- 8 minutes ago
Vinyl has made a record-breaking comeback, outselling CDs and mp3 downloads, and is now the music industry’s highest-grossing physical format. We visited the world’s biggest vinyl factory, GZ Media, to find out how it became the largest manufacturer in the industry, as well as a smaller pressing plant in New Jersey to see how US factories are staying afloat despite cutthroat competition.
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00:01This vinyl factory in New Jersey uses pellets to press over 40,000 records a week.
00:10Vinyl is now the music industry's highest-grossing physical format.
00:14It's a religious experience. It sounds so good.
00:19And more than 50% of all record sales happen here in the U.S.
00:24But most vinyl is pressed overseas.
00:27In fact, one company in the Czech Republic called GZ Media makes 70 million vinyl records a year.
00:35They are the 800-pound gorilla of vinyl pressing.
00:38If you end up with one player, they're going to get to do what they want.
00:42But vinyl makers, including GZ, almost went out of business at the turn of the century,
00:48when record sales nearly disappeared.
00:50I don't think that anyone in our company envisioned that the vinyl will be strong again.
00:55So what brought vinyl back?
00:58And how did a small company in the Czech Republic come to rule the industry?
01:02Drop the needle in place, lock it, and start it up.
01:08The history of recorded music goes back to the late 1800s.
01:16That's when Thomas Edison invented the cylinder phonograph that could play back about two minutes of audio.
01:23In 1887, a German-American inventor, Emile Berliner, developed the first flat disc record.
01:31The hot mixture falls out on great rollers where it is kneaded and rolled into a long, flat sheet.
01:38It was made of shellac, a natural resin from insects.
01:43As it comes out of the machine, circular knives cut it into pieces called biscuits.
01:49But before they are used for actual pressing, they must be heated again on steam tables.
01:55But the material was too brittle, which made it difficult to mass-produce.
02:01Then, in 1948, Columbia Records created these discs from polyvinyl chloride,
02:08a durable type of plastic that allowed for finer grooves and longer playing times.
02:14Turns out, people love it. And recorded music takes off.
02:22That's Justin Barney. He's been covering the music industry for 12 years.
02:26So vinyl sales, they just, they go up and up and up.
02:30Fueled by new innovations and the birth of rock and roll,
02:34American record sales exploded to roughly 200 million in 1950, kicking off vinyl's golden age.
02:421970 is the peak of vinyl record sales.
02:47It will never be passed because there is simply no competition.
02:55At the time, there were over a hundred record manufacturers in the world,
03:00including a small company called Gramofonove Zavodi, or GZ Vinyl, from what was then Czechoslovakia.
03:08The country's communist government launched it in 1951 to supply countries across the Eastern Bloc with records.
03:15We were not a democratic country, so some censorship and regulation were active here.
03:21Now, GZ is the largest vinyl manufacturer in the world.
03:27The process starts with mastering, where an engineer fine-tunes the music to get the best sound quality.
03:34It's not really a copy or paste. You have to really be a musician also.
03:40The final audio is transferred to the cutting machine, where a stylus carves sound grooves on a copper plate.
03:49The tip is made from diamond, which makes precise and sharp cuts in the metal without wearing it out over time.
03:56This plate is what's called a master record.
04:00But copper is too soft for pressing out thousands of records.
04:05So GZ first has to make copies out of nickel in a process called electroforming.
04:11These copies are called stampers.
04:15Each of these stampers will be used to press up to 2,000 vinyls.
04:21These pellets are what the final records will be made of.
04:26Green, pink, yellow.
04:33After machines press the pellets into discs, the edges are trimmed off.
04:40Today GZ presses over 70 million vinyls a year.
04:45But there was a time when vinyl was on the way out.
04:50In 1962, a Dutch engineer and his team at Philips invented cassette tapes.
05:03They soared in popularity in the US.
05:06But it was the launch of the Sony Walkman in 1979 that was a game changer for that format.
05:13Pre-recorded music now became portable.
05:16Think of like the world then when you're just able to listen to the radio.
05:21You have zero control over what you're listening to.
05:24And then suddenly you could listen to whatever you wanted to listen to.
05:28That must have just been an absolute revelation.
05:33In 1983, cassette sales surpassed vinyl sales.
05:39But that craze didn't last for long as CDs soon hit American shelves.
05:46Vinyl struggled to compete with these formats.
05:49They're smaller.
05:50They're lighter.
