Gold Rush Vinyl is revolutionizing vinyl record production by producing albums nearly three times faster than the industry standard. Its success lies in producing and hand-inspecting vinyl in house, allowing the company to deliver high-quality records quicker and more efficiently. This week, Kristen Meinzer talks to Caren Kelleher, founder of Austin, Texas, Gold Rush Vinyl. We’ll learn how the pressing plant implements lean production techniques to minimize waste and accelerate the process. Invesco Distributors, Inc.
Gold Rush Vinyl is revolutionizing vinyl record production by producing albums nearly three times faster than the industry standard. Its success lies in producing and hand-inspecting vinyl in house, allowing the company to deliver high-quality records quicker and more efficiently. This week, Kristen Meinzer talks to Caren Kelleher, founder of Austin, Texas, Gold Rush Vinyl. We’ll learn how the pressing plant implements lean production techniques to minimize waste and accelerate the process. Invesco Distributors, Inc.
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Kristen Meinzer: As every coffeehouse poet, Central Park cartoonist, or parent with a kid who wants to major in theater will tell you ... it’s hard to make a living as an artist.
In the world of music today, streaming dominates consumption habits. But in most cases, a single stream is only worth a fraction of a penny, which makes it hard to pay the bills if you're a musician...
Caren Kelleher: The average American musician in order to make minimum wage could either sell 100 vinyl records, have nearly half a million Spotify streams or have 2.3 million YouTube views.
Kristen Meinzer: That’s Caren Kelleher, a music buff who – at a recent crossroads in her life – found herself in the unlikely position of having an MBA … while also managing indie bands on the side. She started noticing...
Caren Kelleher: that more and more kids were coming up to these merch tables at shows and asking for vinyl.
Kristen Meinzer: Caren knew that vinyl was making a comeback – record players are a universal sign of hipness – but she soon discovered that the vinyl manufacturing process was as vintage as a dusty record collection.
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Caren Kelleher: There really is an opportunity within vinyl. And it felt like a space where there hadn't been a lot of innovation where maybe I could bring lessons from Silicon valley into an industry that was having a resurgence and do some big things.
Kristen Meinzer: Caren and her company, Gold Rush Vinyl, are doing big things – and helping sustain musicians along the way.
BEAT
Kristen Meinzer: I’m Kristen Meinzer Meinzer, and this is Innovation Uncovered from Invesco QQQ…
So far this season, we’ve heard from engineers who are revolutionizing football with the world’s first robotic quarterback and a chief technology officer who is developing the next generation of hearing aid technology.
On this episode, we’re sitting down with Caren Kelleher, a woman who built a production plant in Austin, TX in an effort to support musicians and usher vinyl into the 21st century.
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MUSIC OUT
Kristen Meinzer: Hello Caren, how are you?
Caren Kelleher: I'm good. We're just making lots of records down here in Austin, Texas.
Kristen Meinzer: Now, Caren, it seems you have a very deep appreciation for music. I'm curious, did you always grow up with music as part of your life?
Caren Kelleher: I grew up in a household with a lot of music. From an early age, my dad would sneak me into his car and we'd go on drives and listen to music from the seventies and eighties that he loves so much. And my mother was very into Broadway musicals.
So I grew up with a real appreciation for music. I started taking lessons when I was younger and realized I didn't have much of a talent for it, but I was fascinated by the actual music business.
How is it that some talented artists became household names and some were never heard from, and in high school, especially I took it upon myself to make mix tapes for people to try to shine light on those artists that weren't necessarily getting played on the radio, but were really talented and I wanted more people to know about.
[00:03:00]
Kristen Meinzer: Oh, my gosh. You're making all my memory sparkles tingle right now. I'm thinking about all those mixed tapes I used to have as a kid and so on.
Caren Kelleher: I try to explain to our interns, you guys don't even know how good you have it. You get to make a playlist online with any music in the world. Whereas I wasted so many hours of my life waiting for that DJ to play the song and hopefully not talk over their intro, so I could use it for a mix tape.
Kristen Meinzer: Yes. Oh my gosh. Yes, yes, yes. And I'm guessing that as a kid, you probably had vinyl records, too?
