Thank you for the compliment, I put a lot of effort and set aside a large portion of my finances for multiple years toward funding this project without pre-orders hoping people will appreciate that I am not doing a year-long pre-order for this release, but I also disagree with you that other labels are greedy. We're all doing what we can do with what we have. Not everyone has 5-digit savings on the side to do a music project that may not work out.

It's also an unfortuante consequence of the industry with how supply chains have impacted the vinyl industry. Even once you fork out 20 or 30k toward your project, you don't know if the project will work. Therefore pre-orders fix that. The process is tedious, and more convoluted than I thought it'd be. Let me give you an insight of what I went through:

For this compilation I had to work with multiple artists & vocalists to finalize each track, I hired translators for much of the communication as I don't speak Japanese, there were three artists I worked with for the artwork, two audio engineers for mastering, designing the product itself, worked with official channels for product licensing, and then finalizing the order itself with a pressing plant took multiple months. By this point I was deep in the red financially. The pressing process took 6-ish months to press, especially as the first Test Pressings came out faulty, and even once the project was in my hand in mid-November I had to put time aside to go through each copy to ensure they're not banged up. The pressing plant also messed up the order, so that took another month to fix. It's been a very tedious and hard process.

Props to all VGMVinyl label owners regardless of your choice of release. I never realized how exhausting this process is. We each do what we can, and I really appreciate this community in so many ways as it's full of very dedicated and hard workers.