Postage Pat

In the old days of the band, I'm talking like 2007ish here, you wouldn't really need to focus so much on postage. You'd sell CDs the old way: at gigs (you'd therefore have to play a *lot* of gigs), face-to-face, trying (with varying success) to stock them in local record shops, or by using those gnarly old paypal 'buy' buttons, hastily slapped onto your glittering myspace page.

For the handful of orders you'd get, you could marvel at the faraway places that appeared on the shipping labels: the US! Hong Kong! Australia! Bits of Europe! It was amazing really, and didn't break the bank to send these things (usually CDs because tapes and vinyl weren't really a thing yet, and we were still in the EU) and you could make friends doing it.

As the band slowly got bigger and the internet changed and morphed less around myspace and more around stuff like facebook & then twitter, something popped up to help: Bandcamp. Bandcamp is basically a big myspace page with a buy button on it, so you can upload whatever you want and people can just buy it there and then. Absolutely revolutionary really, and you've no idea how much it helped. Gone were the days of having to rely on slinging a handful of CDs at another shitty bar gig, or hoping Borders would stock your jewel case in their 'local music' section.

Anyway, enough of the history lesson. It's been this way for ages now: the bulk of the sales I make are through Bandcamp, which means for physical stuff, it's me sending CDs and tapes through the post to people. 

Over the years, postage has gone from a genuine delight to an all encompassing shitshow. I dread it, I'll be honest. To post to anywhere now it's anyone's guess how much it'll cost, and what documentation you need to supply alongside it. Earlier this year you needed to charge an extra £3 on top of anything you sold to the EU for reasons that weren't exactly made clear, as they just slapped a charge on it. Didn't matter that much though, because a month or so later, they just stopped you from sending anything.

There've been a few rumblings I've noticed recently about postage and how much stuff is, and I didn't know how much was genuinely meant at having a pop at me, and how much was just that they didn't actually know how much things are now. To take my physical sales as an example, I only really release in two formats: CD and tape. This helps keep costs down as well as a whole myriad of other reasons too, but that's another story for another day tbh. The CDs I press up are always slimline, so I can send as a smaller size, therefore reducing costs to you and making my life a bit easier. 

So in the UK, you have 3 sizes of packages you can send: letter, large letter, and small parcel. There are others above that, but they're not relevant to what we're talking about here, so I'll ignore those.

The aforementioned CDs will fit as a letter, so long as it doesn't go over 100g in weight and it doesn't go above 0.5cm in width. Tapes go as a large letter as they give you wiggle room of 2.5cm in width, but still only allow 100g (unless you want to pay more) so I have to be careful not to stuff these things with any extra material, or use big packaging.

So, let me break this down for you. To send either a CD or a tape to Europe (bear in mind, I still don't know if I'm technically even allowed to send anything there yet, but for the sake of argument, let's say I am for now) I can only use the 'large letter' service, as the 'letter' one is reserved for non-commercial mail. So these are my options:

 

 

Fuck me, right? haha. Tracked is usually best, as you can see where your package is whenever, and it has a higher chance of getting to where it needs to be. About 99% of the time though, I'll plump for the standard option, which is £3.70, but if it goes missing, I'm screwed.

 

So I enter all the details, and then right at the end, I get hit with £3.54 of fees, which brings our total to £7.24 before I've even thought about packaging, etc.  

 

Again, thanks to new rules brought in a few months ago, I'm unsure as to whether I can even do this, as according to everywhere I've looked, I now need a 'responsible person' on the satan payroll in each EU country I want to sell in (who charge anywhere between £150-500 a year) to do essentially nothing. Yeah, I can't afford that. But doesn't matter anyway, as I'll need documentation about the actual packaging itself too, and to provide that, I open myself up to a whole other world of pain if something goes wrong.
  

Anyway, so yeah, it's fucking expensive. 

Your favourite record stores, or online shops, or even some bigger bands, will use fulfilment centres to navigate these worlds: big massive warehouses full of their stock which deal with all this bullshit for them. And if they don't have those, they'll no doubt have business accounts with their couriers (Royal Mail, Parcelforce, Fed Ex, DPD, etc), which give them huge discounts on postage, provided they send a certain number of packages each day. I've worked in offices where they've had this before, and it's a world away from nipping to your local post office with a few jiffy bags, lemme tell you.

To send to the US, these are my options:
 

Again, sending something tracked, which gives your package a better chance of surviving in transit, it's nearly £11 without a signature and almost £12 for one with. Yikes. So yeah, I have to opt for the standard one again, only after I go through and head to the checkout, I'm hit with 50p for 'tariffs'. Annoying, but not bank breaking, and at least I can actually send the fucking thing.

Funnily enough, if I want to send something to New Zealand (that's NEW ZEALAND, nearly 11 and half thousand miles away), it's the cheapest of the lot: £4.50 to go for standard. Insane.

 

So yeah, there you go - a little insight into the bureaucratic nightmare that is being a band in 2026 with physical stock. With apologies to anyone I've overcharged in the past, but these prices don't stay the same for long - so, for a tape I put out, let's say a year ago, the postage I charged on that is now vastly different to a tape I'd have to sell now. And, of course, when you release a lot, you forget to go back and change postage costs for older bits and bobs you have, as you're more focused on the one you have now.

And let's not even get started on what happens when you, shock horror, buy anything more than one item! Then we enter into 'small parcel' territory, which, you guessed it, costs a whole heap more. The prices go up, the fees go up, the tariffs go up, the weight gets heavier, the packages get wider and longer. Vinyl? Yeah, that's small parcel territory, so if I wanted to ship 1 piece of vinyl anywhere, we'd be talking about anywhere between £10-15 (standard, probably closer to £20 for tracked) at a guess, and that's before I have to go and buy mailers and stiffeners and the rest of the shit I have to add to each package.

No wonder tapes made a comeback, tbh.  

Also! when entering details into customs forms these days, we're a long way from simply just your name and address in case it goes missing. They now require everything from phone numbers and email addresses (of both you and the buyer), to IOSS codes, tariff numbers, weights and measurements, and one thing Ive noticed recently: URLs to the actual item you've sold, as well and manufacture and seller IDs and product numbers. It's just more hassle on top of everything else and really honestly makes you wonder why the fuck you even bother sometimes.

So how to handle all this? Simply put, you don't. I can't incur fines if I mess up my QR code which has all the details of where my jiffy bag came from if I send to the EU, I can't afford to pay thousands of pounds every year to 10 or so people to sit around and be my 'responsible person', I can't afford and don't have the stock numbers to get a business account or a fancy warehouse somewhere. It's completely untenable, and if things get any worse, I'll have to just stop all together.

The one thing I've managed to do is switch my distributors, who will now get some limited stock to put in shops who can take the burden of postage off me and do it themselves, but of course that means I lose a Bandcamp sale each time, and the money I do get back from these shop sales is pretty paltry. But I get it, I do, it just sucks for literally everyone concerned.

So for the next satan release, which will be coming fairly soon, EU fans will have to try and find copies wherever my distro can get them, and my UK/ US fans can plump for Bandcamp if need be. What a fucking bananas world, honestly.