This past summer, Nick Alt, the entrepreneur and founder of the record club VNYL, posted some big professional news on LinkedIn, that hallowed sphere where entrepreneurs go to post big professional news. His company, VNYL Inc., had acquired Vinyl Me, Please from the brink of bankruptcy, with plans to restore the “beloved, messy, magical business,” in Alt’s words, to its former glory.
It had been a rough few months for the long-popular LP subscription club — first mass layoffs in March, then liquidation notices involving third-party entities and inscrutable legalese, plus a constant thrum of complaints from members regarding unfulfilled orders and unanswered queries. In April, the brand’s parent company, OffBeat Ventures, LLC, filed for bankruptcy. By all appearances, Vinyl Me, Please was toast, crushed by a combination of financial woes, hubris, and alleged corporate malfeasance — including a lawsuit accusing three former executives of misappropriating company funds — that I outlined in an investigative feature for this publication in early June.
But then, just as that article was going through edits, VNYL Inc. acquired the embattled brand. Longtime subscribers regarded the acquisition through skeptical eyes. “We all were hoping they would be for the best,” says Chris Collette, a VMP member since 2018 and active member of the company’s Discord community. “But none of us were really expecting it.”
In his LinkedIn post, Alt sounded a conciliatory note. “For prior customers, it’s been a bumpy ride … and we know trust needs to be rebuilt,” he acknowledged. “This turnaround takes a village.” (Alt did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this piece.)
Amid the typical LinkedIn fare — Congrats man! Cheering you on, Nick! — one comment stood out from the herd. It was from a record executive named Josh Madell, director of artist and label strategy at Secretly Distribution. “I want you to succeed, and Secretly Distribution is here to support,” Madell wrote. “But are you going to make whole the many labels and distributors who VMP has significant unpaid debts to?” Alt responded yes, stating that he had “[a]lready been in touch with the SCD team and making plans.” (Madell declined to comment or be interviewed for this article.)
Madell’s post alluded to something that has become an open secret within the music industry: Vinyl Me, Please’s relationships with licensing partners and labels both small and large have deteriorated because of significant unpaid debts accrued during VMP’s downfall. Five months after VNYL’s acquisition — and one month after the new owners relaunched VMP without a website storefront, inviting customers to “Join us in this offline revolution” — both major debts and relatively minor sums owed to small businesses remain unpaid. (The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed, but sources say VNYL Inc. did not assume the debt.) The ricocheting effects of that debt have impacted customers as well, since VMP developed a habit of taking preorders for vinyl releases that never materialized. As one former employee told me, “We didn’t have the money to pay the labels to get the licenses released so that we could press the records that we had already sold to people.”
In recent months, I’ve learned that Rhino (the catalog division for Warner Music Group), Third Man Records, and multiple Secretly Group subsidiaries are among the labels to which VMP still owes outstanding debts. They are likely not alone. Precise figures are hard to ascertain; most of the labels I reached out to for this story declined to share information or speak on the record, in some cases because they’re in active negotiations with VMP’s new overlords and don’t want to rock the boat. But some debtees are ready to talk.
“It’s not like I have an ax to grind here,” says Ben Blackwell, the co-founder and minority owner of Third Man Records, who he says has been owed $7,200 by VMP since 2024. “I certainly understand better than anyone the inherent difficulties of trying to run a subscription-based vinyl club.” (Third Man offers a quarterly vinyl subscription service called The Vault.)
But Third Man got off easy, comparatively speaking. Which is why the Jack White-founded label hasn’t been inclined to pursue legal remedies. “I feel blessed that we’re only out the amount of money that we’re out,” Blackwell says. “It could be so much worse. If this was a million dollars I was owed, there’d be a lot different tenor coming from me.”
VMP’s new owners have a clear incentive to restore positive relations with label partners. The vinyl club formally relaunched in September (with a texting-only customer service system that has left many subscribers vexed and confused) and resumed its “Record Of The Month” tradition with an October selection, Switcheroo, the 2025 debut from emerging alt-dance artist Gelli Haha, pressed on “piss-yellow” vinyl. Some customers were unimpressed. “Why would anyone sign up for a piss yellow version of an album no one was really looking for in the first place?” one member complained on Reddit.
In fairness, Gelli Haha’s album is inventive and wackily fun and doesn’t deserve to be sullied by VMP’s drama. (It also has a song about piss!) But if the company wants to lure back disillusioned members, it will need to settle old debts and make nice with the labels from which the old VMP once licensed sought-after classics like Gorillaz’s Demon Days and Outkast’s ATLiens.