Caren Kelleher: You know, we didn't have as many in the house. I do remember going next door to my next door neighbor Allison's house. And her dad had a huge collection of vinyl.
But my interest in vinyl really didn't come until about 10 years ago. I'd say.
Kristen Meinzer: So you’re a teenager. You’re making mixtapes… fast forward and you’re running Gold Rush Vinyl.
What happened in the in-between years?
Caren Kelleher: Well, I thought I was going to go work in politics.
[00:04:00]
You know, I grew up in the Washington DC area and was fascinated by business and by law. And, luckily after my freshman year of college realized I didn't want to do that job. And I think it's just as important to realize what you don't like to do as much as it is to discover a passion.
And I didn't really see music as a viable career for myself until I was lucky to meet the founders of Paste Magazine in Decatur, Georgia, which is where I went to college. They were starting an indie music magazine and film magazine that shines a light on music, art, film, and culture that wasn't necessarily in the mainstream.
So that was my first job out of college was working for that magazine as a marketing director. And it was a dream job. It showed me how much there is to do in the music industry.
I later went on and got my MBA and thought I would get out of the music business and move into something more traditional like tech and came to realize that it was a real special thing to have a career path in something I was passionate about. I mean, music has existed since the beginning of time, right?
And it's just the ways we consume it. The ways that we create it have changed.
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So it felt like, wow, if I'm going to build a career in something, music is something that will always be there. It's so much fun to work in. And it actually led me to the technology side of music. So before opening Gold Rush Vinyl, I actually was the head of music partnerships at Google.
And was starting to see a slowing of innovation in the digital music space.
And one thing in particular that really was hard for me was seeing how little royalty payments musicians were getting from digital music.
At the same time, my sister and I were managing bands and we started to see how much vinyl was making a comeback, that more and more kids were coming up to these merch tables at shows and asking for vinyl.
And I would even ask the kids, do you own a record player? And a lot would say, no, I just want the band to sign this. And I'm going to frame it on my wall.
And more and more became fascinated with the economics of vinyl. How is it that musicians can make money in this new wild west of the digital music space and vinyl really made a lot of money for the artists I worked with and was not going to get any less popular it seemed.
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So it, in a winding way, led me to now, owning a factory. And it's definitely not a career path I would've thought it would've taken me on, but the common theme through all of that is just a real want to help musicians that have great talent, earn a living and continue to do what they do best, which is make music.
Kristen Meinzer: Wow. What actually, though, made you take that risk because it's one thing to manage bands on the side, sell some merch and so on, and it's quite another to leave Silicon Valley, one of the most coveted companies in the world and relocate and start pressing records.
Caren Kelleher: I had great support from friends and family who saw that I'd always wanted to start a business. It's why I went and got my MBA so that I had more skills and was better prepared in case I ever had an idea like this.
It took, I will say a couple of years for me to get the courage to leave Silicon Valley.
But I was giving a presentation within the company about the state of music apps and to drive home the point of how musicians earned money-
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- I had made a slide that showed that the average American musician in order to make minimum wage could either sell 100 vinyl records, have nearly half a million Spotify streams or have 2.3 million YouTube views.
And when I saw that slide, it's something I had lived through the artists that had trusted me to help them with their careers, but to see it just laid out like that was like, wow, there really is an opportunity within vinyl. And it felt like a space where there hadn't been a lot of innovation where maybe I could bring lessons from Silicon Valley into an industry that was having a resurgence and do some big things.
And I'm very lucky. I had supportive friends and family who said, you can do it and encouraged me along the way.
TRANSITION
Kristen Meinzer: After Caren identified her mission to traverse the terrain of the vinyl record industry, she got to work. But she didn’t rely on any existing roadmap – she precisely did not want to do things the way they’d always been done.
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Caren looked at vinyl production plants of the past and asked “how can I do this better?” With both production output and the environment in mind, she built one of the most innovative production plants in the country.
Gold Rush Vinyl produces vinyl records three times faster than the industry standard with 10 times less waste than traditional pressing plants.
