How the Vinyl Record Revival Is Spinning Into the FutureHow the Vinyl Record Revival Is Spinning Into the Future

Back in the mid-1980s, as surely as video had killed the radio star a few years earlier, it seemed inevitable that CDs would relegate vinyl records to the landfill of history. 

I was not an early adopter, to put it mildly. My record collection, to which I was emotionally attached, numbered in the thousands. I had worked as a DJ in nightclubs since the mid-1970s, honing a skillset seamlessly stitching together tracks to keep the party on the dance floor going all night long. There’s nothing like cuing up a record to that precise moment when you fade into a new groove without the dancers missing a beat. (OK, sure, I mixed my share of trainwrecks along the way.) Simply punching in some numbers on a CD player almost seemed like cheating. 

A friend ultimately convinced me to make the leap to digital by appealing to my otherwise modernist instincts. 

“A needle physically grinding into a vinyl groove to produce sounds is just so primitive compared with a laser beam gliding across a CD,” she said. I had no good answer and, however reluctantly, joined the forced march toward progress. 

Then, right around 2010, something miraculous happened: Vinyl began to bounce back. It’s been on an upward trajectory ever since, as the chart below illustrates. In fact, 2023 was the 17th consecutive year of growth for vinyl album sales, according to data compiled by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). What’s more, sales of records last year surpassed CDs for the first time since 1987.

Related:From Metal to Vinyl: Metallica Tours Pressing Plant It Recently Bought

Vinyl is on a 17-year run, but it's still nowhere near its glory days. Chart courtesy of the Recording Industry Association of America.

But today’s vinyl is not the same as that used to press Michael Jackson’s Bad, the best-selling album that year. Just as music has evolved over the decades, so too have the materials and processes used to make the records that spin the tunes.

It's not your father's vinyl

Erika Records in Buena Park, CA, was fairly busy when I visited in November. The plant was ready to ship several albums for the Walt Disney Co.

“We do a lot for Disney, which I love,” said Liz Dunster, a veteran of the record business who started out pressing records for up-and-coming LA metal bands in the early 1980s. She worked her way up in what was essentially a man’s world and now runs a plant with dozens of pressing machines.

In addition to orders from the House of Mouse, Erika Records was also ready to ship platters for local punk and metal bands. While I was there, new vinyl copies of the classic Lateralus album by proggy metal band Tool were being pressed, as you can see in the video below.

At Erika Records and elsewhere, much of the vinyl production process has remained fundamentally unchanged since its heyday — PVC pellets are melted and extruded into “pucks,” which are then pressed into a record shape and trimmed to remove the excess material around the edges — but the industry isn’t stagnant. Like other plastics product manufacturing, it has adapted to sustainability concerns in a number of ways. There’s also newfound interest in switching from PVC to PET material, and some manufacturers are exploring injection molding to replace the traditional press as a means of production. 

Related:Now Hear This: The World’s First Bioplastic Vinyl Record

A weighty 180-gram debate

Poring through the bins of new records, one can’t help but notice a sticker screaming “180-gram vinyl” on almost all of the album covers. Lightweighting may be all the rage in automotive, but when it comes to vinyl, the assumption is that heavier records bring a host of benefits, including durability and overall sound quality, to justify the elevated price tag. Or is it just another passing craze?

“I know that when the 180-gram record started appearing in stores back in the 1970s, it was largely driven by marketing,” said Matt Earley, co-founder and president of Gotta Groove Records. The Cleveland-based custom record presser was established in 2009, right around the time vinyl started getting its groove back.

As to the benefits of heavier records, Earley is skeptical. Although, as with so much involving the vinyl experience, you can’t remove subjectivity. “When you really stretch to find the tangible benefits, you can argue that they do exist,” he said. “Maybe 180-gram vinyl records don’t warp as easily. Some say that if you’re listening on high-end audio equipment, the heavier record minimizes micro vibrations at the point of the stylus and, therefore, is getting less feedback. I don’t know that anyone has proven those claims to be true.” 

Audiophiles attribute a number of other sonic benefits to 180-gram vinyl, as noted on Fluence, including deeper bass and higher treble and something called “stereo imaging,” which the site defines as the perceived spatial locations of various instruments, vocals, and other sonic elements in relation to others.

If these attributes do exist objectively, it may have less to do with the weight of the vinyl than the extra attention that the pressing plant is likely to pay these premium products. As Fluence notes: “Record companies that take care to put out an album on 180-gram vinyl also take care when it comes to the whole mastering and manufacturing procedures, tending to use better source material (such as original master tapes) and improved processing techniques.”

Earley believes that the 180-gram fad has diminished in the past few years, and a prime reason for that is environmental awareness. They’re not going away, he stresses, adding that Gotta Groove still presses a lot of them, but “you’re basically using more material than you need when you make a heavyweight record.” 

Vinyl tracks the circular economy

Bring up any plastic product today, and the conversation will eventually turn to sustainability. That’s happening in the vinyl records biz, as well. 

Scrap vinyl and trimmed material is routinely recycled, and the final product itself is by no means single-use. But one part of the production process that could be improved from an environmental standpoint is the shrink wrap.

Vinyl Mama Liz Dunster of Erika Records in front of her wall of fame.

Erika Records is on the verge of announcing that its shrink wrap will be made from recycled materials. “And we’re looking at making the jackets out of recyclables, too—we’ve already started doing some of that,” Dunster said. 

“I’m a mother and grandmother, and I care about what we’re putting in the ground and leaving behind for the next generations. So, I started using 100% lead free PVC. Color is always non-lead, but black vinyl comes in lead and lead-free versions. Non-lead vinyl costs a bit more and it’s harder to work with,” added Dunster, but the tradeoff is worth it. 

