While politicians clamor for an American manufacturing revival, vinyl records have quietly delivered. In 2015 there were only 21 vinyl pressing plants in the United States — too few to keep up with booming demand. A decade later the US boasts at least 35 pressing plants, from tiny custom shops to massive legacy operations.
Now, President Trump’s erratic tariffs are challenging that progress, offering fresh obstacles and new headaches — especially for smaller presses.
“You don’t think when you go into the music industry or manufacturing business that you’re going to accidentally become a global forecaster,” says Mike Yanchak of Hellbender Vinyl in Pittsburgh, PA. “A little update comes through and something under your feet is changing. It’s different than it was before. How can you deal with it tomorrow?”
Hellbender employs about a dozen people, and like others that Consequence spoke to, the presser feels secure about most parts of their supply chain. The paper products that label and enclose new records are well-supported by American companies. It’s the raw materials for vinyl — the treated plastic pellets — that have made Yanchak’s job “feel like eighth grade geopolitics.”
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“The vinyl industry mostly starts in a chemical bath in Asia,” he explains, but the path to market often includes vendors in the European Union. And as Trump’s tariffs blinked on and off, vinyl has been “ subject to this entire disruption in the supply chain.”
And the vendors aren’t absorbing losses. “People aren’t apologizing for the cost of raw materials, they’re demand pricing it like they’re Ticketmaster.”
Hellbender isn’t planning to increase the price of their records. But shipping is another matter. “The shipping prices in the United States right now are incredibly dynamic. We’re having a hard time even on a 90-day turnaround. It’s been hard to predict and project what our shipping costs are gonna be, even to the point of being able to bill through on the web.”
The burden of these disruptions is falling disproportionately on smaller companies. Larger operations — at least, those that took Trump seriously on his tariff pledge — were ready.
“ I think we’ve anticipated this,” says Cam Sarrett, director of sales and marketing at United Record Pressing. Homed in Nashville, TN, United is a 75-year-old part of music history, having pressed for The Beatles and Motown and Jack White. According to Sarrett, United have been preparing for the next trade disruption since COVID-19.
“Learning from the pandemic and the supply chain issues that went on there, we’ve taken a lot of steps to become more supply chain flexible and resilient,” he says. They greatly diversified their vendors and stocked up where they could. Today, “we have a lot of warehouse space” filled with raw materials.
United says they can weather the tariffs without passing along price hikes to customers, at least in the short term. Longer than that, “It’s pretty uncertain. But with the current administration, uh, it’s hard to tell what’s actually going to stick.” He’s also not convinced by Trump’s goals of bringing back a broader spectrum of manufacturing: “Not everything that we use to make the records that we make is available in the US. Frankly, it would take a long time and a lot of money to make that all US based.”
Sarrett worries about the effect tariffs might have on the ”diverse ecosystem right now of vinyl pressing plants.” As for manufacturers that couldn’t or weren’t able to “take preparatory measures before this point, I can’t imagine it’s gonna get a lot easier for those plants. And that’s a shame.”
That’s because the tariffs are only one stressor facing an industry coming off a decade-plus boom. Vinyl has added a lot of new plants, and supply has caught up with demand: “For the first time since probably the eighties, the amount of vinyl that can be pressed in the US market has exceeded the amount of orders,” he says. Plants that five years ago were humming 24-hours-a-day have cut from three shifts to two; others two to one.
Yanchak knows what companies like Hellbender are up against: “The farther down on the business pyramid you fall, and the smaller you are, the more subject you are to the tide.”
Hellbender is working to cut costs in a number of ways, including offering musicians the chance to use cheaper recycled vinyl, like from previously-pressed records. The company hopes to sell artists on the environmental benefits and more competitive pricing, though Yanchak acknowledges the difficulty in convincing audiophiles to give up their beloved “virgin black” pressings. Still, he vows to fight on.
“I don’t care if we have to learn how to grind up combs and press records. I don’t care if we have to learn how to press records on baloney. We’re gonna figure out how to make a great sounding record.”