Hunger for vinyl means a chronic shortage of pressing machines

05/2017 The economist

Vinyl gets its groove back

Hunger for vinyl means a chronic shortage of pressing machines

Only two firms still make the lacquer discs used in mastering

FOR young hipsters and middle-aged sentimentalists alike, the resurgence of vinyl is cause for celebration. Since 2010 sales of vinyl records in America have tripled. Britain’s vinyl industry saw its biggest gains for 25 years in 2016. Big supermarkets are extending the amount of space that they allocate to the discs and even the turntables that twirl them have found a place on Amazon’s best-seller lists.

Meeting this demand has been tricky. Vinyl accounted for 76% of total album sales in 1973; by 1994 this had dropped to 1.5% as compact discs (CDs) took over. By then the bulk of the world’s vinyl-pressing plants had closed and most of their cumbersome machines had gone to the scrapyard. Only a very few plants that could diversify into new areas of printing and production stayed open. But they did so without any further investment in vinyl, so the few machines that kept on producing often date back to the 1960s.


GZ Media, a Czech firm that is the biggest manufacturer of vinyl (it makes around 60% of all vinyl records), went from churning out over 13m records in 1987 to a low of 200,000 in 1993. Requests for vinyl began flooding in again about a decade ago; it is now working around the clock and will produce 24m vinyl discs in 2017.

Although vinyl is still only a tiny fraction of the global music market, big orders from record labels have swamped the few pressing plants left and caused delays in production. GZ Media has kept on top of orders by building, from 2014 on, updated versions of its older pressing machines. Others are also ramping up. More than a dozen new pressing plants have cropped up across North America, Europe and beyond in the past couple of years.

A chronic shortage of machines is the chief headache. Reports of people racing across the world to get their hands on an old machine have become common. That in turn is spurring investment in new options. Nordso Records, based in Copenhagen’s Nordhaven district, which opened its plant last year, opted for a new pressing-machine design from Newbilt, a German startup. Newbilt have sold 25 of their products across Europe for up to €500,000 ($554,000) each, including all parts. They are manual, so an operator needs to oversee each stage of the process; they churn out 400 records a day if operating flat out.

On a more industrial scale, Viryl Technologies is a Canadian startup that started building new machines in 2015. One eight-hour shift presses 1,200 records. Plants across North America, Europe and Asia have already installed them.

Startups, which also provide machine servicing, see further room for innovation in the mastering process, or the transferral of the recording to a master disc from which all subsequent copies will be derived. One method involves cutting the grooves onto a lacquer disc, but only two companies in the world manufacture these discs (one of them is run by an old Japanese couple in Tokyo) and they too are in short supply. A second technique uses a copper-plated disc that is easier to come by but is again hampered by the limited number of machines that can cut the disc: of the 25 that still exist, GZ Media owns four.

Last year, Rebeat Digital, an Austrian company, filed a patent for a “high-definition vinyl” mastering technology. This produces a computer-generated image of the music before blasting it onto a lacquer master disc with a laser (rather than a spinning stylus). They reckon this slashes the time needed to produce the master disc by 60%. But audiophiles are still sceptical about the sound quality of vinyl records produced in this way.

Even if vinyl’s fashionability fades a bit, servicing the remaining few machines and supplying parts should keep the cash flowing for the startups. And the format is unlikely to disappear entirely, as once seemed possible. Many fans buy the liquorice-black discs from Spotify, a music-streaming service, after it started in 2014 allowing artists to sell merchandise, including vinyl, from their profile pages. Another promising sign that there are more hipsters than ageing purists involved is that about half of all those who buy an album on vinyl have listened to it before, online.

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline "Vinyl gets its groove back"