05:51They can fit tons of more music on them.
05:56A vinyl record, like a 45, you can hold less than four minutes on a side.
06:02And a CD, you can hold something like an hour.
06:06CDs cost less than a dollar to make, and companies resold them for up to $20.
06:12Then, in the early 2000s, MP3 players like iPods flooded the market.
06:19The fact is, I'm not going to want to bring my entire song collection with me all the time.
06:23So, might as well have something that looks fresh and funky.
06:26With all this competition, by 2005, vinyl sales hit an all-time low.
06:33Dozens of record manufacturers shut their doors.
06:37All the machines moved to kind of dark corner of the company.
06:43Jeezy saw almost a 97% drop in sales.
06:48The company pivoted to offering print and packaging services.
06:52But Jeezy never stopped vinyl production entirely.
06:56We kind of hoped that it will survive.
06:59But we never thought that this would be the main product of our company in the future.
07:08Meanwhile, back in the US, some stores were keeping records alive.
07:13Like Amoeba Music out of California.
07:15It tapped into fans of alternative subcultures, like hip-hop and techno.
07:22People seeing DJs and being like, that's cool. I want to do that.
07:30Amoeba thrived by buying and selling rare used records, as well as CDs and cassettes,
07:36at a time when MP3s dominated the industry.
07:40It is kind of a living encyclopedia of music.
07:44Today, the selection here is carefully curated by staff that live and breathe music, like Mark Bieber.
07:51When you take them out, this little area at the end of the run-out is called the matrix.
07:56And there are little numbers stamped in there.
07:59And those will indicate which pressing plant it was at, what year it was pressed.
08:04Mark says original pressings are usually more valuable than reissues of the same record.
08:10So, Yesterday and Today by the Beatles was first released with a picture of them wearing lab coats, baby doll parts.
08:18There was such a reaction to it that the company immediately pulled them back off the shelves.
08:23Let's say you had the original cover. It could be worth thousands.
08:27But even with iconic finds, Mark has to carefully inspect their condition before determining their value.
08:34This record, it's something that is consistently in demand, but it's been through the wringer.
08:40It's all coming apart a little bit at the corners.
08:44And then when I take it out, there's scratches deep enough.
08:47You can slightly feel them with your fingers, and that means that you're going to hear them.
08:51On busy days, the store sells up to a thousand records.
08:56Our all-time high sellers would be Unknown Pleasures by Joy Division, The Wall by Pink Floyd, and Rumors by Fleetwood Mac.
09:04While Amoeba kept records spinning during Vinyl's dark days, some experts say Vinyl's comeback was carefully being planned.
09:14I think a big part of the reason that Vinyl came back was marketing, scarcity, and variance.
09:26In 2008, music stores, artists, and record labels got together and established Record Store Day, when independent shops offer exclusive vinyl.
09:35They make the list, and the list is a couple hundred records that are going to be released specially and only on that day.
09:46And so that involves buy-in from labels and manufacturers because they make the list, and then they announce it with Record Store Day.
09:54The result? Lines out the door, and sales increased over 100% that year.
10:01By 2010, big retailers like Target and Walmart ramped up their record selection too.
10:08That opens them up to a whole new audience, to cities that don't have an independent record store, to somebody who's shopping for somebody else, who would never even go into a record store.
10:18Labels also hooked listeners by releasing more limited edition records.
10:24Stuff you can't find on Apple or Spotify.
10:28Soon, global pop music icons, including Adele and Taylor Swift, began prioritizing the format.
10:35You can get a lot of records sold, you can make a lot of money.
10:38Vinyl is the biggest money maker per unit for the artist.
10:43It's better than streaming, but at the same time, you don't sell as many vinyl records.
10:48So, the streaming is a big multiplier by a small amount.
10:52The vinyl is a small multiplier by a big amount.
10:55You get about a thousand records, and then you have to change it.
10:59Sal Rocanova oversees record production at Independent Record Pressing, or IRP.
11:05Founded in New Jersey during the 2015 vinyl boom.
11:09The artwork, the lyrics, the colors, that's really what brought it back.
11:14There's a statistic that 40% of the records that are sold are never played.
11:18They're more there for collection.
11:20And it's not just the covers that have to be eye-catching, but even the records.
11:27More than half of IRP's orders are for colored vinyl.
11:31It offers a hundred different shades.
11:36To create these, workers grind and melt down old records along with their scraps.
