vinyl pressing plants
While biking across Iowa this summer, Mark Michaels enjoyed a rare moment of reflection. “You’re riding about 80 miles a day among cornfields, and it gives you a lot of time to think,” the United Record Pressing chairman/CEO says. “I spent a lot of time while I was peddling thinking about United,” he adds of the oldest and largest American-owned, U.S.-based vinyl pressing plant in the world, which will celebrate its 75th anniversary this fall.
Michaels is speaking from his Nashville office, where he’s surrounded by signed records from Buddy Guy, Jack White and more of his icons, all expressing their thanks to him and his manufacturing team. (In 2014, White made history by recording, pressing and releasing a 7-inch of his single “Lazaretto” in under four hours, thanks to URP.) “It’s easy to forget those moments of euphoria and gratitude because you’re so focused on ‘How many records of this did we ship?’ or ‘What’s going on with that press?’ ” Michaels says. “But you don’t want too much life to pass by where you don’t stop and reflect.”
URP was founded as Bullet Plastics in Nashville in 1949, becoming Southern Plastics in the ’50s before landing on United Record Pressing in 1971. By the ’60s, a deal was signed for the plant to handle singles pressings for Motown, and in 1963, the first Beatles 7-inch, “Please Please Me”/“From Me to You,” was pressed, with a typo that spelled the band’s name as The Beattles.
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In 2007, a year before Record Store Day officially launched and just before the format was beginning its first-wave resurgence, Michaels bought the company — and helped sustain it through a particularly rough patch. As he recalls, half of URP’s output at the time was 12-inch singles created as promo records for DJs. “That was a lot of what we did, and shortly after I bought the company, the labels stopped doing that,” he says. “The DJs all got [music production software] Seratos, and the labels figured out that was a better business model. So all of a sudden, the health of the company was in serious jeopardy … We were doing everything to keep the lights on.”
By the summer of 2009, a career-changing order came in: a 50th-anniversary pressing of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue (a favorite of Michaels) — the plant’s biggest order to date. Michaels himself oversaw quality control, checking a record at random every 30 minutes. “I remember one night, it was two in the morning and I’m in my office listening to these records, and I thought, ‘This is crazy, but goddamn, I’m lucky.’ And it just gave me this boost of energy. The next month, we got another order of that size.” Since, URP has manufactured vinyl for every major artist, from Adele to Taylor Swift.
In the early 2020s, URP faced another challenging period: the coronavirus pandemic. “Demand for vinyl exploded” during lockdown, Michaels says, but the orders put an unprecedented pressure on pressing plants to keep up. He says that was the catalyst for URP to expand, resulting in an $11 million project that built new infrastructure and supporting equipment and added 26 new presses. “The challenge is you can’t do that overnight,” he says. And now, not only can URP meet demand, but “the plant runs better than ever.”
He and his team of approximately 130 employees — all of whom have been sporting anniversary T-shirts that detail the plant’s various logos over the years — are now ready to toast such a feat and storied history, with Michaels saying the energy “is palpable” at the plant these days. A forthcoming celebration will bring together partners, customers, vendors and “people who support the format … There’s a renewed sense of pride and interest in what we do.”
Already, Michaels is focused on how to maintain it for the next 75 years, doubling down on the honor he has in keeping the process — and workforce — in Music City. “Seventy-five-plus years of history gives you a lot of gas in your tank in terms of pride,” he says. “You don’t make the first Beatles record in America, you don’t make all these Motown records, you don’t accumulate all this history and know-how and not have something special. And I never want to lose that.”
This story appears in the Aug. 24, 2024 issue of Billboard.
“I don’t know if there’s ever a perfect time to open something like this,” says Jim Davis with a laugh.
Davis, president of audiophile retailer Music Direct, is standing at the front of the newly unveiled Fidelity Record Pressing, a high-end vinyl pressing plant in Oxnard, Calif. And while he doesn’t believe there can be a “perfect” time to open a new pressing plant, he does believe in the “right” time, adding: “Our niche in this industry is the high-quality end, and there’s always room for someone making a better quality product. So I’d like to think it’s the right time because we have the right people who put this plant together, and that’s going to make all the difference in the world.” Plus, as he admits while scanning the state-of-the-art facility during an invite-only preview, it’s “very encouraging that people wanted to see what’s going on here.”
