By Larry Jaffee,
Haarlem, Netherlands — In the midst of their busy season, nearly 300 vinyl record professionals, including manufacturers, record labels and distributors, descended on this quaint town in Holland to reflect on the challenges and realities facing the business.
Making Vinyl Europe speakers and attendees on Sept. 30-Oct. 2, 2024, in this Amsterdam suburb at the Phil venue here for the second consecutive year, repeatedly spoke of signs of a “new normal” right around the corner.
The Making Vinyl conference, which focused on B2B, followed the Haarlem Vinyl Festival (HVF), a weekend of consumer-oriented events that began Sept. 27. These included outdoor and indoor record fairs, concert performances, and talks on vinyl culture and lifestyle.
Unlike last year’s Making Vinyl discussions, this time around, plant operators and others along the supply chain described optimism that the same level of orders is within reach, as kept their presses working overtime in the pre-pandemic and COVID days to meet consumer demand from the locked-down global community.
Executive Summary
Stuck at home, listening to vinyl became music lovers of all age’s favorite new pastime, fueling the growth that in turn caused wait times of 10 months for finished goods. Those days are over, thanks to new European capacity from already large plants adding new machinery, as well as scores of boutique startups jumping on the vinyl bandwagon or answering an entrepreneurial calling to serve untapped markets in certain geographic regions.
Dan Francis, IFPI’s head of global analysis, provided sales figures. The worldwide market “doubled in the last four years,” marking 17 years of growth and amounting to valued at USD$1.734 million in 2023. Francis broke down the latest vinyl revenue available for the 10 leading countries, underscoring America’s economic consumption is fueling consumer demand: 1) USA: $108 million; 2) UK: $28 million; 3) Germany: $19 million; 4) Japan: $14 million; 5) Canada: $13 million; 6) Italy: $8 million; 7) France: $5 million; 8) Spain: $4 million; 9) Australia: $3 million; and 10) Netherlands: $3 million.
The list also explains why such a large percentage of the records pressed in Europe are headed across the Atlantic Ocean.
James Duvall, Futuresource senior analyst, urged pressing plants to anonymously provide their 2022 ands 2023 data in aggregate for a report that will be published in December. Company names or their volumes will not be revealed to their reported volumes; only a total number will be reported. Pressing plants should submit their data to: https://tinyurl.com/84ev97jx
Initiated by Making Vinyl and underwritten by the Vinyl Manufacturers Association (VRMA), the survey was launched in April. With data in from only a third of the world’s known plants, Duvall reported 110 million units were pressed in 2023.
Yet Luminate’s asserted that only 49.61 million vinyl units were sold through in the US in 2023, while it’s well known large quantities are imported from European plants, and retailers place orders on what they’re confident will sell.
VRMA president Dustin Blocker urged all plants to participate so the industry can present as accurate picture as possible.
Making Vinyl event organizers this year tweaked the conference format by introducing the Sustainability Summit, a second day on Wednesday focusing on environmental concerns. Highlights included sessions on the importance of not overstating vague green claims without evidence (i.e., “Greenwashing”); the Carbon Footprint of a record; and the new Coldplay album made from plastic bottles gathered from a river in South America.
Another new Making Vinyl wrinkle following HVF’s festivities was a half day of pre-Making Vinyl hour-long meetings by the VRMA and an informal get together of small pressing plants, whose challenges are different from the larger companies.
In addition, on Monday deep-dive roundtable discussions covered Cutting And Mastering; Raw Materials; Pressing Plants; Plating; Quality Assurance; Sustainability and Social Practices; Customer Service; and Vinyl Culture and Consumer Relationships.
Record Industry, Haarlem’s hometown pressing plant, once again gave tours to hundreds of both HVF and Making Vinyl attendees over the three-day period.
The State of the Business
A discussion undercurrent centered on whether the market can continue to bear the current high prices, which might be out of the financial reach of the key younger demographic, specifically Gen Z women who have fallen in love with the format’s collectibility.