11:41If you don't like one of these colors, we blend stuff together and start to make other colors.
11:47It's kind of like closed.
11:50Pastels are in, and no, it's more earth colors.
11:54What's the color that's in right now?
11:56Um, obviously orange, right?
12:00The company presses roughly 45,000 records a week.
12:04Its output even includes Minecraft's video game soundtrack.
12:09But keeping up with demand hasn't been easy.
12:12A lot of people that break into this think that,
12:15Oh, I'm going to take the machine.
12:16I'm going to plug it in and hit a button and records are going to come flying out.
12:20Nothing could be further from the truth.
12:24For IRP, orders really started booming in 2020.
12:28We had thought that physical media was going to drop by about 25% during the COVID era.
12:34Instead, vinyl sales surpassed CDs and the following year increased to over a billion dollars.
12:42People were staying home.
12:44They couldn't go to a music venue.
12:45So they said, I'm going to support the artist by buying vinyl records.
12:49The company added a weekend and night shift just to keep up.
12:53The labels who were trying to get their records pressed on vinyl were seeing that,
12:58my gosh, there's a shortage of capacity.
13:01But opening up new vinyl plants during the pandemic wasn't quick or easy.
13:09Companies that originally made vinyl presses hadn't fully come back since the format's resurgence.
13:15So many plants were stuck using decades old machines.
13:20It's almost like having an old car that constantly breaks down.
13:23And you know how to open the hood and wiggle the wire or tap on something to get it to go again.
13:30So labels were waiting up to twice as long to get their records,
13:35with lead time stretching from four weeks to seven.
13:38Nobody was loving us at the time as hard as we were trying.
13:42In 2023, lockdowns were lifted and the bubble burst.
13:46Labels over ordered.
13:48So all that hooting and howling and hurry up, I need my records, they stopped ordering.
13:54Now you had umpteen pressing plants to compete with.
13:59When the dust settled, one plant had risen to the top.
14:03GZ Media.
14:05The company already had an edge because it never stopped producing vinyl.
14:09While everyone else scrambled to find machinery and talent,
14:12GZ had updated equipment and kept a team with decades of experience.
14:18They are miles ahead of everybody else.
14:22They're leagues above everybody.
14:25GZ now owns 10 production facilities across the globe,
14:29including several pressing plants in North America.
14:32And it produces roughly seven times more records than the biggest U.S. manufacturer.
14:38They are the 800-pound gorilla of vinyl pressing.
14:42And that kind of gets on my nerves a little bit, to be honest with you.
14:47Still, independent manufacturers like IRP are making millions of records a year.
14:53There are some labels who say, I will not have my record pressed overseas.
14:56It will get pressed in the United States.
14:58Um, and then there's some, they don't care.
15:00They just want to lower cost.
15:02That's really destructive to the industry because if you end up with one player,
15:08they're going to get to do what they want.
15:12I don't think that independence will ever die.
15:16I think that there will always be artists who want to support local record pressers.
15:24Competition is good.
15:26And GZ are great competitors.
15:28But like, it's a whole industry that they have the potential to decimate.
15:33In response to this concern, GZ told us it's, quote,
15:37built a strong local presence in the U.S., creating local jobs and bringing new technologies to the market.
15:44But whether it's a small record maker or a big one,
15:48it doesn't seem like these pressers are going quiet again anytime soon.
15:52It's gotta come down at some point.
15:56It just seems inevitable that it would level off.
16:02But it hasn't!
16:06Nerd stuff.
16:07Okay, so does vinyl sound better than digital?
16:11Um, if done right from beginning to end, it's a religious experience.
16:18It sounds so good.
16:20But, when people talk about vinyl sounding better,
16:24they're usually talking about the golden age of vinyl,
16:28and when music was recorded to tape, and then that tape was translated to vinyl itself.
16:34And then you hear, this is as close as you can get to being in the room when they're recorded.
16:39Nowadays, you have a lot of digital that goes into this physical medium,
16:44where if they don't treat it right before it translates to vinyl,
16:48you're not gonna get all the fine details.
16:50In my opinion, though, to keep it short after saying a lot of words,
16:54yes, it does sound better.
16:56It does sound better.
16:58It's a very good thing to say.
17:00It's a very nice tool,
17:02yes, that's, very bad,
17:04as you can get there.
17:06It's a very nice tool.
17:08It's a very nice tool,
17:10yes, it's a very nice tool.
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