Davis co-founded Fidelity with the father-and-son team of Rick and Edward Hashimoto; the two have over seven decades of pressing plant experience combined and have emerged as leaders in quality and proficiency. Rick sees Fidelity as an opportunity to bring high-end vinyl back into focus. “I think that commercial records have been kind of pushed out the door [lately], and I think it’s important for the vinyl industry to maintain a high-quality presence,” Rick says.
Fidelity Record Pressing Plant
Courtesy of Fidelity Record Pressing
One way Fidelity’s practices help set its products apart are the burnished edges, which Edward says is an “extra hassle” but well worth the quality. “Whether you realize it or not, [the edges of vinyl are] one of first things people notice,” he says. Another way is through the plant’s record cooling process, in which only five vinyl are stacked on aluminum plates (as seen above) to help preserve disc integrity by drying slowly. Specially designed spindles also run through the center to hold each disc and prevent warping.
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But perhaps Fidelity’s biggest differentiator is that the plant presses both vinyl and SuperVinyl, a proprietary compound developed by PVC manufacturer Neotech and Record Technology Inc. (RTI) exclusively for Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs (MoFi). The composition features carbonless dye, resulting in a quieter surface that reduces noise floor and enhances groove definition. (Manufacturing costs for SuperVinyl can be eight times more than regular vinyl.)
After a two-year build, Fidelity officially opened at the start of 2024 as the pressing plant for MoFi; it soon started accepting vinyl orders from outside clients. There are currently six presses (manufactured in Nashville by Record Pressing Machines LLC) that can churn an estimated annual capacity of around 1 million records. Another four presses are on the way (the plant can accommodate a total of 12). As of now, one employee operates up to three machines, with additional employees focusing full-time on quality control, which includes spot listening to every 40-50 records for around 30 minutes.
“If you have a flawed record, you may as well just stream it on Spotify,” says Rick. “But if you have a great sounding record, you’re going to want to play that record over and over and that’s what’s going to keep people coming back to vinyl. It’s got to be great — and I think that’s what we do here.”
Rick and Edward Hashimoto
Courtesy of Fidelity Record Pressing
About a decade into his career with Universal Music Group (UMG) — primarily heading A&R and working as a staff producer for Harvest Records — Tim Anderson had a front-row seat to the late-2010s vinyl boom. “It was still an archaic, dinosaur thing,” he recalls of how labels approached record pressing. He started to wonder why records were so hard to manufacture and had such long lead times — and what he could do about it.
By the time the pandemic hit, Anderson — who is also a songwriter-producer, composing for Suits and working with acts like Banks, Halsey and twenty one pilots — had left his major-label gig and had little interest in producing. Unsure of what to do next, his wife kept reminding him that music is what he knows best and suggested he tackle the vinyl issue that had plagued him years ago.
Twenty minutes later, Anderson made his first call to Scotty Coats, an old friend of his wife’s and Capitol Music Group’s one-time vinyl marketing manager. Coats immediately expressed his belief in the idea of a more sustainable approach to vinyl manufacturing. The call motivated Anderson — who doesn’t have an environmentalist background, admitting he gets confused trying to properly sort his recycling — to figure out how to make his vision a reality.
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He found a video online posted by Dutch company Green Vinyl Records, which detailed the development of an environmentally friendly alternative to record manufacturing that is free of polyvinyl chloride. “I’d been told my entire life that you needed the PVC to make a record sound great, and I just believed it,” Coats says. “Until Tim came along and inspired me to find a better way.”
“We saw it right when we met them that they had made something that could be this huge unlock,” Anderson recalls of GVR. He says the company needed a partner to help scale what it had built, and Good Neighbor was able to provide production contacts at many independent and major labels, especially in the United States. “They needed us and we needed them,” he says.
Soon after, Anderson met Reyna Bryan, president of innovative packaging company RCD, and in late 2023, he quietly launched Good Neighbor, a first-of-its-kind record-pressing company that manufactures fully recyclable discs, with Reyna as CEO and Coats as vp of sales and marketing. He later hired Coats’ friend and UMG manufacturing veteran Jonny O’Hara as vp of productions and operations. “As more people were stepping back into the world of vinyl, a lot of artists were like, ‘Is there a more eco-friendly alternative?’ ” O’Hara recalls. “There were better options coming online, but they were never to the same degree as Good Neighbor.”
