In the midst of their busy season, nearly 300 vinyl record professionals, including manufacturers, record labels, and distributors descended on the quaint town of Haarlem in The Netherlands from September 30 through October 2 to reflect on the challenges and realities facing the business.
At the Making Vinyl Europe conference, speakers and attendees here for the second consecutive year repeatedly spoke of signs of a “new normal” right around the corner.
Providing a business-to-business focus, the Making Vinyl conference followed the Haarlem Vinyl Festival (HVF), a weekend of consumer-oriented events that began Sept. 27 and included outdoor and indoor record fairs, concert performances, and vinyl culture and lifestyle talks.
Unlike last year’s Making Vinyl discussions, this time around, plant operators and others along the supply chain described optimism, and that within reach are the same level of orders that kept their presses working overtime in the pre-pandemic and then COVID days to meet consumer demand from the then locked-down global community.
Executive Summary
Stuck at home during the pandemic, listening to vinyl became a favorite new pastime for music lovers of all ages, fueling the growth that in turn caused wait times of 10 months for new records. 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, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry’s (IFPI) head of global analysis, provided sales figures. The worldwide market “doubled in the last four years,” marking 17 years of growth and valued at USD$1.734 million in 2023. Francis broke down the latest vinyl revenue figures available for the 10 leading countries, underscoring the fact that 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 head across the Atlantic Ocean.
James Duvall, senior analyst for market research firm FutureSource, urged pressing plants to anonymously provide their 2022 and 2023 data in aggregate for a report that will be published in December 2024. Company names or their individual sales volumes will not be revealed; 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 Record Manufacturers Association (VRMA), the survey was launched in April. With data in from only a third of the world’s known plants available, Duvall reported 110 million units were pressed in 2023.
Yet music and entertainment data company Luminate asserted that only 49.61 million vinyl units were sold-through in the US in 2023, while it’s well known that 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 in the current survey so the industry can present as accurate a picture as possible.
Making Vinyl event organizers this year tweaked the conference format by introducing the Sustainability Summit, a day focusing on environmental concerns. Highlights included sessions on the importance of not overstating vague green claims without evidence (i.e., “Greenwashing”); facts about the carbon footprint of a record; and a session about the new Coldplay album, made from plastic bottles gathered from a river in South America (more on that later in the article).
Another new Making Vinyl wrinkle following HVF’s festivities was a half-day of pre-Making Vinyl conference hour-long meetings by the VRMA and an informal get together of small pressing plants, whose challenges are different from the larger companies.
The conference was well attended. Here's a shot from day two of the event.
In addition, deep-dive roundtable discussions covered topics including 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 of vinyl records, 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 collectability.
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 [oriented],” 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 slackened business internally. In regard to personnel, he conceded, “we’re looking for younger staffing in all departments.”
Record Industry’s COO Anouk Rijnders said during her Making Vinyl presentation, “we need to get younger,” and that “the average age of Making Vinyl attendees is over 50.” Co-panelist Jose Maria Sanchez Covisa, international sales director of the large French pressing plant MPO International, said that 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.”
Christoph Hilkemeier of German pressing plant Pallas sits in on a session.
Lucy Launder, another panelist who heads the vinyl mastering department of London’s famed EMI-owned Abbey Road Studios, 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 what may happen in the future now than it has been in the past. “We’re hoping for the new normal,” he said.
Session moderator Blocker, who’s the chief creative officer of Hand Drawn Pressing, a small plant in Texas, pointed out that the Making Vinyl/VRMA initiative to get an accurate determination of how many records are actually getting produced will help pressing facilities purchase the right level of raw materials, which in turn should enhance the bottom line, so operations can better focus on where financial resources should go.
This groundbreaking project for getting actual and accurate sales numbers was this writer’s idea after US music research house Luminate (formerly known as Nielsen) disclosed that it had less than 4 percent of the 1,600 indie stores reporting to it, and they were weighing the difference to determine actual sales estimates. 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 control (QC) at every step of the record manufacturing process. An unfortunate byproduct of the pandemic’s supply chain crunch was hastened in part by the loss of a source of lacquers, the Apollo/Transco production facility, which was destroyed in a fire in 2020. This left only the Japanese supplier, Public Records, which somehow stepped up enough production to keep the global industry afloat.
On a related subject, several speakers mentioned during the conference that test pressings are not regarded with the same level of scrutiny as they used to be.
Abbey Road’s Launder noted she’s encountered situations where “the label approved test pressings but the artist didn’t like [them].” No one revealed actual test pressing reject rates, but anecdotally it was obvious that such snags occasionally happen for various reasons.
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 mastered releases. “We can’t check everything; we don’t have the time,” Showell said, prompting a nodding of heads through the room. The subject also came up at a separate panel of Europe’s leading cutting engineers, for 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.
Has Pricing Hit a Ceiling?
Quality is especially important considering the product is already expensive. With the prospect of PVC alternatives to vinyl for records to become “greener,” Jose Mª Sánchez-Covisa Garay, international sales director of French pressing plant MPO, wondered if labels can afford to pay “25 to 30 percent more” for PVC, 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 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 [is] something we’re all going have to deal with,” Billy Fields, Warner Music Group’s vice president of retail/commercial services and 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 who serves on the board of the VUT (the German Association of Independent Musicians and Music Companies, or Verband unabhängiger Musikunternehmer). 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 that in regard to high prices, buying through an online merchant often results in “shipping costs [that are] two times more than the record.”
