If you want to have a record pressed, you first have to look around to see where there is delivery capacity at all. For years there has been a great demand for the vinyl product. Industry grew again in the first half of the year.
Pressing plants cannot meet the demand for sound carriers due to the continuing boom in vinyl records. “We have significantly increased our production capacities in recent years and are working on further expansion, but the demand is currently higher than the possible output,” said Optimal Media. The company operates what it says is Europe’s largest press shop in Röbel on the Mecklenburg Lake District.
Winfried Söllner of Newbilt Machinery, a manufacturer of record presses, said: “We actually have musicians as customers who, in their desperation, press their own records.” His colleague Erwin Neubauer explains that the corona pandemic has caused demand to increase again. Four times as many machines as before the pandemic are now being delivered – if not more. “90 percent or 98 percent of our customers are abroad.”
A new press shop recently went into operation in Güstrow in Mecklenburg-West Pomerania. According to the managing director André Kronert, he organized the record production for artists and labels. However, the waiting times got longer and finally his regular press shop no longer served him. “We’ll just do it ourselves now.”
According to the Federal Association of the Music Industry (BVMI), vinyl sales have increased almost tenfold since 2010 (2021: 118 million euros). Vinyl had almost disappeared from the market from the early 1990s to 2006. In the first half of 2022, according to the BVMI, the German music industry again generated a good twelve percent more sales of records than in the first half of the previous year.
