Groove Masters of the Vinyl Revival

You don’t hear this very often anymore in Salina, Kan., but business is booming—for one company at least. Amid the blue-collar town’s shuttered factories and empty grain elevators sits the squat brick warehouse that’s home to Quality Record Pressings, which does exactly what its name says. QRP’s services are so much in demand, it had to stop taking orders temporarily last August; for much of last year, Chad Kassem, founder and chief executive officer, had to run the plant 24 hours a day to work through a backlog of some half a million albums overdue to be pressed. QRP manufactures about 1.6 million records a year—from artists ranging from Miles Davis to Nirvana—making it one of the largest such plants in the country. And demand won’t quit. “Nobody wants to hear you bellyaching about how you’re so busy,” says Kassem, 53. “But who wants to turn away work because you don’t have time to do it?”

Dudes like Kassem have helped keep vinyl alive for the last, oh, four decades, ever since the format started losing ground to technological marvels such as the eight-track and cassette tape. For a long time, the core customer was a middle-aged man who sifted through dusty crates to round out his Steely Dan collection. This is more or less the market QRP still serves. But now a significant and growing number of vinyl heads are millennials—or even younger. They buy new records rather than used, and many are women, which explains why last year’s best-selling artists on vinyl were Adele and Taylor Swift, and why Whole Foods Market, Urban Outfitters, and Barnes & Noble have all gone old-school. The average price these kids pay is about $20, though limited editions made for April’s Record Store Day, the shopping holiday created in 2007 to boost vinyl sales at independent record stores, can run well north of $50. That’s a lot of money for music that’s practically free in digital formats. Last year, 12 million records were sold in the U.S., according to Nielsen Soundscan, twice as many as in 2013 and 13 times the number from a decade ago. That translates to $416 million in revenue for the record labels, more than all of the millions and millions of fractions of cents earned from streams on Spotify, SoundCloud, and YouTube combined.