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We’ve gotten a bunch of questions asking how the shipping system works, so we thought we’d post something explaining it because it’s changed a little bit since Limited Pressing.

1. You can create a shipping profile, which will allow a store owner to easily add a specific group of polocies to specific products (click thumbnail).

2. Fine tune your profile to fit a product exactly (click thumbnail).

3. Finally, when you create a product, add the profile that fits the variation (click thumbnail).

As you can see, this new shipping system allows a store owner to put a different profile on each variation. This makes it extremely easy to have a single product that encompasses all variations of that product, no matter the weight or difficulty of packing.

We’ve spent the last 10 months rebuilding the entire platform and are extremely excited to start inviting people to try it out. Along with developing some incredible features, we’ve also christened it with a new name, Limited Run! We wanted a name that embodied what we truly love, which are people who make and sell unique products. Whether it’s music, toys, or even t-shirts, we think the people selling them will feel right at home with us.

Read more about some of new features below or grab an invite now.

Here’s just a few of the features we have on the new platform:

Brand New Digital System

Our new digital system is the best in the business. Upload anything you can dream of and link it to a physical product, or just sell it on it’s own. If you upload lossless audio, we’ll automatically convert it to a bunch of great formats. With the old platform you had to buy downloads prior to selling them. Now, with Limited Run, we’ve developed a way for you to pay only for the digital you sell, and only after you sell it. We’ve also removed the upload cap so you can sell those gigantic FLAC files we all know you llloovvvveeee.

Themes and Custom HTML

With Limited Run, you’ll be able to pick from one of our great themes or create your own totally custom design. Whether you just want a store or an entire website, our theming and custom page system will let you accomplish whatever look you’re trying to achieve.

Free Options Galore

Something that we thought was really important with the new platform was figuring out a way for bands and artists to get setup with an entire site for free. So here’s what we’ve done. We’ve created a free store that allows up to 5 products. We’ve also developed some great free modules like a blog and show listings, that anyone can install. And finally, something we’re extremely proud of, if you want to give away your digital files for free, we won’t charge you to do it. No buying credits, or selling a minimum amount first. Just come in, create a store, and start giving away your music, books, etc. Is it going to cost us a fortune? Yes, but as long as none of those Lady Gaga types sign up, we should be in the clear.

SoundCloud Integration

Since SoundCloud is the best way to stream your music, we decided to make it easy for you to integrate them into your store. When you connect with SoundCloud, we’ll automatically upload your music, manage your sets, and embed music players. It’s the easiest way to use one of the best services on the Internet.

Revamped Payment System

We were using PayPal subscriptions on Limited Pressing. They suck. We know it. You know it. Why do they suck? Well for one reason, you need a credit card attached to your PayPal. And second, if you’re in a band, or you have a small t-shirt company with your friend, someone needs to pay for the store themselves, and then get reimbursed from the group. We decided to toss out PayPal subscriptions and use a system that allows fees to accrue in a balance, and then you pay off that balance after you sell items from your store. And unlike other companies who use this method of payment, your customer never sees us in the transaction. You get paid from your customer, and then using something called chained payments, you automatically send the fees to us, and your customer is none the wiser.

We have a million more incredible features that we’ll be showcasing on our blog, so check back often so we can dazzle you with our tremendously artful descriptions.

Love,
LR

Hello, friends. Happy Fest weekend! Here is an interview with Craig Ericson of Rise Records to celebrate. Love, Thomas.

Rise is having a busy last couple of weeks. You guys put out the Man Overboard self-titled on September 27 and Transit’s record on October 4. This Is Hell is only a week later, on October 11. One release per week is pretty insane! Give us an inside look at what’s been going on with you guys for the last month or so.

Yeah, we’ve been really busy with all of the new releases. But, we can handle it. Our distro is top notch and the Rise team is really efficient and we work smart.

I think these days, a lot of record labels are sort of proceeding with caution. A lot are downsizing and maybe choosing what to release a little more carefully, especially some of the bigger independent labels. Take us through your guys’ outlook when it comes to output, as you’ve been increasing roster size and, like noted above, putting out quite a few records. Rise is - ahem - rising? during a period where lots of labels are doing just the opposite.

We’ve always gone against the grain. We know that word of mouth sells records and spending money on advertising doesn’t necessarily sell records. We’ve worked hard over the years to build a brand that the all-ages music scene can rely on. Whether it’s metalcore or pop-punk, kids can trust that Rise will release great albums from multiple genres.

