In Episode 2 of Music Citizens, we explore Nashville’s role in the vinyl manufacturing industry’s global competition through the lens of Piper Payne, a scrappy manufacturer making small batches of records on old machines. In just the past two years, the vinyl industry has undergone significant changes—a global superpower in vinyl has made Nashville home and now poses an existential threat to independent vinyl manufacturers in Nashville and around the world. New tech has completely eliminated what was an infinite bottleneck just two years ago. Now that issues in the supply chain are completely solved, will demand keep up? Even if it does, can everyone survive? We watch as Piper tries to find her niche in a quickly corporatizing industry.
Piper is the founder, owner, operator and president of Physical Music Products, a small batch vinyl record manufacturing company in Nashville that opened in 2022. She’s scrappy and hands-on. She opened the company with a handful of finicky old machines in the peak of vinyl demand while, at just about the same time, The Vinyl Lab opened with two brand new machines. United Record Pressing, the country’s largest vinyl manufacturer at the time, expanded operations, and a corporation in the Czech Republic built and opened a new plant called Nashville Record Pressing. In this episode of Music Citizens we report, for the first time, just how much has changed in vinyl manufacturing in the past two years and if everyone will survive.
This episode will hit all podcast platforms and air on WNXP on November 21. Listen to the teaser below.
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Music Citizens is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Tennessee Arts Commission, Metro Arts Thrive, and the First Horizon Foundation. To find out more about how National Endowment for the Arts grants impact individuals and communities, visit www.arts.gov.