Kristen Meinzer: For those people who have never been to a factory where records are made before, can you just walk us through, soup to nuts, what it actually is like when you walk into the room, what are you going to see, what are you going to hear?
Caren Kelleher: Ooh, it's really fun. People come in and say, oh, this is kind of like Willy Wonka's factory for music. Right now, our facility is full of materials. We've been preparing for potentially more supply chain issues.
And so we've stocked up a lot more than we would necessarily have in the past, but you'd walk in and see lots of plastic and cardboard and artwork for the record jackets that we assemble here, which is really the fun part.
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When you start to see all of those things come in and you see the artwork for the record you're going to be working on it brings it to life in a really special way.
There's a bunch of parts of the process that really haven't changed over the years, and that is the actual pressing of the vinyl. So we get raw materials in namely pellets of PVC, polyvinyl chloride, that get melted down in our machines and then pressed between metal plates called stampers and stampers are basically the negative of a record.
Before we even get to the pressing part of making a record, a cutting engineer will make a master record called a lacquer, and the lacquer is what we base all of our metal plates on.
It goes through a process called electroplating where the original lacquer, which has the music cut into it, gets put in a bath with liquid nickel. It's electrocuted.
And the liquid nickel starts to attract to the lacquer disc to create a shell or a plate that, when we rip it off, gives us a master template to work off of to make these metal stampers that go in our pressing machines.
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Here in our Austin facility, once the plastic is melted, it gets passed through between those two stampers.
We put tons and tons of pressure on the plates and physically press the vinyl into the tiny, tiny grooves of these stampers to make a record. That process will take about 30 seconds. We also run hot steam and cool water into our machines to manipulate the material then gets passed off to a trimming station where we trim off excess material.
So what we do here is an automated process. A lot of pressing plants have manual machines. You'd see lots of people moving around and putting plastic into the machines, pulling levers down, putting their hands in machines, very dangerous.
Here it's a lot more streamlined. You'll hear kind of an ocean like a rhythm to the machinery when records are getting pressed.
And from there we then inspect, package, and ship them out to fans.
Kristen Meinzer: I love what you said about being a Willy Wonka factory for music. It just sounds so magical, I can picture it all in my head.
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I’m curious how this plant was built out – how did you know where to start?
Caren Kelleher: Well, I think what makes us unique is kind of the benefit of naivete. None of us in my company had worked in vinyl before, we'd worked in other pieces of manufacturing or other pieces of music industry. But in building this company, I really got a chance to look at it with fresh eyes. I'd watched a lot of YouTube videos about the process.
I'd read a lot in the library, just saw that – particularly areas of lean manufacturing hadn't been incorporated into this particular industry.
And knowing where the music industry was going, one thing that especially I was interested in, and that has seeped into the innovation we have here is environmental sustainability. I mean, vinyl itself is a really wasteful industry. There's a lot of plastic waste, energy waste, water waste.
So I called on a lot of experts from other industries to help me think about how to design this factory with waste reduction in mind.
And it's something that even day to day our team are meticulous about tracking.
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Kristen Meinzer: Now, you just mentioned your approach to sustainability – let's talk more about the innovation in your company. What else are you doing differently that other vinyl companies aren't doing?
Caren Kelleher: You know, we built a infrastructure for this vinyl facility so that it would not go down. We put in place measures and machinery that would ensure uptime because one of the reasons that vinyl was so interesting to me was it was almost impossible to get made if you were a smaller band.
There was so much demand and so little capacity for manufacturing that you really needed to have an in, at a plant, or you were forced to wait for months and months at a time. And artists today can't wait months and months at a time when suddenly you have a Tik Tok video that blows up and your song is hitting the charts and you have this very finite moment to take advantage of lightning when it strikes.
So a lot of what we've done here and the innovation we've brought in has been with that in mind. How do we create a space where we can manufacture as quick as we can, so that musicians don't have to wait and potentially miss the opportunity to earn money.
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And then to also try to do it more sustainably, knowing that the next generation of consumers are gonna demand that kind of responsibility from companies.
Kristen Meinzer: Now, when you say a fast turnaround, how fast are we talking?