However, the new owners have less incentive to repay old debts to small-time vendors and independent contractors, who have watched VMP’s relaunch with frustration, wondering if they will ever get paid. (Some have also filed claims through an ongoing third-party claims process initiated by Vinyl Liquidation LLC.)
This piece is an attempt to take stock of some of the individuals and small businesses who got screwed when Vinyl Me, Please went bust.
“I have just become a critical bill to Vinyl Me, Please”
Toys are in Mike Bonanno’s blood. His grandfather ran a toy factory, and Bonanno eventually became a toy designer himself. He spent more than a decade as creative director of the toys and collectibles division at Mondo, a company known for limited-edition posters and soundtracks.
In 2022, after Mondo was acquired by Funko, Bonanno decided to strike out on his own. He went freelance. Conveniently, Vinyl Me, Please was looking to expand into soundtracks and collectibles. With ambitious CEO Cameron Schaefer at the helm, VMP was throwing everything at the wall, including developing its own 14,000-square-foot pressing plant. Why not try soundtracks and toys, too?
“They were hiring all of these people to be like, ‘Hey, let’s make action figures, we’re gonna get into selling collectibles,’” says a former VMP employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Cam’s vision was like, ‘We’re going to not just be the best place for you to go if you really love vinyl. If you’re a fan of collecting Iggy Pop action figures, we’re gonna make Iggy Pop action figures.’ But nobody on staff at Vinyl Me, Please had any experience doing that.”
That’s where Mondo came in. In 2023, VMP hired four ex-Mondo staffers, including co-founder Rob Jones and art director Alan Hynes, to shake up the record club’s offerings. “We want to cover every soundtrack aspect, including film, video games, television, sports, and the odyssey of life itself,” Jones said in a cheeky press release.
“Our audience had never bought soundtracks in a meaningful way,” says the former VMP employee. “They were spending a lot of money hiring creative folks to work on these big, pie-in-the-sky ideas that were literally starting from zero.”
Meanwhile, Bonanno began landing freelance projects for VMP. He was thrilled. “It was kind of shocking how open they were to doing these really cool projects,” the creative director recalls.
Bonanno says between mid-2023 and March 2024 he worked on eight or nine projects for VMP — mostly 3D renderings and concept mock-ups for music-themed toys. He designed a Speak & Spell toy modeled after Big Boi, apparently intended for a product collaboration with Hasbro. He designed a “Sabotage”-themed Hot Wheels car, meant for a Beastie Boys release that never materialized, and 3D models for multiple figures VMP planned to release alongside the PaRappa The Rapper soundtrack. When the company planned to reissue the Blue Velvet soundtrack, Bonanno sculpted a severed ear tie-in.
“I didn’t get paid for any of them,” Bonanno says. “A lot of time was put into this stuff.”
In fact, only one project he worked on — a toy kit accompanying an exclusive pressing of the Barbie soundtrack — actually materialized. The rest were apparent casualties of the financial distress and executive oustings that roiled VMP last year.
In March, 2024, Bonanno sent VMP an invoice for $6,600. Months went by. No payment.
In June of that year, Bonanno followed up. Eventually, he received an email from VMP co-founder Matt Fiedler, who had taken over as Interim CEO following Schaefer’s firing. “Unfortunately, I need to ask for more patience from you as we continue to play catch up on AP. We’re currently planning to pay this in September,” Fiedler wrote on July 2, according to emails shared with Stereogum. (Fiedler did not respond to several requests for comment for this article.)
In early September, Fiedler delayed the payment again to November. In late September, Fiedler wrote that he couldn’t actually promise the payment would arrive in November. “The reality is that we’re currently focusing our resources on critical business needs — things like inventory, payroll, and other essentials,” Fiedler wrote, apologetically. Bonanno was frustrated but patient. “I’m happy to go on a payment plan that works for you all, it’s just that 6 months of waiting with no real plan to pay is unsettling,” he responded.
In early November, Bonanno paid a lawyer to help him write an email threatening legal action. In the email, he requested mediation to resolve the unpaid contract; if VMP skipped mediation and didn’t pay, he threatened to file a lawsuit and seek attorney fees. “As you stated, you are only paying ‘critical’ bills. Receiving payments for work I completed is critical to me,” Bonanno wrote. “So, please understand: I have just become a critical bill to Vinyl Me, Please.”
Still, VMP wouldn’t pay. In an email, Fiedler apologized and explained that VMP was “still in a position where we have to direct our resources to critical business operations… I’d hate for this to get to the point of legal. I would expect you would have to invest a significant amount of time and resources ahead of any outcome.”
