[LINK] "Putting a Czech Spin on Vinyl"

[rfmcdonald]

Bloomberg's Mortkowitz Bauerova has a cool article explaining how a Czech firm dominated the global manufacturing of vinyl records.

Albums by Black Sabbath, David Bowie, and U2 line the walls at the headquarters of GZ Media, which last year pressed 13.7 million records for up-and-coming indie labels along with industry stalwarts such as Sony and Universal Music Group. The Czech company is riding the wave of the LP revival, thanks to a fleet of half-century-old presses still capable of producing top-quality discs. “It was our great stroke of luck that even in the meager 1980s and 1990s, when nobody was buying vinyl anymore, the management decided to keep the machines and never threw them out,” says Michal Nemec, GZ’s sales and marketing director. In the U.S., 80 percent of record-making equipment was scrapped, says Bob Roczynski, owner and president of Record Products of America, a Hamden (Conn.) company that supplies machine parts to the dozen or so surviving plants in the U.S. Order backlogs at many of those companies now run three to four months, he says. “In the old days, if you were backlogged that much, you weren’t doing something right.”

Sales of vinyl LPs hit 9.2 million in the U.S. in 2014, a 52 percent increase from the previous year, according to Nielsen Music. Nielsen’s numbers, which go back only to the early 1990s, show sales hitting a low of 300,000 in 1993. In the U.K., record sales topped a million last year, a milestone not reached since 1996, says Official Charts Co. “There’s a kind of back-to-basics movement now, especially in London. People knit their clothes, grow their own organic veggies. Buying vinyl records is just part of that,” says a sales clerk at the Rough Trade record store in Nottingham who goes by his DJ name, Nail.

Originally named Gramofonove Zavody Lodenice, GZ pressed its first record in 1951. By the 1960s the state-owned enterprise was making LPs for much of the Soviet bloc, until cassettes and later compact discs pushed the brittle black discs to the brink of extinction. GZ embraced the new audio technologies—CDs are one of its mainstays—but didn’t stop making records entirely, though it did mothball some equipment. Winslow Partners, a U.S. private equity fund, acquired GZ in 1998 and sold it to the company’s management a few years later.