Caren Kelleher: Well pre pandemic, we were averaging a six week turnaround time on all of our projects over two and a half years. And that's compared to an average turnaround time in our industry of three to six months. Now I say pre pandemic, because like so many companies we've just been hit by supply chain delays that despite all of the things we do internally here to try to speed up our production process have been delayed.
But part of how we're able to do that so quickly is just my team have accepted the challenge I put in front of them to say, we're going to do it that much faster. We're going to turn records around three times faster than anyone else.
Kristen Meinzer: That’s amazing. And tell me more about the efforts you’re making to use energy efficiently.
Caren Kelleher: So we made this facility from the ground up, essentially we rented a warehouse space, but did all of the construction and the building of the infrastructure.
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And there's a couple of key things that honestly, I didn't know I was going to have to invest in which have made all of the difference and that is really the infrastructure around our water supply and how we use our energy.
So we have the pressing machines that actually are kind of the showpiece where the records get pressed. But a lot of what makes that process work is behind the scenes, in our equipment room, where we have steam generators and chillers and cooling towers, heat exchangers, pumps, all of these things that work behind the scene to deliver tremendous amounts of steam, cold water and energy to the pressing machines and putting all of that together in the way we had, had not been done before.
We really didn't follow the blueprint of past plants. And that's, it's partly because of a philosophy that we really embrace here. And that is that we don't believe in the, quote, way it's always been done.
I think in older industries, especially, it's very common for knowledge to get passed down in that way where someone says, well, “that's how it's always been done.
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So that's how it should be done” rather than coming in and saying, well, is it done that way just because that's how it was passed down or is that the correct way to do it?
So we were able to convince some great contractors to work with us, to put together machinery that normally would not be used in the vinyl industry which allow us to use less water, less energy.
And to be more thoughtful about production output, which is what we care most about.
Kristen Meinzer: Yeah. And about that production output, you said that you can press a very small number of records or a very large number of records. Why were other companies not doing that?
Caren Kelleher: I can't speak for them. I can conjecture, but, I come from a family of folks who've worked in the hotel industry and that actually provided a lot of the perspective I used to build this factory. And that is because hotels have a real finite capacity. And every room has to make you money. It has to be sold thoughtfully.
From growing up in that, around that industry, you can see how it's easy to sell off a whole week to a convention and say, yay, we sold that week off.
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But then it prevents you from selling to more routine customers who need to come every single Tuesday, whether if it's for business or what have you.
All of that kind of taught me a lot about capacity planning and where the revenue needs to come from.
Kisten PU: So, bigger artists who are less dependent on vinyl sales - let’s be real - for revenue are tying up resources pressing large numbers of records...and that means smaller artists are having to adjust their record release plans...sometimes for weeks, months, many many months. And that means you could be losing loyal, long-term customers...What is Gold Rush Doing to navigate this?
Caren Kelleher: So when I sat down and did our modeling, what I really saw was that the smaller jobs really gave us the most efficiency to move quickly.
And so we, out the gate, we're a lot more disciplined about saying we want to have smaller run jobs so that we can fit in people who really do need rush orders, and to just focus on output.
And there's a lot of plants that made it through, from the fifties onward that still are fantastic operations today here in the US that focus on those bigger runs.
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We're not going to be that pressing plant. We instead decided we would be this boutique plant and focus on quality and turnaround time. And so far so good. It's worked for us. Now, what's been changing is more people are buying vinyl. And so our small orders are actually just inherently getting bigger across the board, which is great. There's more people interested in purchasing records.
So that'll be a challenge we'll have to face in the coming years.
TRANSITION
Kristen Meinzer: Demand for vinyl records is continuing to grow, and Caren and her team are looking at a future where more bands will be able to make records.
In fact, the vinyl record industry has seen consistent growth for more than a decade. In the first six months of 2021, 19.2 million vinyl albums were sold.
That’s up 108% from 2020.
It’s something of a curious trend; one that seemed niche at first… mostly popular in the Brooklyns and Portland, Oregons of the world...
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but the vinyl resurgence has proved to be far more than a passing fad.