September and October are particularly busy months for your “WTF” signings from a while back. Sticking to Man Overboard and Transit in particular since they just released albums, how have those signings played out for you and how do you think those bands are promoting the Rise Records name in the scene and amongst new listeners, who previously might not have listened to bands on Rise too much?

I think it’s a win-win. Rise has always had a diverse roster but none of the rock type bands got big and went unnoticed for the most part. I think it’s a little different with Man Overboard and Transit because they had some buzz before I signed them. I didn’t discover those 2 bands.

Another upcoming album is A Loss For Words’ No Sanctuary coming out on October 25, which is a dual release with Velocity Records. Can you first give us some thoughts on the new AL4W record, and then maybe explain for everyone how the whole Velocity imprint works?

I’m really pleased with how the new album turned out. It has all the elements to make it an amazing album. It’s super catchy, honest, earnest and sincere. I can’t express how much I like this band and this album.

Velocity is the Dave Shapiro’s record label. We joined forces last year and Velocity is an official imprint of Rise Records. Basically, Dave finds the bands and we work them as a Rise band. It’s been a great partnership.

Rise just announced the signing of Cheap Girls. How did that signing come about, and what should we expect from them moving forward? Give us some thoughts on their past work and what made them an attractive signing.

I’ve been a fan for a couple of years now and their manager reached out to us. We were very interested and worked out a deal. I really like Ian’s voice and their overall vibe. I think they’ll make a great addition to the roster.

Probably the biggest shocker that Rise pulled out was landing Hot Water Music and getting the rights to put out their upcoming 2012 full-length. I know you said this was a “dream” signing for you (assuming this is Craig), so can you talk about that signing and the excitement for it, and about how maybe this thing has come full circle for you so long after starting the label?

I don’t really know what else to say. It truly is my dream signing. They are my favorite band and the album “Forever And Counting” brought me back to music after a few year hiatus. They are great human beings as well and I couldn’t be more thrilled. I can now die a happy man.

When you guys announced the Cheap Girls signing, you released that info on your Facebook with a little bit of a disclaimer: “Core Rise fans….have some respect and cherish diversity. We can’t sign all screamo bands, okay?? This is what you’ll be listening to when you’re a little older so consider it a gift to you, from Rise. Trash talk and trolling will get you banned, you’ve been warned.” Let’s talk a little bit about the opposite side of the signing of these bands - the perspective of the dubbed “core Rise fan” who listens to metalcore music. What is the message you want to send to these fans, and what have been the most common responses from these fans to the latest additions to your roster?

My message was clear. Have respect for other types of music. Kids that exclusively listen to metalcore can sometimes just automatically hate everything that doesn’t sound like metalcore. I don’t want to stereotype people, but a lot them talk shit. I don’t really like shit talkers, especially if it’s on the Rise site about a Rise band. Common sense, right??

Continuing about metalcore music, a lot of people this is a genre with a pretty short shelf life. Do you see Rise continuing to sign and produce metalcore records, or is this the beginning of a movement to a more punk/pop-punk outlook?

We will continue to sign metalcore bands. We will continue to sign rock bands. We will continue to sign Pop-punk bands. We will continue to metal/thrash bands. We will continue to sign hardcore bands. Get my message??

Punk and pop-punk are genres that have been out of the mainstream for quite a while now. Rise is a pretty big label as far as independents go, with a lot of resources to make things happen. With some of these bands - especially Man Overboard, which happens to have a more “marketable” sound, and might have been on the radio in the earlier parts of the 2000s - do you see them ever getting the chance to be widely known like that again?

I hope so. Though, we don’t do any radio. Not sure it will ever be like it once was. I think it will still be underground with a few artists that go big every once in a blue moon.

Thanks a lot to Craig!

The following interview is with Sam Vermette, the creator of one of our favorite iPhone apps here at Limited Pressing: Shows. Learn more about Shows or download it by visiting the website or iTunes.

Tell us a little about yourself. Where are you from and what do you do?

I’m a 25-year-old, self-taught iOS and web developer living in Montreal. I’ve always been passionate about how people interact with things, so software development appealed to me like the most accessible way to scratch that itch. You just come up with an idea and get to build it out of thin air. It’s nothing short of amazing.

I’ve always been a big preacher of Apple design and that’s kind of how I learned to make things look simple and clean. Studying industrial design at University of Montreal also helped, as I was taught how to better approach design problems and solutions. Looking back, I’m glad I spent those 4 years studying design. With so many apps in the App Store, it has become clear that design is what make apps stand out (it goes without saying that I’m among those who claim ideas by themselves are worthless, execution is what matters).

Tell us about Shows. How does it work?

