Every vinyl company pushes the FOMO since they realized how much it sells. And most have raised prices in the past few years again. Newbury Comics is the first company I remember really pushing limited color variants years and years ago. They now flip their OWN records in their stores. $40 single LPs are becoming normalized but it's not just because of VMP. AP and MoFi helped set the $40 price tag (buy now cry later! fuck chad!), then other companies jumped on that regardless of specs and try to take advantage of people not really knowing much about the pressing process. Lots of generic GZ cuts out there now selling for $40+ under the guise of being limited, or being a title that was badly in need of a reissue and the labels phoned it in.
@RHANDMJ can tell you about how Amazon caused vinyl prices to go up across the board.
I will say by and large, VMP is actually spending the money on improving the records. I've been a member on and off since their 2nd year in business. They've gone from generic GZ cuts to doing a majority AAA cut by top engineers, nice jackets, etc. I don't think that pressing at GZ was necessarily a price choice--I think they primarily had to do that just to meet deadlines with the numbers of ROTM they were pressing. QRP mostly stopped pressing for other companies (and VMP stole their plant manager for their own plant), RTI was backed up like crazy, Pallas was having issues, etc.
I'll be very curious how the VMP plant goes. I'm rooting for it to succeed because it will be great to have another good pressing plant out there. As for anthologies, I've always seen this as their pet project and most companies have those. I'm sure they know the financials and how many they need to sell to break even. I know people made fun of them for the Grateful Dead box set, but they did end up selling it out and the demand was there for them to repress it. I'm not saying that this Memphis rap set will sell out anytime soon, but I don't think they ever expected this one to sell out day 1.
The Anthologies are a curious one because many of them do not sell out and they must be losing "profit" on them every day with warehousing costs. But I doubt they would keep making them if they are real big money losers. It seems they have them planned out for at least the next year knowing full well that the majority of them don't sell out quickly at all. I do think they made a mistake putting some in swaps awhile ago because now everyone assumes that every set is going to end up in swaps eventually.
VMP still has a bunch of issues to work out but I do think they have mostly improved in a lot of areas even from a few years ago. They also pretty constantly have coupon codes or offers to bring the prices down on subscriptions and items in their store. Like right now you can get a referral for $80 off a yearly subscription PLUS 8 free records which drastically brings the price down for members (something like $18 per album). They do also seem to be trying to pilot a loyalty program of sorts and giving bigger discounts on sales to people who have remained members for a long time. They did those regional hip hop sales last month and I think you could get up to 40% off if you've been a member for over 2 years or something.
