The Secret Society of Lathe Trolls

I can give an update on the US market which is mostly positive in that there are more resurrections than new closures. Resurrected VRP (Jacksonville, FL) - Re opened as Grave Face Record Pressing Softwax (Philadelphia, PA) - Re opened as Hellbender Philly (a branch of Hellbender Pittsburgh). Closed ...

Similar to what is going on with electronics the raw materials needed to make records in the US are subject to tariffs while finished goods manufactured outside the US are exempt. It is going to be a long four years....... https://www.wired.com/story/trumps-tariffs-could-hit-you-in-an-unexpected-pla...

These are a couple of good posts from llary. All important common sense questions that anyone considering opening a new plant should be asking themselves and few do. I fear that the calculation of 4 auto presses being the minimum setup to turn a profit is also correct. This doesn't bode well for the...

Here are the US based plants that have closed in the last year or so, maybe someone can chime in with the others around the globe.

VRP (Jacksonville, FL)
Blue Sprocket (Harrisonburg, VA)
Softwax (Philadelphia, PA)
The Vinyl Lab (Nashville, TN)

Since we don't have a separate thread going to compile plant closures I guess I will post this news here. One more plant down in the US, this time The Vinyl Lab in Nashville. They have been very active in the pressing community in the US, the VRMA, Making Vinyl, etc and most recently announced that ...

There is an interesting episode of a Nashville based podcast called "Music Citizens" that just came out. Without having any prior knowledge of the record manufacturing industry they dive right into the over capacity issue that Moss and I are here prattling on about. Check it out: https://podcasts.ap...

When the only way to start a plant was to do it with old machines this kept capacity at a limit, but more importantly it forced new people to interact with the old timers because there was no other way to figure out how to obtain or use the machines. The thread that ran for years about new plant sta...

In the time since this thread was started I count no less than 9 small plants that have opened in the US 1 - Minnesota 1 - Florida 3 - California 2 - Texas 1 - North Carolina 1 - Pennsylvania I may be missing one or two, and there are also a couple more in the works. All are 1 - 2 press operations, ...

One more down, Softwax (Philadelphia, USA) has closed.

Don't misunderstand me Moss, I agree with you completely the point I was making is that even worse than the scenario you describe is that the few new plants that are still in the process of setting up are not doing so with less expensive used machines, they seem to all be doing it with brand new ful...

If someone could buy a defunct plant and make a more profitable one out of it good for them. What is worse is that new plants are still opening up with new equipment while used equipment sits unsold. I am old enough to remember the days when tons of machines from the major label plants were sent to ...

Blue Sprocket Pressing (Virginia, USA) closed a few months ago and is for sale (3 warmtones, 1 light tone if anyone is interested). A couple more US plants seem to have stopped pressing but haven't announced closure yet. This is all a sad but very predictable chapter in the history of record manufac...

Moss, you propose a question but you mostly answer it. I think the lines are pretty clear, the "art" side goes from the creation of the music right up to recording and mastering. Galvanics is somewhere in between art and mass production. The part that comes after that, pressing and printing are defi...

I think that when you say "the reality is that potential clients WANT to see this content. They want to connect with the people behind the scenes, they want to fall in love with the gritty side of manufacturing because it makes the whole process more human", you are talking about the retail customer...

Whenever I meet someone who is planning to open a new plant, and I have met many in the last 5 - 10 years I always have the same first question, which is "have you ever worked in a factory". I have never encountered someone who has answered yes. I can see that there is a complete misunderstanding of...

The key difference between producing bottle caps and producing records is that no one would open a bottle cap factory because of their undying love of bottle caps. If you had the customers who wanted you to make bottle caps for them you would crunch the numbers, amount of machines, production quanti...

Moss hits the nail on the head with this one. In the same way that razor blade companies give away the razor in order to sell you the blade, the record itself is not the profit center. Pressing records is a break even proposition (at best) and the only reason to do it is to try to make a small profi...

When demand spiked and turn times grew to over a year there was a frenzy of ordering as labels tried to keep their biggest sellers in stock. People started ordering much larger quantities of re orders and I think this was a big part of what created the bottleneck we all saw in 2021 - 2022. No one ne...