It’s driven by quality … music just sounds different when it’s compressed through an app and delivered in an earbud. And vinyl taps into this amazing human urge to collect. You can hold it in your hands. Pouring over the liner notes of your freshly unwrapped record... produces the same little burst of euphoria today as it did in 1965.
Kristen Meinzer: Why do you think more people are buying vinyl, as you say, is it because they want to have it hanging on the wall? Or is it because they actually want to listen to it and they feel like it sounds different than let's say an MP3.
Caren Kelleher: A BBC study came out, I think about five years ago, that found about 50% of all vinyl is never opened.
And we actually did a survey and found that over 35% of the people that responded to our survey collect records and don't own a record player.
So I think that speaks to the idea that vinyl isn't just a medium to listen on.
[00:19:00]
It has some emotional sentimental value to people. And we hear that a lot from young people. One of our interns said to me so poetically that her whole life, her record collection had been hidden in her pocket where no one could see it because it was in apps.
But when she has vinyl in her dorm room, when people come in, they know immediately what music she likes and that piece of it- what does music say about us? What is your choice of where you spend your dollars say, you know, about you and your taste is a really big piece of why vinyl has exploded.
And the pandemic really was a game changer for our industry though, because so many more people were spending time at home, looking at their spaces and saying, what can I do to disconnect? And how do I make my home speak more about me?
So I had a lot more people personally calling me and saying, what record players should I buy for my house? So I think that that has had a tremendous part of the vinyl revolution too, is just the swing back from digital.
We're all so tied to digital that the ability to take a moment and put a record on a record player and listen for 20 uninterrupted minutes is a real luxury.
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Kristen Meinzer: And I got to say your records sometimes look like their own pieces of art because you have all sorts of ways to customize the records for your artists. Can you tell us about that?
Caren Kelleher: Yes, we do a lot of color vinyl. And I'll tell you that before 2020, about 75% of what we pressed was black vinyl. I would guess it's about 25% now. There has been a tremendous swing towards doing colored vinyl. And I, I don't know if it's partly because we advertise and show people the beautiful vinyl we make. So they come to us and say, I want something like that.
But our team also really wants to help musicians to see their vision through end to end. So that'll mean if an artist comes to us and says, and this is a true thing that happened, can you make my vinyl look like a Flamin’ Hot Cheeto?
And we can send it to the press operators and say, this is the vision, here's the artwork. And they get to put their heads together and say, okay, well, what if we do this combination of plastics?
We're also seeing that fans want to collect these special variations.
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It's given artists a lot more opportunity to sell their merchandise in unique ways. And for other people, especially the ones that do want to display it on their walls, an opportunity to really treat it like an art piece.
And that's what vinyl is. That's what vinyl gives us a digital doesn't is this physical connection and component to what the artist's intention was for a record.
Kristen Meinzer: Yeah. And in a way it adds a different kind of value to the music. I mean, not just the value to the musicians who get to make a higher cut off of the record, but something that in this world, there are so many things that are not concrete that we can't hold or touch or feel, or hang on the wall.
And now you have that for them.
You helped create something with their imagination and your technical skills and your imagination into something that is concrete now.
Caren Kelleher: It's a really meaningful job and that is our mission is to work with musicians in this physical form, right? When we get to send off records, every single time I wave kind of half jokingly and say, bye records, enjoy your new homes.
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And to think about what fan is going to open that is really special.
Kristen Meinzer: Caren Kelleher Kelleher this has been such a delight. Thank you so much for talking with us today.
Caren Kelleher: Oh, and thank you for shining light on the work that my team is doing.
OUTRO
Kristen Meinzer: Thanks for listening to Innovation Uncovered from Invesco QQQ.
On the next episode, we’ll hear from Doll Avant, the founder of Aquagenuity, a company that is imagining a future where everyone has access to real-time water quality data.
Doll Avant: Most of our cellular health and all of that can be traced back to environmental factors. If there's any kind of toxin or contamination in the air or in the soil, it ultimately is going to end up in our water supply.
Subscribe to Innovation Uncovered, and if you’re diggin’ what you’re hearing, leave us a review.
MUSIC OUT
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