Remember vinyl? It's not dead: in fact, the biggest pressing plant in Europe is working at full capacity. Here in Record Industry, a 6,500-square-metre factory in the northern Dutch town of Haarlem, 7.5 million vinyl records will be produced this year for artists including Ed Sheeran and Miles Davis -- up from 3.8 million in 2013.
"The entire world music industry is after vinyl," says Anouk Rijnders, sales manager at Record Industry. "We had to double our shifts to meet demand -- and it's still not enough."
Record Industry creates each record from nothing, cutting copper and lacquer masters, pressing vinyl pellets, even printing the sleeves. It's a complicated, expensive process (each record costs just over £2 to make), but with record labels going through their back catalogues to re-release albums on vinyl, Rijnders expects this growth to continue.
In the last year, the company has expanded from 50 to 110 employees, and could press as many as "eight, nine or ten million records" in 2016.
The reason for this revival? "There's no emotion to having music on MP3," says Rijnders. "Music, for some people, is still something they'd like to own."
Above: Once the excess vinyl has been cut away, the disc (here, a red one -- Record Industry specialises in colours) can be fed into its inner sleeve. It then cools down in a warehouse, before being packed in to an outer sleeve. It is now ready to be sent to the record company, then on to the distributor and retailers.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