“In my business of transforming supply chains, any opportunity to reduce carbon production or eliminate chemicals of concern from the process is a major win,” adds Bryan. “Good Neighbor achieves both.”
Key stakeholders of Good Neighbors, from left: Tim Anderson, Scotty Coats, Reyna Bryan and Jonny O’Hara.
Ryan Kontra
Instead of a traditional hydraulic press, which uses energy to heat up and cool down, GVR’s “futuristic-looking” machine (as O’Hara describes it) uses injection molding of polyethylene terephthalate (PET plastic), which reduces energy by 60% and increases manufacturing by three times. (GVR’s single press in the Netherlands, running three eight-hour shifts, has an estimated capacity of 1.2 million records a year.) A second press will arrive in the United States in mid-September. (Good Neighbor is currently raising money through the team’s pro-skater friends and music managers.)
GVR’s Pierre van Dongen and Harm Theunisse say they looked to the pressing process for CDs and DVDs as inspiration, noting how precise and adaptable it was. And while they say some research on trying this process with records was done in the 80s, it was never finished — until now. It took them six years to “perfect the development,” as they say, which included testing over 200 materials, optimizing molding and developing the direct to record label printer.
Coats and O’Hara are particularly excited about how this new process eliminates paper center labels that require high-heat baking in order to stick to PVC. Instead, Good Neighbor’s labels will be directly printed onto the PET plastic, allowing for individual customization of records — a sustainable step forward for exclusivity. Meanwhile, Anderson is thrilled that the machine is “material-agnostic,” meaning it can mold any material into a record, but Anderson says most don’t sound great — yet. The company is currently testing recycled bottles.
And while Anderson says he leaned on his “purist” friends for feedback on test pressings of the PET plastic and that no one pushed back on quality after listening, he still acknowledges that “audiophiles might not be our target consumer.” With Good Neighbor, he says, the goal isn’t to shame vinyl connoisseurs for their existing collections but to set a new precedent for sustainability in record production.
“If this industry keeps growing at this pace, it’s got to change … When the biggest artists in the world start selling millions and millions of these shrink-wrapped [vinyl], that’s when I was like, ‘This feels like something that would be fun to disrupt.’”A version of this article will appear in the June 8, 2024, issue of Billboard.
In 2020, after years of steady growth, the vinyl market exploded. Sales climbed over 46% in the United States, according to Luminate. Then, remarkably, they jumped another 51% in 2021.
But in 2022, that growth plummeted to a rate that was far more pedestrian: Luminate reported that sales were up a little more than 4%. (Pull two juggernauts — Taylor Swift‘s Midnights and Harry Styles‘ Harry’s House — out of that number, and growth was less than 1%.) Year-over-year growth also fell in the United Kingdom from 23.2% to 2.9%, according to the British Phonographic Industry.
“Some labels report sales are down,” says Nick Gordon, chief partnership officer at Symphonic Distribution. And big retailers like Walmart offered some titles at a heavily discounted price around the holiday season, stoking fears among the smaller players that those stores had overbought — maybe an indication of slackening demand.
Despite these figures, Gordon believes the vinyl market remains “healthy.” And several of his peers — from distributors to indie-label heads, chain stores to independent retailers — also seem unruffled by the slower growth. “It corrected the market,” says Todd Oenbrink, sales director for All Media Supply, a Florida-based indie wholesaler.
“It feels like a welcomed return to normalcy,” agrees Terry Cole, founder and owner of Loveland, Ohio-based store Plaid Room Records and the label Colemine Records. “It feels way healthier. This industry is not set up for rapid growth.”
And according to Russ Krupnick, managing partner of the market research company MusicWatch, “core metrics” in the vinyl market are still “showing strength.” “Our initial look at the data from 2022 is indicating that the number of vinyl buyers is still holding up,” he continues. “And in early projections, it looks like the used vinyl market is going to be up by double digits.”
During the first two years of the pandemic, demand for vinyl grew like crazy, outpacing production capacity. But retailers, distributors and manufacturers consider those two years an aberration — from 2015 to 2019, year-over-year growth ranged from around 9% to 17%.
