Vinyl Me Please (store, exclusives, swaps, etc)

Hemotep said:
I would have said, Cam, the plant is either ours now, or we fire you and sue the shit out of you. You'll never be a CEO again. Or we keep this quiet and you walk away.

Press what they can, small batch, audiophile. Get that revenue up. Without the knowledge of the shaky ground that got public, they could have weathered this and not spooked the customer base. It wouldn't have solved all the problems, but they'd be in a much better position today for someone to acquire them than they are now. Losing the subscribers destroyed them.
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Cam wasn't the only owner of the plant though so don't think it would have been that simple. But I'm not a lawyer so I have no clue hah. We also really only know what VMP claims happened. Cam filed a countersuit saying VMP was firing him and suing him because they couldn't afford to pay him severence.

I think they were gonna be a sinking ship either way. The lack of cash reserves from the plant is what killed them. Not that easy for them to just conjure up a few million dollars quickly to get back on track. Cash flow has seemingly screwed them. Led to it being impossible to license titles with rising label costs. I'm not convinced that the plant would have been up to speed now to press all of their preorder titles. Paramount seems to be moving quite slowly to get everything done correctly--VMP didn't have the luxury to be able to do that.

The whole thing is crazy to me. The board looks awful in the lawsuit--they fell asleep at the wheel. Cam looks bad for fucking the company.

ntaos said:
I never understood the publicity of it. Like they’re three dudes. After fees I can’t imagine you’d gain enough in the suits to help out or warrant the press.

I say this with no inside baseball so there could very well have been good reasons to do so. From the outside though, yeah I would’ve done exactly this.
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I don't get the publicity of it either. They did try to keep it quiet for awhile--think they were all fired in March and it wasn't brought to public knowledge for a few months. Forget the exact timeline. It was going to become public at some point after Cam made a huge deal about the pressing plant. They would have eventually had to come out and say 'we aren't going to have a plant anymore" and explain why. Those court docs weren't going to be private forever.
 
TenderLovingKiller® said:
I think you should spend as much as you can while you can. How many of the Dead albums do you already own?
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I don't own all of the ones in the box, but can probably easily offload the ones i DO have. This'll clear me out of VMP bucks and I'll pay $170ish out of pocket but will be done with VMP. Could easily make my money back if I wanna sell the box too...my CC is also good with chargebacks if it comes to that...
 
MikeH said:
I don't own all of the ones in the box, but can probably easily offload the ones i DO have. This'll clear me out of VMP bucks and I'll pay $170ish out of pocket but will be done with VMP. Could easily make my money back if I wanna sell the box too...my CC is also good with chargebacks if it comes to that...
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That will be a bitter pill for VMP to swallow. People using credits to buy pricy box sets. Keep up the good work in killing off VMP ;)
 
bdm105 said:
The unknown is private equity in all of this as well
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I suspect the rub is that Cam, Tyler and Matt are all founders and 1/3rd owners. PE would like to get control of the 2/3rds that are not Matt's, who is probably safely on their team, so they can flip VMP easier. The lack of severance and lawsuit is to force selling shares. Taking on the costs of maintaining a pressing plant were not in PE's interest, nor in the eyes of the potential buyers (think of the ongoing overhead in rent, machine maintenance, personnel like Gary, PVC materials) who just wanted the previous subscriber base to bolt on to their existing program. The subs volume and brand reputation were VMP's biggest value add to a buyer. Since VMP has no offices, few staff, some inventory in a warehouse (that PE has been trying to hock via Crate, new ROTM program and selling to record stores at a discount to reduce inventory), there isn't much else there of value to a VMP buyer.
 
Biscuit said:
I suspect the rub is that Cam, Tyler and Matt are all founders and 1/3rd owners. PE would like to get control of the 2/3rds that are not Matt's, who is probably safely on their team, so they can flip VMP easier. The lack of severance and lawsuit is to force selling shares. Taking on the costs of maintaining a pressing plant were not in PE's interest, nor in the eyes of the potential buyers (think of the ongoing overhead in rent, machine maintenance, personnel like Gary, PVC materials) who just wanted the previous subscriber base to bolt on to their existing program. The subs volume and brand reputation were VMP's biggest value add to a buyer. Since VMP has no offices, few staff, some inventory in a warehouse (that PE has been trying to hock via Crate, new ROTM program and selling to record stores at a discount to reduce inventory), there isn't much else there of value to a VMP buyer.
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You work in that industry right?
 
Biscuit said:
I suspect the rub is that Cam, Tyler and Matt are all founders and 1/3rd owners. PE would like to get control of the 2/3rds that are not Matt's, who is probably safely on their team, so they can flip VMP easier. The lack of severance and lawsuit is to force selling shares. Taking on the costs of maintaining a pressing plant were not in PE's interest, nor in the eyes of the potential buyers (think of the ongoing overhead in rent, machine maintenance, personnel like Gary, PVC materials) who just wanted the previous subscriber base to bolt on to their existing program. The subs volume and brand reputation were VMP's biggest value add to a buyer. Since VMP has no offices, few staff, some inventory in a warehouse (that PE has been trying to hock via Crate, new ROTM program and selling to record stores at a discount to reduce inventory), there isn't much else there of value to a VMP buyer.
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Tyler is on the VMP team and still works for them. I do not believe Cam is an owner.
 
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