Nothing beats a store clerk providing purchase suggestions knowing the customer’s taste than putting a record in [their] hands and saying ‘listen to this,’” Krieger said.
Regarding pricing concerns, at least for used records, Discogs COO Lloyd Starr pointed out in the conference’s final session that “You can’t go into a record store without seeing” a laptop on the counter with a web browser open to Discogs to check how much a particular record is going for. “ Everyone is using it to set prices.”
On the other hand, panelist Esther Vollebregt, Record Store Day director for The 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 not unusual for young girls to spend 200 Euros on records in one visit at Sounds Haarlem record store, observed Luka Ingelse, the store’s managing director. Whether or not the younger generation sticks with their new favorite hobby will be known in 20 years, he added.
Starr noted that the most well-attended HVF event that Discogs ran during the convention was a Billie Eilish listening party. It’s important that the industry pay attention to “how young people talk about music” by going to TikTok’s #vinyl channel, he noted, and that it’s unreasonable to think young people have the same tastes as their parents.
A session on the eye-opening topic of counterfeit records finding their way into retail outlets and e-commerce sellers was presented by Greg Schoener, plant manager of the Minneapolis plant Copycats Media. The VRMA has begun an initiative to study the problem.
Newcomers in Remote Territories
Industry consultant Kevin Da Costa hosted a panel featuring representatives from 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 had any vinyl production in decades.
These entrepreneurs’ stories shared commonality with indigenous cultures ripe with music waiting to be pressed. Some of their challenges are greater than others, such as not being able to operate during a war that has just hit its first-year anniversary. Muhammad Amash is the Arab founder and CEO of M.E.N.A-Press in Jisr el Zarqa, Haifa, Israel. The city is 17 kilometers (27 miles) from the Lebanese border. The company cannot press records for obvious reasons. (Reuters reported a week after the conference that Hezbollah rockets hit Haifa.) “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, a country with 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 has been 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 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 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. K-Pop 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 with his wife Dominique of Seabass Vinyl, pointed out that 32 percent 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’s customers have visited the plant in their first year.
The couple’s bootstrapped strategy focused 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 the potential dangers of running afoul of EU regulations and risking financial penalties by overstating greenness, also known as “greenwashing.”
As to the latter, they noted that 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.
At a session of record label representatives who discussed how they’re dealing with the sustainability challenge, Ian Stanton, head of sustainability of London-based Beggars Group, said it wasn’t lost on him that the method by which records are manufactured is “broadly the same as it was 70 years ago. That seems like a real opportunity for collaboration.”
Networking opportunities abounded at Making Vinyl Europe 2024.
Sonopress CEO Sven Deutschmann explained how the German pressing company worked with The Ocean Cleanup, a non-profit dedicated to gathering and recycling plastic bottles from bodies of water throughout the world. Coldplay’s new album Moon Music was released as an EcoRecord on October 4, 2024. Pressed by Sonopress from recycled PET plastic, 70 percent of each record was processed from bottles intercepted in 2023 at a river in Guatemala, explained Esther van Loon, river waste valorization manager of the Rotterdam, The Netherlands-based organization. One EcoRecord uses nine recycled bottles.
In a separate presentation, Belgium-based Beologic CEO Marc Thometschek explained how his company recycles massive amounts of vinyl records throughout Europe. The center labels get punched out so that the vinyl itself can be reground and pressed for new records. Also, 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,” Thometschek said.
The next-to-last panel was the most thought-provoking, getting to the heart of concerns about sustainability.
People Are the Problem, Not the Plastic
Playing devil’s advocate, session moderator Andreas Kohl asked the panel for responses to the perception that plastic in general and PVC in particular are 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 the fact 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 for Colt Technology Services and a consultant for a number of industries and organizations, including the European Green Digital Coalition and the Global Enabling Sustainability Initiative. With experience 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 records’ cultural impact should be, of course, balanced against their environmental impact.
But just as important is the necessity of maximizing the efficiency of business systems and materials across the entire production chain used to create the resulting product, he stressed. Aside from looking at the environmental impact of manufacturing, he said that the key question is whether the business model is sustainable.
The panelists concurred that ideally, the most sustainable approach is for consumers to buy already-manufactured used records. But the reality is that society wants and covets new products, hence, the rebirth of the vinyl record industry, as chronicled by the Making Vinyl conferences since 2017.
Panelist Andreas Arnold, a staffer with VinylPlus Deutschland, a PVC value chain association for sustainable development, noted that PVC is a product that doesn’t have “leakage.” By the 1990s, window frames, flooring, and cables made from PVC were getting recycled, and by 2000, lead and additives were phased out from PVC materials.
Tom Moran concluded that it behooves the industry to figure out ways to reduce waste, and that sustainability also involves companies operating in socially responsible ways, not the least of which includes paying their employees a living wage.
All images courtesy of Andrej Krause, © Studio Krause.