In January, Bonanno tried a friendlier tack. He offered to accept half the money then and a payment plan for the rest. Alternately, he also offered to accept $5,000 then and the remaining $1,600 in store credit. “I really like what you all do,” Bonanno wrote, adding that he didn’t want to “bring in any outside parties or make this dispute public. That is not the type of person I am.”
Fiedler was receptive to Bonanno’s ideas. VMP had made “progress in turning the business around,” he wrote on January 10. “Happy to give you $1,600 in store credit to make the outstanding balance $5k. I can then pay you $500/month for the time being,” the CEO proposed.
Bonanno accepted this solution and received the store credit within a few weeks. He even offered to meet up with Fiedler during an upcoming trip to Denver.
“When I attempted to use the credits, the store stopped accepting orders, it seemed,” Bonanno tells me. He says he never received the $500 a month either. After the bankruptcy, he filed a claim with the liquidators of Offbeat Ventures; he has no idea if or when he will get paid.
“I thought they were trustworthy”
“Jason,” a professional video editor, runs a small film production company. Through friends, he got to know people at Vinyl Me, Please. In early 2024, Jason’s company began working with the vinyl club to create engaging short-form videos for VMP’s social channels, featuring interviews and record-store spotlights.
“It was a new creative team with Mondo, and they were looking to change things up,” recalls Jason, who requested that his real name not be published. “So we came back with ideas and pitched them. They loved it. They greenlit everything. Greenlit the budget. And wanted to move forward immediately.”
Jason requested 50% of the budget up front, his usual policy, but VMP said they didn’t do that. “I had acquaintances — friends — within VMP. And I thought they were trustworthy,” Jason recalls. He went ahead without the 50%.
“We immediately went into production,” Jason says. “Started filming everything. Any of the production costs were coming out of our pockets. Even while we were in post-production, editing some of the series, they were posting them already.”
That spring, some of the videos appeared on VMP’s social accounts. “It was a big success,” Jason says. “They were engaging, informational, and funny — everything they were asking for.”
In May, 2024, Jason submitted an invoice for around $7,500. Thirty days passed. He followed up with VMP staffers and was informed that the company had transitioned to a new payment system, which he needed to sign up for. He filled out the paperwork. Still nothing.
Meanwhile, articles appeared about VMP’s internal turmoil and financial woes. “That definitely caught our eye, and we were like, hmm,” Jason recalls. He continued following up intermittently. In July, Fiedler apologized for the delay and wrote that the invoice was scheduled for payment in October.
Jason was taken aback. “The contract for this project states that payment is due net 30,” Jason wrote back, requesting an explanation. “A five month delay in payment is highly unusual and puts our business in a difficult position.”
On July 11, Fiedler replied at length, explaining that VMP was in a tough position after “things started to go sideways” at the company in 2023. “There were several investments made to expand VMP from it’s [sic] core business that added significant overhead. These investments were made without a clear understanding for ROI and product/market fit,” Fiedler wrote, possibly referring to the pressing plant.
“We let go of our entire management team in March and I stepped back in,” Fiedler added. “The unfortunate reality is I have to prioritize where we put our resources, and I need to direct our resources towards the providers that are currently helping our business move forward. This includes, primarily, labels and key manufacturing partners.”
October came and went. Fiedler still couldn’t provide a clear timeline for payment. By December, Jason was losing patience. “It has now been seven months since that work was completed,” he wrote in an email dated Dec. 5. “We’ve been advised to let you know that we are well within reason to take additional steps toward claiming the debt.”
A week later, Fiedler apologized for the continuing delay. “We are in the midst of a fundraise and are having productive conversations with existing and potential investors,” he wrote. “It is unlikely I’ll be able to pay this invoice until we’re able to secure financing.”
The invoice was never paid. After the bankruptcy, Jason filed a claim, but he isn’t particularly hopeful about seeing that money. “There’s three lines of creditors, basically: primary, secondary, and we’re on the third tier,” he says. “Apparently, when you’re in the third tier, your hopes of getting paid anything at all are slim.”
He knows $7,500 is a trivial sum for most small businesses — but not for his. “It just sucks, because [VMP] was a good company and good people,” he says. “And we had a lot of fun making the videos. But the way everything was handled once payment became due was unacceptable, you know?”
“Give us the emails and we’ll call the debt off!”
Sources believe that Vinyl Me, Please’s unpaid debts to labels extend well into high six-figure — and possibly seven-figure — sums. One vinyl manufacturing services company, A to Z Media, which served as a “primary broker between Vinyl Me, Please and GZ Vinyl,” is said to be owed more than $1 million. But the money it owes Third Man Records is much smaller: just $7,200.
