Vinyl record revival spins success for Czech producer

GZ Media, founded in 1948 behind the Iron Curtain, weathered the 1980s slump and now claims to be the world’s biggest vinyl record producer
When vinyl record sales hit bottom in the late 1980s, managers at Czech record producer GZ Media in a small town near Prague were wondering what to do with their idle record pressing machines.

They decided not to get rid of them and put them in garages at the company’s backyard. That proved to be a wise decision.

As vinyl retro-mania started spreading around the world a decade later the firm dusted off the presses, and it is now spinning profits on records for the likes of the Rolling Stones, U2, Bob Dylan and David Bowie.

With 7m records made in 2012 and 10m expected to be produced this year, GZ Media says it is the world’s biggest vinyl record producer, making records for Universal Music Group and Sony Music, and is beginning to co-operate with Warner Music.

“Vinyl is an inscrutable animal,” Jiri Hasek, the company’s commercial director told Reuters. “Everybody is waiting for when the growth will slow, but instead it keeps accelerating.”

Vinyl record production accounts for about 30% of GZ Media’s sales, which reached 1.8bn crowns ($93m) last year.

The company also makes sophisticated packaging for expensive consumer goods such as mobile phones, electronics and whisky.

Founded in 1948 as Gramofonove Zavody Lodenice, the central record producer in the then-communist bloc, GZ Media pressed its first record in 1951.

During the 1980s demand for vinyl records began to ebb as CDs and DVDs emerged. Production bottomed out in the early 1990s when GZ Media was producing only about 200,000 records a year.

In 1989 the communist regime collapsed and GZ Media was up for grabs as part of a nationwide privatisation programme. It ended up in the hands of US fund Winslow Partners, which later sold it to the firm’s own management.

Last Christmas it made a special Beatles recording gift box approved by Paul McCartney and is now working on a special gift packaging of The Who discography.

According to the Official Charts Company, vinyl record sales in the UK, one of GZ Media’s main markets, have reached 375,000 so far in 2013, which compares with 393,000 for the whole of 2012 and 227,000 in 2009.

“For uber-fans of a particular band, getting the vinyl edition is a really important souvenir and mark of their commitment to the artist,” said Steve Redmond, a spokesman for the Entertainment Retailers Association in the UK.

He said vinyl was “an inevitable reaction” to the rise of digital music, which offers little room for cover art and the kind of tangibility that people were used to.

“It’s never going to return to where it was, when it was the lead format for the industry,” Redmond said. “But I think it is a far bigger niche than people anticipated that it was going to be and, at the moment, is continuing to grow at a fairly dramatic pace.”

Source: The Guardian