Ton Vermuelen, who bought Record Industry from Sony 26 years ago, wondered out loud on the opening panel where all the other Taylor Swifts are because the industry needs to press their records. “There’s a lack of new artists selling huge quantities in music today,” said Vermeulen, who was hopeful for a return to the volume his company hit in 2018. “Music today is more singles-driven than album,” he said, alluding that consumers are streaming those hit songs, not buying the complete albums on vinyl.
Vermuelen lamented having to recently downsize Record Industry’s workforce because of a slackened business internally. In regard to personnel, he conceded “we’re looking for younger staffing all departments.”
Record Industry’s COO Anouk Rijnders said during her Making Vinyl, “We need to get younger and that “the average age of Making Vinyl attendees is over 50.”Regarding staffing, co-panelist Jose Maria Sanchez Covisa, international sales director of the large French plant MPO International, said hiring and retaining well-trained “good people” is a key to future success.
Co-panelist Christoph Hilkemeier, sales director of the large venerable German pressing plant Pallas, agreed with Vermeulen that recent times have been “hectic” and that “the key for 2025 is flexibility.”
Co-panelist Lucy Launder, who heads the vinyl mastering department of the famed EMI-owned Abbey Road recording studio in London, noted the studio maintains close relationships with multiple pressing plants, underscoring all the talk of so many options for getting a record made these days.
Vermeulen agreed with Blocker that it’s more difficult to forecast now. “We’re hoping for the new normal,” he said.
Session moderator Blocker, who’s chief creative officer of Hand Drawn Pressing, a small plant in Texas, pointed out that the Making Vinyl/VRMA initiative to get an accurate of how many records are actually getting produced will help pressing facilities purchase the right level of raw materials, in turn, enhance the bottom line, so operations can better focus where financial resources should go.
The groundbreaking numbers project — after US music research house Luminate (formerly known as Nielsen) disclosed that it had reporting to it less than 4% of the 1,600 indie stores reporting to it and they were weighing the difference. That being said, it stands to reason that actual sales are much greater than what Luminate feeds the industry and media
QC Must Be Maintained
Another recurring topic was the need to maintain quality at every step of the process. An unfortunate byproduct of the pandemic’s supply chain crunch was hastened process that in part was caused by the loss of a source of lacquers, leaving only the Japanese supplier, which somehow stepped enough to keep the entire industry afloat.
Along the way, test pressings are not like they used to be, several speakers mentioned during the conference.
Abbey Road’s Launder noted she’s encounter situations that “the label approved test pressings but the artist didn’t like.”
So much can go wrong at every step of production, noted Miles Showell, a mastering and vinyl cutting engineer on Launder’s Abbey Road team known for his work on half-speed releases. “We can’t check everything; we don’t have the time,” Showell said, prompting nodding heads through the room.
The subject also came up at a separate panel of Europe’s leading cutting engineers, which conference chairman Andreas Kohl marveled “in this room is 500 years of experience,” referring to Rainer Maillard, Andreas “Lupo” Lubich, Thorsten Megow, and the aforementioned Showell.
No one revealed actual test pressing reject rates, but anecdotally it was obvious such snags occasionally happens for whatever reason.
Has Pricing Hit a Ceiling?
Quality is especially important considering the product is already expensive. With the prospect of PVC alternatives to get more green, MPO’s Covisa wondered if labels can afford to pay “25 to 30% more,” a cost that most likely would be passed along to the consumer.
Danny Veekens, head of Amsterdam-based Dutch indie label Rucksack Records, also questioned vinyl’s high prices from the stage, while sitting on a different panel, asking rhetorically: “Where is the money going?”
In regard to the retail market, “pricing remains a problem from the consumer side, and something we’re all going have to deal with,” Billy Fields, Warner Music Group’s VP of retail/commercial services & vinyl strategist, admitted from the audience during a Q&A.