Shows is your live music companion. It automatically stays in sync with your iPod library and makes it really easy to import artists from your Rdio and Last.fm accounts. From there you usually have all the artists you’re interested in seeing in concert, but you can also add more manually.

By default, Shows will show you concerts in your local area. You can easily offset your location so you know what’s going on at your next travel destination. You can also increase the area radius so that Shows displays concerts from further away. For instance, say you’re in NYC, you can increase the distance slider to view shows from more cities like Boston, Miami, etc.

Location offsetting and area radius are in fact the only 2 settings in Shows. Settings are evil!

Last but not least, Shows sends you push notifications when artists you follow announce a new gig nearby (where nearby is defined by the user-defined location and radius).

Oh and I should probably mention that it’s all powered by Last.fm (although Shows has its own backend, which is the one interacting with Last.fm).

Why did you decide to develop Shows?

In 2009, I was sick of not knowing when specific artists were coming next to Montreal. All the apps out there were showing me *all* local upcoming concerts for artists I didn’t even like. They were terribly designed, slow and had too many useless features (most of them still do). So in the summer of 2009, I decided to make Shows. Version 1.0 was using Apple standard UI and had very rough edges, but it still gained a bit of traction. By the end of that year, I was ashamed by it and didn’t have any more time left to work on it, so I decided to take it off temporarily (I was still in school back then).

Then in October of last year, I had just graduated and decided to rebuild it from complete scratch. When it launched In January 2011, it gained tremendous momentum, so much that I had to momentarily take it down within the first 2 hours. As I kept working on other projects and learning more about design and good coding practices, I once again felt guilty about the version that was in the App Store. I got back from WWDC with a huge list of improvements to be done on the app, which led me to this week’s release of Shows 2.5.

What’s your favorite thing that Shows does?

Push Notifications are probably the feature that’s the most exciting to me. That feeling when you get a push notification about your favorite artists coming to town, it’s quite awesome.

What kind of feedback have you received from Shows users?

It seems unanimous that everyone loves the design effort that went into it; the simplicity, the lack of settings, the very straight-forward display of content. The sliding panels, although non-standard and maybe hard to grasp at first have also become a hit and are kind of Shows’ trademark. The 2.5 update has only been out for a couple of days but Favorites and Artist Sources (which allow you to import music from Rdio and Last.fm) seem pretty popular so far.

The complaint I’ve been hearing the most about Shows is the sometimes inaccurate data. Since Last.fm is all user-generated, erroneous data gets in (like dead artists playing at some place in Brazil) as well as dupes, or missing listings. I don’t have much control over this, and I’m guessing Last.fm has other better things to do than to moderate content (although they do). Some other sites allow artists to post concert listings themselves, therefore making their data set super accurate. It’s the case of Songkick, from whom I’ve been declined an API key because our apps are too similar (I don’t blame them, they have a business to run).

Do you have any plans to develop other music related iPhone applications?

Very much so! I love music and there are a couple other problematics I’d like to tackle with iOS apps. One particular thing that’s been bothering me is album releases — I always find out about them weeks later! That being said, I have a bunch of other ideas in the works, so it might take a while before this one ever sees the light of day.

Hi everyone. Thomas Nassiff here, with the second installment of the LP Interviews series. This month, we have an interview with Buddy Schaub of Less Than Jake for you guys. We talk about how LTJ is doing things that really no other bands are doing right now; about how they come up with and execute these unique plans and about the music industry in general. I hope you guys enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed talking to Buddy. Thanks to him and LTJ for taking part in this.

First off, can you introduce yourself and say what you do for Less Than Jake?

I’m Buddy and I play trombone and jump around like a monkey on stage. I also do most of the video projects for the band and am now in the beginnings of handling the ins and outs of our web store.

Most recently, LTJ released the Greetings From Less Than Jake EP, which was received well by critics and fans. Can you talk a little about the EP? How it’s different or similar to your past work? And whether we’ll see a 7” of it in the future?

Working on this record was a nice breath of fresh air for our band in that no one else was involved at all this time around. It’s been a long time since we’ve done a record with no outside involvement at all such as a producer or label schmooks tossing in their opinions here and there. We recorded everything at Roger’s studio (The Moat House) and got done with everything: writing, recording, mixing, and mastering in only a couple of months. I believe the plan is to put this out on vinyl in the very near future as well as get back to the drawing board and start working on another EP.

Less Than Jake also just wrapped up a couple months on the Vans Warped Tour. You guys were probably the most “veteran” band on the tour. What can you say about being one of the older and more established bands on a tour that always includes a lot of up-and-comers?

