price sensitive with vinyl, they are loyal to sellers - likely true in 
the case of physical stores, unlikely true online as evidenced by all the aggregator sites 
for books, movies, any other item you can think of...
* Vendors don’t play affiliate ball
* Cost of scraping for those who won’t provide data
* We can’t cover enough of the market and users still have to go outside our site to compare
whole of market
* Marketing cost too high to generate requisite awareness
* Someone else does this better and faster than us

Research Required
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* Interviews with indie record labels - cost structure (pressing, distribution, retail etc.), 
understand business model and pain points.
* Interviews with different customer segments - assess loyalty factor, how do people decide 
where to buy from, what does current online buy process flow look like
* Investigate price variance of online vinyl retailers
* Who are the biggest vinyl retailers in the UK / US. Do they have affiliate schemes & API?
* New vinyl sales (units & money) in uk & globally, online and offline, with sources
* Second hand vinyl sales (units & money) in UK and globally, online and offline, with sources
* Vinyl sales figures by genre - so we can decide on whether a niche is viable
* How do labels find out about demand, so they can press more if necessary 
* How do aggregators / price comparison sites typically protect their business?
* What is the average price of a new vinyl album?
* Business models of the old record clubs (e.g. Britannia)