“At the end of the day, we need record stores,” chimed in Ronny Krieger, an industry consultant serves on the board of the VUT (the German Independent Music Association). Krieger pointed out that e-commerce doesn’t provide the same kind of care that vinyl lovers receive at brick-and-mortar. Not to mention in regard to high prices, buying through an online merchant often “shipping costs two times more than the record.”
Nothing beats a store clerk providing purchase suggestions knowing the customer’s taste than putting a record in your hands and say listen to this,” Krieger said.
In regard to the pricing issue at least for used records, Discogs COO Lloyd Starr pointed out in the conference’s last session “You can’t go into a record store without seeing a Discogs [computer] tab. Everyone is using it for setting prices.”
His co-panelist Esther Vollebregt, Record Store Day director for Netherlands and Benelux countries, noted that “young people coming into stores are not complaining about the prices.” Her co-panelist Nadine Steffens, who runs the video channel SoulDisco on Youtube, pointed out that nobody forces you to buy anything.
It’s no unusual for “young girls” to spend 200 Euros on records in one visit at Sounds Haarlem, observed Luka Ingelse, the store’s managing director, during the same session.
Whether or not the younger generation sticks with their new favorite hobby will be known in 20 years, he added.
Starr noted the most well attended HVF event that Discogs ran was a Billie Eilish listening party. It’s important the industry pay attention to “how young people talk about music” by going to TikTok’s #vinyl. It’s unreasonable to think young people have the same tastes as their parents, he added.
An eye-opening topic of counterfeit records finding their way into the retail supply chain covered was presented by Greg Schoener, plant manager of the Minneapolis plant Copy Cats, as an initiative being studied by VRMA.
Newcomers in Remote Territories
Industry consultant Kevin Da Costa gathered some of the pressing startups he’s been helping get operational in remote areas of the globe, including Israel, South Korea, India, and Bulgaria, all of them countries that hadn’t any vinyl production in decades.
These entrepreneurs’ stories shared commonality with indigenous cultures ripe with music waiting to be pressed. Others’ challenges are greater than others, such as not being able to operate during a war that just hits its first-year anniversary. Muhammad Amash, an Arab founder & CEO of M.E.N.A-Press in Jisr el Zarqa, Haifa, Israel. The city is 17 kilometers (27 miles) from the Lebanon border.
Amash said on Oct. 2 his company is poised to press both Israeli and Palestinian music, as well as all the wider Middle East region. Those plans are sadly on hold for obvious reasons. (Reuters reported on Oct. 7, Hezbollah rockets hit Haifa in the first direct attack on the northern city that evaded the military’s usually reliable air defense “dome” system.)
“There’s high demand for vinyl not only in Israel and Palestine, but also throughout the Middle East,” said an undeterred Amash.
In August, the first record in decades was pressed in the vast, populous country of India with its various subcultures and music styles. “There are so many different languages in India,” said Saji Pillai, founder of Samuel Digmedia Art and Solutions in Navi Mumbai.
Pillai was able to apply his already considerable knowledge as ex-business head for the former Sony/DADC Manufacturing India, an optical disc replicator, to the more complicated world of vinyl production. The factory plans to press not only the various forms of Indian music, but also obtain limited licenses to popular Western titles.
Like Pillai, William Shin was experienced in physical media, working as a vinyl broker vinyl for seven years from his home country of South Korea. Shin sensed an entrepreneurial opportunity to deliver on vinyl K-Pop, a popular culture phenomenon not only domestically but also internationally that has been a boon to CD replicators in recent years, as the genre’s fans devour anything available from their favorite artists.
Scotland isn’t exactly in a new territory for vinyl. The UK is the second largest global market for the format, not to mention home to the half dozen well established and boutique British pressing plants. In fact, panelist David Harvey, co-owner of Seabass Vinyl with his wife Dominique, pointed out that 32% of UK record collectors are Scottish.
“It’s important for artists to be able to say ‘Made in Scotland,’” Harvey said, noting that 40 of Seabass customers have visited the plant in the first year.
Seabass has only pressed records for only a year, but the couple’s bootstrapped strategy appears to concentrate on local musicians to help design the Glasgow factory—which is focused on sustainability—appears to be working.