That’s because this debt stems not from licensing partnerships but from photography services rendered at the Third Man Photo Studio. “The records that we partnered together on all went fine,” says Blackwell, who co-founded Third Man with Jack White and Ben Swank. In 2020, VMP put out a limited repressing of the White Stripes’ De Stijl for its 20th anniversary. It sold out, and everything worked out happily.
Then, in the spring of 2024, VMP hired Third Man to produce high-quality prints of a unique photograph of John Coltrane. The prints were apparently meant to go along with a lavish, 8-LP A Love Supreme box set priced at $399 ($299 for members). It was announced in early 2024 but — like many other projects in development — never saw release.
Third Man’s photography studio completed the work and submitted an invoice for $8,500, Blackwell says. Like other vendors, Blackwell describes months of fruitlessly asking when payment would arrive. “It was monthly follow-ups for at least six months,” Blackwell says. “I think my manager of the photo studio had a reminder for, whatever, the 15th of every month.”
After 10 months, there was progress: VMP did two months of a payment plan and paid Third Man $1,300 total, Blackwell says.
The remaining $7,200 is still outstanding. Blackwell assumes it will never be paid. The thought of filling out legal paperwork or getting in line for a bankruptcy settlement to pursue such a modest sum never seemed worth it.
“I’m sure there’s other people who are owed smaller amounts that are much more critical to their livelihoods,” Blackwell says. “We can weather that. Not happily. But yeah. On my end, I’m inherently wanting vinyl subscription services to flourish and thrive because I think one of them working helps all the other ones who are doing it.”
In the spring of 2025, Blackwell received a formal letter from the third-party liquidation company, inviting Third Man to participate in bidding on VMP’s assets. He had no interest. There wasn’t much for Third Man to gain. “Didn’t feel like it was even worth our time to sign an NDA and get involved in all of that stuff,” Blackwell says.
“What I wanted to do was say, ‘Give us the email of all your subscribers and we’ll call the debt off,’” Blackwell jokes. “Just give me the list!”
“We didn’t deliver on a lot of promises”
When VNYL Inc. purchased Vinyl Me, Please, it made a certain sense. The company already ran two vinyl clubs. Why not add a third?
“This is the third time we’ve done this, and we’ve really built a strong operational playbook to do it,” VNYL’s president, Emily Muhoberac, who has apparently been sifting through boxes and boxes of records inherited from the old VMP, told Variety. “We’ve done the same thing with a company called Bandbox, as well as VinylBox.”
But for many VMP old-timers, Nick Alt’s stewardship of the record club Bandbox — which his company acquired last year — inspires little confidence. “He bought that thing, too, and never finished all of the projects and was selling that inventory on his own personal Discogs,” says the former VMP employee. “He’s a liquidator. He’s not a guy who wants to run a record club. He’s a guy who buys records for 50 cents and sells them for a dollar 50.”
Reddit has threads full of disgruntled Bandbox customers complaining of unfulfilled orders and broken promises. (“I have dozens of unshipped bandbox orders. Just being ignored now,” one poor soul posted recently.) Meanwhile, in March, the beloved band Alvvays said that Bandbox’s new owners had been “uncooperative every step of the way” in either pressing the exclusive Alvvays records for which Bandbox took preorders in 2023 or otherwise issuing refunds.
Alt, meanwhile, has suggested that in purchasing Bandbox, he inherited more unfulfilled orders than he could manage. According to a St. Louis Magazine profile, he built a website called BandBox.Sucks where customers could list their unfulfilled records. “We have a taste for making things right for these customers that had been so deeply wronged,” Alt told the magazine, “but there’s thousands of customers in this situation.”
A similar pattern seems to be playing out with Vinyl Me, Please, whose clientele are accustomed to a higher level of curatorial tastemaking than Bandbox’s were. The VNYL team has inherited boxes full of VMP stock, but may or may not get it into the hands of customers who already paid for it. “It’s like stolen merchandise, as far as I see,” says Matthew Fuggi, a former VMP customer who canceled his membership last year. (Fuggi remains frustrated that he spent more than $100 to pre-order a Fela Kuti box set that never saw release and for which he was never refunded.)
In that St. Louis profile, Alt talks earnestly about wanting to “grow this community” and “do right by the customers who built it.” But the employees who curated VMP’s monthly selections are long gone, VMP’s recent Instagram comments are full of customers grumbling about unfulfilled orders, and Alt has said that he can’t issue refunds in those situations because he didn’t receive revenue from the initial sale of those titles.
Instead, VMP’s new owners seem to be offering store credits to jilted customers. Mike Bonanno, the toy designer, was mystified when he recently received an automated email telling him he had “32 Member Credits available.” But there was no way to redeem those credits unless he signed up for a VMP membership, which starts at $39 a month. In other words: He has to pay for a membership to receive records that were previously offered to him as compensation for work that he never got paid for. That’s the music business in 2025.
