Slashdot Mirror
Inside One Of the Last Vinyl Record Manufacturers
jonerik writes "The Nashville Tennessean has this look at Nashville's United Record Pressing, one of the last vinyl record manufacturers left in the U.S. Although LPs and 12" and 7" singles make up a tiny portion of the American music market at this point, the article reports that United's business is booming, thanks to consolidation within Nashville's record pressing business community, steady orders for the jukebox market, techno, dance, reggae, and rap orders, and this year's 25th anniversary of Elvis Presley's death. 'Elvis has been good to us. I can't complain,' says Cris Ashworth, the company's owner."
There doesn't have to be a huge market to support a business when there isn't much competition.
The Demand for vinyl from the DJ industry (techno, trip hop, rap, and the like) shouldn't be slowing down too much, Especially with new prime time hits buy groups like the Gorillias (Produced by Dan the Automator).
I have great faith in fools; My friends call it self-confidence. Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1845
i clearly came too late to suggest this to you, but there's plenty of ways of making your turntables not skip. mass is your friend. my fav is to bring 2 large empty plastic trays, fill them with sand, stack a couple cinder blocks in each tray full of sand, and lay a table surface across the top. you can dance yourself silly on stage with this setup and it won't miss a beat...
I wonder how much breakage they have in the production line for vinyl records.
After all, the RIAA subtracts an 11% 'laquer breakage' allowance from artists' royalties. They don't do laquer any more, but I wonder what the breakage is for vinyl, or even for CDs.
I know, pointless barb, but I'd like to see a lawyer go after this one. No doubt the padding would appear somewhere else.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
BEcause the DJ scene is so important in europe there has recently been shortages in vinyl manufacturing capacity. I hear a lot of UK companies are having to outsource their vinyl pressing to the Czech Republic to make their release dates.
Personally I'm a vinyl junkie, I spend over $5000 a year on hard to find vinyl, and I DJ a few weekly events. Of course all this is funded by my day job as a software developer (I was working at napster until recently). I wrote a digital mixing application for linux about 6 years ago, back then mp3 wtill wasn't really standardised so I used Raw CDR audio, or Mpeg Layer 2. The UI on any digital mixing application sucks compared to vinyl, Final scratch is close but has too many shortcomings (where's the vorbis support?).
The other somewhat dubious advantage of vinyl is that the music industry's lawyers see to be more tolerant of short run vinyl bootlegs of tracks which could never get released legally - Usually mashups of Britney Spears vs Nirvana over a 4 to the floor beat. If that was put out as an mp3 or CD they'd probably be more aggressive, but vinly tends to only go to DJ's who can make a decent argument about promoting music. I'm not saying litigation is uneard of, but It's very rare.