Pressing Vinyl Marketing Videos With Turn
Introducing Turn Press
I might be biased but I think Turn, a side-product of mine, has one of the nicest vinyl video grids on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. About a half a year ago, we started creating these videos to freely market new vinyl releases and anniversaries while also sharing the capabilities of the app. Today, we’re taking our design learnings and offering it up as a premium video creation service called Turn Press. Now, I encourage you to just use Turn as it’s a very simple but powerful video creation web app for marketing vinyl. However, if you would rather one of our expert video creators work with your assets to generate social videos for your vinyl release, all you need to do is book the package on Turn Press and we’ll be in touch to help you realize your videos. We’ll work with you and your vinyl image assets, album artwork, and audio to generate a series of videos in square, landscape, and portrait formats.
How did we get here and where are we going? Let’s discuss.
To Tuck or Not To Tuck
For as long as I can remember, we’ve marketed the large majority of vinyl releases with an image like you see above. The “tucked vinyl” layout. And, to be honest, I’m guilty of this also. There was always something interesting about the record poking out the sleeve but the more we used this layout, the more it came to represent this category of product generically. I think this is fine for an online store product listing but social media requires something more dynamic.
One approach, which vinyl influencers take, is to record a video of the vinyl spinning on a turntable. This helps represent the rich sound and warmth of the product. These videos may also examine the packaging and linear notes included with the release. These can be great but do require a bit of effort to create the video.
With Turn, we’re focused on allowing the vinyl itself to shine as if it is spinning gently on a record player. It’s more of a low effort, high design approach. I believe both approaches are valid and can easily be used in tandem.
Speed, Size, and Shape
For years, Turn videos have spun at the gentle speed of 5 rotations per minute but we were inspired by the recent crop of zoetrope releases to introduce the ability to adjust the speed to 1, 5, 33, 45, and 78 RPM. In the case of a zoetrope release, if the vinyl spins at 33 RPM, the zoetrope animation is visible. Pretty dope. In addition to speed adjustments, Turn recently introduced the ability to change the size of the disc. Did I calculate the exact scale of a CD compared to a 7” compared to a 12” record? Yes. Yes, I did. The disc image itself can be a transparent PNG image so if your vinyl is shaped, like this heart-shaped Taylor Swift vinyl, that would work too. Transparency also comes in handy when your vinyl is translucent, allowing it to blend into the background below. We continue to expand the feature set which allows your vinyl to be represented the way it should be.
Using Platform Audio
A little pro tip we’re utilizing on the Turn socials: we create our videos without audio and then use platform audio features to attach music to them. As the streaming providers become more and more integrated with the social apps, it makes sense to use your on-platform audio to tie back your videos to your songs on the streaming providers. It also allows your videos to sit nicely within the song usage rankings page, which is a very important TikTok strategy. Also, to be perfectly honest, it is much easier to generate videos when you don’t have to worry about trimming audio. Audio is optional on Turn and if you don’t include an audio file, you’ll get a 1 minute silent video in return.
Turning Towards the Future
I didn’t mean to turn this newsletter into an advertisement for Turn but the truth is, vinyl marketing excites the hell out of me and I wanted an opportunity to let you know where my personal efforts stand currently because I have many thoughts on what comes next. On the Turn side of things, I’m currently working with Noiseland Industries to ingest all of their vinyl variants into the video creator so you can easily generate vinyl video variations. On that topic, if you know someone who works in vinyl pressing, we’d really love to talk to them about Turn and vinyl marketing in general. The same goes for anyone in catalog. In addition to Turn, I have begun ideating on another product which will assist us in our vinyl marketing efforts. Stay tuned and thanks for reading. How are you marketing vinyl these days? Drop your tips in the comments below.