Sustainability Summit
Making Vinyl devoted the conference’s second day entirely to sustainability topics, a recurring theme over the three days. The joint VRMA/Vinyl Alliance sustainability committee gave separate presentations on their studies of a carbon footprint of a record, and running afoul of EU regulation risking financial penalties by overstating greenness, also known as “greenwashing.”
As to the latter, a rule of thumb for vinyl manufacturers—both pressing plants and material suppliers including packaging—should follow these six guidelines: 1) Be truthful and accurate; 2) Be clear and unambiguous; 3) Do not omit or hide important information; 4) Only make fair and meaningful comparisons; 5) Consider the full life cycle of the product; and 6) Back up claims with robust, credible and up-to-date evidence.
On a session of label representatives discussing how they’re deal with the sustainability challenge, Ian Stanton, head of sustainability of London-based Beggars Group, said it wasn’t lost on him that the method records are manufactured is “broadly the same as it was 70 years ago. That seems like a real opportunity for collaboration.”
Sonopress CEO Sven Deutschmann explained how the German pressing company worked with The Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit dedicated to gather and recycle plastic bottles from bodies of water throughout the world.
Popular rock band Coldplay’s new album Moon Music was released as an “Eco-Record”on Oct. 4. Pressed by Sonopress from recycled PET, 70% of each record was processed from the bottles intercepted in 2023 at a river in Guatemala, explained Esther van Loon, river waste valorisation manager of the Rotterdam, Netherlands-based organization, joining Deutschmann the stage. One Eco-Record requires nine recycled bottles.
In a separate presentation, Belgium-based Beologic CEO Marc Tometschek, explained how his company recycles massive amounts of vinyl records throughout Europe by punching out the center labels. Beologic’s research found that seven out of 10 listeners thought a record made from recycled PVC sounded better than one made of virgin material.
“Plastic is the most sustainable product because it can get recycled,” he said.
The next-to-less panel was the most thought-provoking getting to the heart of sustainability.
‘People the Problem, not the Plastic’
Playing devil’s advocate, session moderator Kohl asked the panel for responses to the perception that plastic in general PVC in particular is bad for the environment. Plastchem CEO Onno-Pieter Sonnega pointed out that life cannot exist as we know it without PVC. “If you go to the hospital, without plastics there is no life.”
Alluding to the Ocean Cleanup project, Sonnega said the “problem isn’t with the plastic; it’s the people [who discard bottles into the ocean].”
Tometschek pointed out there’s no escaping that the clothes people wear or a beer they drink involves plastic.
Panelist Tom Moran, an American who now lives in Amsterdam, works as a sustainability researcher of many industries for Colt Technology Services and a consultant for organizations, including the European Green Digital Coalition and the Global Enabling Sustainability. Previously working in physical media and digital music, Moran noted he was speaking at Making Vinyl on behalf of himself.
“I look at vinyl as a deluxe product, while streaming is like fast fashion, a throwaway product that consumes resources,” he said, adding that ecords’ cultural impact should be, of course, balanced against their environmental impact.
But just as important is maximizing efficiency of business systems and materials across the entire production chain used to create the resulting product, he stressed. Besides manufacturing’s environmental impact, the key question that “Is the business model sustainable?”
The panelists concurred that ideally consumers buying already manufactured used records is the most sustainable approach. But the reality is society wants and covets new products, hence, the rebirth of the the vinyl record industry, as chronicled by the Making Vinyl conferences since 2017.
Panelist Andreas Arnold, staffer with VinylPlus Deutschland, a PVC value chain association for sustainable development, noted that PVC is a product that doesn’t have leakage. In the 1990s, window frames, flooring, and cables made from PVC were getting recycled. “By 2000, lead and additives were phased out,” Arnold added.
Moran pointed out it behooves the industry to “figure out ways to reduce waste.” But sustainability also involves companies “operating socially responsible ways, such as paying a living wage.”
