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How It Works

We work without contracts at Smalltown America, simply because we don't have the capital to be able to afford legal bills. We try to do things very simply here, we've not had any trouble and most of our records have at the very least broken even. Please be advised, it's a hard slog selling records - everyone's at it these days! The bottom line is, if you gig lots we'll get them all sold. So with that in mind:

You mail us your music
We let you know if we can help you to release it
You decide if you would like us to release it after all
You tell us how many records you can sell at gigs and by other means
We tell you how many records we think we can sell
We design the artwork, master the record and find people to promote it (we normally undertake this work together because it takes quite a while)
We manufacture the records according to the following equation:

Number of records manufactured = Number of records you think you can sell + Number of records we think we can sell + Agreed number of promotional copies

We post the records for sale on this website
You sell your records at shows
We endeavour to find a distributor for the record (if appropriate)
We post out the promotional copies to people who will actually listen to the record and do something for us with it
We sell all the copies of the record (that's the tricky bit!)
STA expenditure is recouped first. Although this may sound fair to you it's important to understand what we mean. Although you may have lots of costs associated with making the music (studio time, mixing etc) - we have to recoup our outlay first, this is the only way we can stay afloat and encourages us all to be really budget conscious.
The profit split is as follows:

Profit made from sale of record = (Money made from sale of record - Cost of manufacturing/promoting record)
Profit Distribution
40% to artist (that's you)
40% to STA
20% to rolling fund

The 20% that is retained from each manufacturing run - will be re-invested in the next set of artists. This might be for touring/recording... whatever. The rolling fund money will be allocated by mutual agreement of the STA staff. This isn't a move to make the split 60/40 to us, the money we make from your release goes into keeping the office going - the 20% retention is a 'trust fund' that you contribute to.
We publish your accounts online - so you can see how we are getting on with sales etc.
We move onto the next record

Last updated 2:30am 18 August 2005