New Pressing Plant Cements Nashville As Vinyl City USA

With a new plant opening doors on the city's north side, Nashville could soon be known for a new nickname: Vinyl City U.S.A., according to The Tennessean.

Albums began spinning last month out of Nashville Record Pressing, a $13 million operation from GZ Media, a Czech Republic company with existing North American operations in Toronto and Memphis. The company aims to bring 36 new pressing machines online — a needed capacity addition in an industry fighting to meet rocketing demand. 

When teaming Nashville Record Pressing with a landmark expansion at longstanding plant United Pressing and independent operation Vinyl Lab, it could be argued that no city in U.S. produces more vinyl albums than Nashville. 

Add in a $30 million expansion planned for GZ-owned Memphis Record Pressing and Tennessee could be considered the vinyl capital of North America, said Drake Coker, CEO of Nashville Record Pressing. 

"Our customers asked us to be here," Coker said. "They continued to ask us ... for more and more capacity. And they specifically asked us to locate here, if we could, to get close to them and close to their distribution." 

He later added: "There's going to be a tremendous amount of capacity here." 

The new plant began pressing records on six new machines by late June. Nashville Record Pressing plans to add 12 to 24 machines — depending on international shipping and installation logistics — by the end of the month. 

When the plant hits 36 machines, Nashville Record Pressing should produce about 96,000 albums a day out of the 100,000-square-foot space. 

What does a new plant mean for record collectors? More albums and — hopefully — shorter wait times for a release to hit shelves. 

Last year, U.S. sales reached nearly 42 million units, according to Luminate, a media consumption company formerly known as MRC-Nielsen-SoundScan. Vinyl accounted for more than half of all physical music sales in 2021, growing dramatically from 3.9 million records sold a decade ago.