When few music fans were going to shows due to COVID-19, “vinyl took a far greater share of music fan spending than it would otherwise take,” says Stephen Godfroy, director and co-owner of Rough Trade, which saw 30% growth in vinyl sales in 2022. “We saw exuberance for all sorts of things during the peak COVID era — vinyl, Netflix, cooking lessons, home improvement,” Krupnick notes.
Now listeners “are spending money on other things — going out drinking, going out eating, going to gigs — whereas they couldn’t do that much in lockdown,” says Peter Quicke, chair of independent label Ninja Tune. (Vinyl sales for Ninja Tune rose over 25% in 2022.) Even so, vinyl sales still grew.
With higher prices for raw materials and labor, the cost of records has also increased, another potential growth dampener. Several independent store owners expect major-label prices to increase again in 2023. “We keep hearing there are more [price hikes] to come,” says John Kunz, owner of Waterloo Records in Austin. “I wonder how that 10- or 20-something shopper is going to be able to afford that.”
Price sensitivity, especially in an uncertain macroeconomic climate, is a chief worry in the independent record store owner and label community. Already “we see customers backing away from the high prices for new releases,” says Michael Kurtz, co-founder of Record Store Day.
But at the same time, the vinyl industry’s production capacity is expected to rise in 2023. Slower growth last year “was less about people suddenly not wanting to buy as many records and more about the amount of records available to purchase,” says Cameron Schaefer, CEO of Vinyl Me, Please. (VMP sales were up 15% in 2022.) “The biggest limiter on growth is just pressing.” “We could have sold much more vinyl in 2022 if only we could have gotten hold of more supply of the right product,” Godfroy agrees.
Independent labels are still struggling with long turnaround times, executives say, which leads to missed sales for their artists — especially when an album doesn’t hit stores and streaming services at the same time. But more plants are coming online — Vinyl Me, Please expects to have its own new plant operational this year, for example — and existing facilities are adding capacity.
There are other potentially positive signs. Krupnick published a study on “the vinyl revolution” in 2022 which found that the most common barrier to buying records was “I don’t have or want to buy a turntable;” similarly, Luminate’s year-end report noted that only 50% of vinyl buyers have a record player. But “when Harry Styles came out last year, we saw a spike in turntable sales,” says Crissi Bariatti, music buyer at Barnes & Noble. “We are converting a lot of new vinyl fans” who might purchase LPs for years to come. (The chain had an “amazing December” for vinyl sales, and “January numbers are great” as well.)
Fluctuation in growth isn’t uncommon, of course. “Ebb and flow in vinyl sales over short periods” is natural, according to Scott Hagen, CEO of Victrola, a product of “what the new releases are, what the availability is in that moment in time, and what the general traffic in retail is.” (That was down in the fourth quarter of 2022.) Schaefer from Vinyl Me, Please predicts that “the next two years will give a much better preview of what to expect from the vinyl industry in the long term.”
“People got excited by high numbers in the years prior,” he continues. “If we can get to 10% a year, stay there and do that well? That’s healthy.”
For the record… We’re hiring!” reads the lawn sign in front of Nashville’s United Record Pressing, the largest vinyl pressing plant in the United States. With an expansion underway that will bring in 48 new presses — upping the manufacturer’s count to nearly 100 and more than doubling its total output from approximately 40,000 to over 100,000 units of vinyl per day — the need to staff up is crucial. And URP isn’t the only Tennessee plant on the prowl.
As the vinyl boom continues — the format generated $570 million in revenue through June 2022 (up 22% year over year), according to the Mid-Year 2022 RIAA Music Revenue Report — pressing plants around the world are not only striving to keep up with demand but planning how to get ahead of it. Tennessee is aiming to take the lead, increasing its number of plants from two to five in 2022 and planting a flag as the U.S. vinyl hub. The state offers advantages in distribution, in taxes and, most notably, in culture.
“All music resonates from Tennessee,” says Brandon Seavers, CEO of Memphis Record Pressing (MRP), which was founded in 2014 and is undergoing its own $30 million expansion. “We really take pride in our musical heritage.”
“We’ve got wine country in California,” adds Drake Coker, CEO of Nashville Record Pressing, one of three new manufacturers that have come online in the past year in Music City. “Tennessee is going to be vinyl country.”