We’ve actually been running with the older crowd on the Warped Tour the last few times we’ve been on it and have definitely learned the ropes from bands such as NOFX on how to utilize your seniority on the tour. It was a lot like The Godfather movies this year with us playing the role of Don Corleone…

Less Than Jake has always made a point to offer products that are a little out of the norm to its fans, like the TV/EP and past products, such as the cereal box and things of that nature. On Warped Tour, you guys were selling LTJ rolling papers that, if purchased, would also get the customer a download of the EP. What goes into the formation ideas like this?

A lot of these great ideas pop out of Vinnie’s brain, but we do sit around and brainstorm some ideas before tours for new merch goodies. These days people expect to get the songs for free so it’s become really important to make the physical record be worth something to the fans whether it be a cool packaging concept, some sweet colored vinyl or a specialty item that comes with a download.

Let’s talk a little about the live shows you guys have released and the DVD you just put out. Products like these excite fans easily because they aren’t very common. What gave you guys the idea to put all of the shows together in a DVD format, and what is it that makes Less Than Jake so much more apt to try out things that no one else is really doing?

The DVD was kind of a no brainer in this situation. The real genius was the idea of playing all of our records at six shows around Florida and filming and recording the whole thing. It was great for us as a band because it really made us go back and do our homework; we very rarely play some of the songs on those records if at all, so it was really fun and a rejuvenating bonding for us. And on top of that playing them in small venues around our home state was really exciting for our super fans who were essentially the people that bought tickets early enough to get in. What maybe makes us a little different than some bands I think is the conviction we seem to have to actually bring an idea to fruition. Many bands have good ideas, “wouldn’t it be cool if we…” but we take that crucial next 69 steps it takes to actually make the idea a reality.

A while ago, Less Than Jake said that it wouldn’t put out another full-length record. That’s something that goes hand-in-hand with the costs of recording an album and the profits that album goes on to return to the band. Are you guys still planning on sticking by that plan? Will all new Less Than Jake tunes in the future be delivered via EPs?

I don’t know if we want to paint ourselves into a corner and say we’ll never do something again, but these days an EP is plenty for people to digest. It trims the fat so to speak. Putting out 5 quality songs is better than 10 mediocre songs. And with our schedules and Roger’s studio, going in to bust out 5 songs at a time keeps the frequency of music into the fan’s hands at a peak.

Continuing on the same track, the band also refused to make Greetings available on iTunes. If I remember correctly, I think a Facebook status once said that you “can’t afford to let iTunes take 30 percent.” What can you say about iTunes, acting as essentially the world’s largest record label, and the future of not only Less Than Jake’s releases on iTunes, but your thoughts on what the future for digital music looks like in general?

Well, this is true for almost all aspects of being in a band. The days of letting someone else do the work for your band are coming to a close. Everyone always wants a piece of the pie, but the pie keeps getting smaller and the ability to take charge of your band is getting easier by the second through technology.

While we’re on a broader plane, let’s talk a little about record labels. Less Than Jake has its own label, Sleep It Off, where you guys put out your own releases. Can you guys ever foresee a situation where you sign to a traditional label again? Is the traditional label format even worth it for bands anymore?

Going to a major label these days will 99 out of 100 times mean signing a 360 deal which means they take a piece of EVERYTHING. The only reason to do this as a band is if you are young, good looking, and are sure you’re going to be the biggest thing since sliced bread. We’re pretty sure we are no longer any of these things.
We can do pretty much anything an Indie label can do on our own, so I don’t foresee us breaking the new mold we’ve made for ourselves any time soon.

Now let’s narrow it down a little. Who runs your webstore? Do you do it yourselves or does someone distribute stuff for you?

We currently have our merch in a couple of different places. MerchDirect.com has a wide array of stuff from our band on sale at their site and they handle all of that with the designs that we provide. But just this past summer we set up an account with LimitedPressing, which we are currently handling all ourselves, the posting of items to the store, stocking and inventory of the merchandise and shipping the products themselves. From the moment someone orders something, the responsibility of it getting there relies on us. It’s all part of our plan to put all things LTJ back under one umbrella.

What are some plans for the future? You guys have some time off before FEST in late October, and I believe the Orlando Calling festival is in Orlando? What’s the band planning for the time off?

We are in the midst of some new members to the Less Than Jake family arriving at our doorstep via stork, and while we’re figuring out how that whole world works, we will also be writing and recording some new material, getting together more items for our web store, and planning for the big year we have ahead of us. Next year Less Than Jake turns 20!!!

Anything else you would like to add?

Your Mother!