For disillusioned longtime customers, the policy means that if they cancel their VMP memberships — as many have — they are forfeiting records they already paid for pre-bankruptcy. “If you cancel, they’re like, ‘OK, we’re ending your subscription. But that also means you are giving up anything that we still owe you. You’re canceling whatever months you are owed records,’” Chris Collette, the member since 2018, says. Or, as one Redditor put it: “The short of it is their promise to fulfill orders is empty unless you re-subscribe.”
Moreover, some long-promised releases from the old VMP regime are unlikely to ever materialize.
“There are people who are like, ‘What happened to this Fela Kuti box set that I paid for and they’re not going to make it?’” says the former VMP employee. “[The new owners] have not talked to any former employees. They did not try to figure out what inventory we had. They haven’t talked to the production people who would know where all of the unfinished projects were in the pipeline.”
“The last two years of Vinyl Me, Please, before we went bankrupt, we didn’t deliver on a lot of promises,” the former employee adds. “So it’s sad that the people who bought it also do not seem like they’re going to deliver on promises either. It felt like there was an opportunity — you could bring this thing back that people really cared about.”
“If you want out, simply text FUCK OFF…”
How’s Vinyl Me, Please’s relaunch going so far? Let’s put it this way: In late September, Chris Collette texted “Fuck off” to VMP’s customer service line.
He wasn’t trying to be rude. He was just following instructions. And the instructions — written on a printed letter that Collette, like other customers, received in the mail in September with his long-delayed April Record Of The Month (Bella Donna by Stevie Nicks) — were clear: “If you want out, we get it, simply text ‘FUCK OFF’ to (314) 300-9979 to be directed to the claims process.”
“It feels kinda crass and juvenile,” Collette says. “Why do I have to drop an F bomb?”
In any case, Collette wasn’t expecting to receive any more shipments from VMP. He had ended his subscription back in the spring, amid the bankruptcy chaos — or so he thought. “The website was still functional in May, even though none of us knew what the heck was going on. I was able to log into my account, so I went in there and canceled the auto-renewal,” Collette says. When June 1 came and his subscription would have renewed, “nothing happened.”
Now VMP is back, but its website isn’t. That blows my mind,” says Fuggi, the former member (who won’t consider rejoining unless he gets his Fela Kuti box set). “I don’t understand. It’s not 1986, where you’re taping a penny to the back of the Columbia House thing.”
It’s hard to tell if VMP’s new model is a strategic decision, a political statement, or what. “We’re going offline, not as a gimmick, but as a declaration of war against the soulless machine that consumer music tech has become,” the new owners announced in a rambling open letter in October. “We’re stripping back to what vinyl was always meant to be: tangible, deliberate, human.” Translation: VMP’s website no longer has customer service functions (nor a way for members to view their order histories). Instead, customers with questions or complaints have to text (314) 300-9979 and hope to be transferred to a human.
The trouble is, VNYL Inc. doesn’t seem to have records of members canceling their accounts on or after May 1 — “April 2025 was the last snapshot of the business we inherited,” the new owners informed members recently — but does have those members’ credit cards information. Which was an unwelcome surprise for customers who thought they were inactive, didn’t text “FUCK OFF” post-relaunch, and discovered that their credit cards had been charged around $479, the annual membership price, without prior notification.
“They didn’t ask if I was still a member. They haven’t even confirmed my shipping address,” says Angel Montero, a former VMP subscriber based in California. “I didn’t authorize the payment. I was under the impression that I was already canceled with Vinyl Me, Please.”
Montero described the situation as “very frustrating” and said that his only option would be to report the charge as fraud. He isn’t alone. In early October, the Vinyl Me, Please subreddit lit up with posts from customers alarmed to discover that they’d been charged without their knowledge. “Just got charged $507…” one Redditor posted. “I’m mega pissed I have to deal with this shit and they have no customer support. This new VMP can get fucked.” Another poster wondered, “How did they charge us when we can’t even access a website?”
As for Collette? He texted “FUCK OFF” just before the Sept. 30 deadline and evaded any unwelcome charges. Now, he believes, his VMP membership is really and truly over. It felt like the right time. He had amassed around 1,500 records and was running out of space in his apartment.
Recently, Collette was listening to his final Record Of The Month, Bella Donna, and feeling bittersweet. “Just looking at the packaging, listening to the album — it was melancholy, almost,” he says. “This was a good thing we had. And I guess you don’t realize it until it’s gone.”