The growth in Tennessee’s vinyl production capacity is substantial. MRP — owned by Czech Republic-based GZ Media, the world’s largest vinyl record manufacturer — is adding 33,000 square feet to house 36 new presses to be up and running by early 2023; NRP, also owned by GZ Media, opened in June. Physical Music Products, a smaller plant with three presses currently online (and five more expected by early 2023) that was founded by Nashville-based mastering engineer Piper Payne, opened in March, and The Vinyl Lab, a music venue and boutique two-press plant, has been operational since April 2021.
“Nashville is exploding right now,” says URP CEO Mark Michaels. He cites everything from “attractive” economics and state tax rates to the presence of tech giants like Amazon and Oracle as drivers for the city’s growth.
And, as Coker points out, an estimated 75% of the U.S. population lives within a 24-hour drive of Nashville, making it what he calls “a distribution heaven.” (Nashville and Memphis are centrally located to two of the country’s major distributors in Franklin, Ind., and La Vergne, Tenn.)
It’s not just proximity to distributors that makes Nashville and Memphis ideal cities to house a pressing plant. The Vinyl Lab founder Scott Lemasters believes it’s about proximity to everything. “The components that you need to make a record: the mastering houses and studios, the people who cut the lacquers. There’s even a plating facility in town. Everything is within a 10-minute radius,” he says. “Half our jobs are just running around town.”
But not everything can be done locally, and surely not everything can be sourced locally. So how did so many plants within one state manage to break ground on expansions or entirely new facilities all at once — and during a global supply-chain shortage?
Michaels believes URP, which was founded in 1949, had a bit of luck on its side. After the plant relocated to its current, larger facility in 2017, Michaels never thought it would need to further expand. “And then, as we saw 2020 and the growth of vinyl, it created an incredible acceleration and demand,” he says. “All of our customers were just crying for capacity.” By the top of 2021, URP decided to grow its operations yet again — fortuitous timing, with Michaels noting that supply-chain challenges got much worse soon after.
It’s something Seavers can attest to as well. At the start of 2021, MRP booked three-and-a-half months of work in five weeks. “It was more than a flood,” he says. “It strained every system that we had.” With the financial support of GZ Media, MRP added another 36 presses to its facility for a total of 52, which will eventually boost its vinyl units per day from 36,000 to 130,000. “Having GZ behind it all really has been key,” says Seavers.
The hustle to get GZ-backed sister plant NRP operational is further proof of how essential that kind of backing can be for a plant at any stage and of any size. For decades, GZ has been building a family of plants across North America, including Precision Record Pressing in Ontario. It was that plant’s president, Shawn Johnson, who approached Coker about relocating to Nashville to head up the newest sibling. Coker arrived in fall 2021, secured a space for NRP by December (because of Nashville’s current growth, he says commercial real estate was hard to come by) and started construction and operations in March. He compares the process to a plane leaving the runway as it’s still being built.
Capital and technological support from GZ have allowed that plane to take off, fueled by already existing customer relationships. “Every record that we can make in the next four years is already presold,” Coker says. “Who gets to start a company and not worry about sales?”
The Vinyl Lab — a multifunctional space that includes a pressing plant and a venue that will open in October — has enjoyed a similar safety net from the start. Scott first conceived the idea for The Vinyl Lab in 2015 and, after a series of setbacks, leased its space in January 2020. The following December, the Grand Ole Opry called. The Opry had continued holding shows in an empty hall during the pandemic, recording each one and eventually choosing 12 performances to release as an album — which it wanted on vinyl. “They called us, and we were like, ‘Our machine is not even in its final resting spot yet,’ ” he recalls with a laugh, noting he secured the company’s first Phoenix Alpha press in 2019. “We were fully transparent with [the Opry]. That order was due on June 3, and we delivered it on June 2.”
Lemasters, who operates The Vinyl Lab alongside Clint Elliott and Heather Gray, says their orders have mostly been word-of-mouth (in addition to ads they posted in bathroom stalls). He praises both the city and the vinyl community as a whole for the eagerness to help one another, recalling the time Jack White and Ben Blackwell of Third Man Records referred Dualtone Records to The Vinyl Lab, which led to a steady flow of work early on.
“That’s what’s great about the industry right now, is that we are still in a very collaborative phase,” says Seavers. “We would never be where we are if we hadn’t had that.”
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