All of the PVC she doesn’t use gets recycled. “We grind it all up and use it for the color core of the picture records, for example, which no one plays, and to make those platinum albums you see on TV.” When it comes to the vinyl used to make new records, though, she is very particular. 

The secret’s in the supplier

Dunster sources her vinyl from a longtime supplier, who gets the raw material from a company in France. She’s loyal, but not careless, and tries to keep a second supplier at hand in case there’s a chink in the supply chain.

The newest kid on the vinyl block, Fidelity Record Pressing in Oxnard, CA, also has a long-time relationship with its material supplier. While the plant is only a little over a year old, owner Rick Hashimoto is an old hand: He’s been in the vinyl business off and on since the mid-1970s. “I’ve been working with that materials supplier for over 20 years, and I know that I can trust him to give me top-notch vinyl,” said Hashimoto.

Rick Hashimoto (left) recently launched Fidelity Record Pressing with a little help from his sons. One of them, Edward, is pictured here. Image courtesy of Fidelity Record Pressing.

Gotta Groove, likewise, has been using the same materials supplier for many years, and for much the same reason as Dunster and Hashimoto. “The supplier is very consistent in terms of the materials it sends us — a non-leaded formulation that gives our records the sound quality our customers expect,” said Earley. “We’re not the only plant to use that formulation, but I think it’s fair to say that we’re the largest one.” 

Gotta Groove, like other pressing plants, is tight-lipped when it comes to its vinyl formula. Its website is packed to the gills with information about every aspect of the production process but notably scant on the subject of raw material. 

“There is a ton of R&D that goes into making a successful PVC formula for vinyl records,” according to the company. “Not just any PVC will do — there are specialized attributes required to make sure the record stays the same from right off the press to several decades of listening down the line.”

While PVC remains the material of choice for vinyl albums and the basic compression molding technique for pressing records has remained essentially unchanged over the years, injection molding PET has been getting a lot of attention lately. There again, sustainability is driving interest.

Back to the future

First, let it be said that injection molding is not a new process when it comes to pressing records. As far back as 1950, music trade magazine Billboard ran a story titled, “Columbia Gearing to New Injection Molds,” which reported on a “hush-hush” process under development at the company to mold records using polystyrene. Hashimoto remembers listening to some molded records back in the day, and the sound quality was “terrible,” he said. 

The reason the technology is back in the news a few decades later is largely because of Coldplay partnering with German company Sonopress to produce its latest album, Moon Music, earlier this year. Instead of PVC, the album was made using recycled polyethylene terephthalate (rPET), which Sonopress markets under the EcoRecord brand. The 140-g EcoRecord reportedly is made from nine recycled PET bottles recovered from post-consumer waste. On its website, Coldplay claimed that using this technology to press its new album prevented “the manufacture of more than 25 metric tons of virgin plastic, and provides an 85% reduction in manufacturing process CO₂ emissions/kg compared to traditional 140-g vinyl." How does it sound? Well, that’s a matter of opinion, as with most vinyl-related audio debates, but Coldplay is known for its meticulous attention to sound quality, as is Gotta Groove’s Earley, who is exploring the technology.

PET sounds

“I’m pretty excited about it, to tell you the truth,” says Earley. “From a manufacturing perspective, injection molding is more efficient than compression molding, regardless of what you're making,” says Earley. Part of the argument for PET is that it's more environmentally friendly than PVC, he notes, “but I think it depends on how you frame the question,” he adds. “It takes more energy upfront to make PET than it does to make PVC, but fewer chemicals are involved.”

Earley does think it’s a growing market, but it’s an open question how much market share it can capture. Gotta Groove is giving it a go, says Earley, but initially it will be a small part of the operation. And it does raise a consequential linguistic issue, he adds: “At the end of the day, the name of the format is vinyl. If the record’s not made of vinyl, what do you call it?”

Is the vinyl renaissance flagging?

There’s conflicting information floating around about 2024 vinyl sales projections, with some claiming numbers are trending down while others insist that yet more growth is on the horizon. 

Over at Erika Records, Dunster has been riding the wave. A couple of years ago, demand blew up and the company had to put up a waiting list for orders. “But it started to drop off, and we really felt it in the middle of last year,” she said. Since April of this year, though, Dunster said that she's seen a rebound, with "demand increasing daily."

Fidelity has only been in business for around a year, and Hashimoto understandably is bullish about the future. He is already investing in more equipment. “We’ve added automation to two of our machines, and we’re going to do the same to the other machines in the next couple of months. And we’re supposed to get four more presses sometime next year, and we’ll be adding automation to those machines, as well.”

The folks at Gotta Groove Records aren’t too worried about the future, either. The company was established in 2009, right around the time that vinyl started getting its groove back, and Earley figures it’s still in growth mode. 

“It’s a younger demographic that’s buying vinyl put out by new artists and touring bands. College-age people are getting introduced to the format, and that gives me great hope for the future,” said Earley. “Once you’ve invested in a turntable, you want to keep buying records so that you can keep using it, right? I do think we will continue to see growth because of that.”

I can say that I’m doing my part to keep vinyl alive. Those thousands of records I had back in the day have mostly vanished — casualties of hasty retreats from relationships gone sour and, especially, a trans-Atlantic move — but I’ve been rebuilding my library for the better part of a decade, my beloved vinyl peacefully cohabitating with many, many CDs, which for all intents and purposes have become vestigial. While my CD player rarely sees any use these days, my turntable is in perpetual revolution. To borrow a phrase from Neil Young, who is always in heavy rotation in my house, “Long may it run.”