Raw Materials
Raw Materials
Onyx Record Press is the DIY alternative to Big Vinyl.
The following article contains select quotes from Onyx Record Press co-founders Surachai Sutthisasanakul and Moe Espinosa.
If you want the full 60-minute discussion we had with these two incredible talents, it is available in video format for our Premium Subscribers. You can click here to watch the first 5 minutes for free, or subscribe for $6/mo. ($60/yr.) to get the full convo, plus our full archive of complete Cadence Talks.
We all missed the celebration, but March 13, 2023 marked the 10-year anniversary of the creation of the “Vinyl Revival” entry on Wikipedia. In the subsequent decade, major retailers, from Amazon to Walmart, have been flooded with new LPs by major label megastars like Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Harry Styles, along with a tsunami of represses from classic rock staples like Fleetwood Mac, Queen and Pink Floyd. Even Amy Winehouse’s Back To Black, which was released during the format’s nadir (2006) landed in the top 20 vinyl sales chart of 2021, the year when vinyl sales nearly doubled.
Sadly, missing out from all the extra income that has accompanied vinyl’s post-COVID too-the-moon moment are the same independent artists and labels that kept the presses running during the lean years but now find themselves unable to get their records pressed due to major labels monopolizing the manufacturing facilities.
It’s enough to make some DIY folks go damn insane, yo, which is why, last month, a group of them announced the opening of their own record-pressing facility in Southern California — Onyx Record Press.
“Our record-pressing plant exists because of the pure white rage that I experienced when I was trying to get my record pressed,” says Surachai Sutthisasanakul, one of the four partners in Onyx. “After working with one pressing plan for ten years, they said it would take 14 months [to get a record made].”
His colleague, Moe Espinosa (known in international techno circles as Drumcell) concurs. “Major labels are going into a pressing plant and requesting massive amounts of copies of records to supply retail stores like Target and Walmart. It has really pushed out independent artists.”
Rather than resort to complaining online, Sutthisasanakul and Espinosa partnered with entrepreneur Cyrus Makarechian and vinyl manufacturing expert Gil Tamazyan to open Onyx with the expressed mission of “prioritizing non-major label artists, creating access for customers that are faced with unrealistic timelines or flat out denied.”
“We've all kind of been very DIY in the fact that we never sat around and waited for shit to happen for us,” explains Espinosa. “If something wasn't available and we needed it, we were going to do it ourselves.”
The term do-it-yourself (or DIY), first entered the common lexicon after the Second World War, as home ownership exploded, and with it, home repair and improvement projects. The phrase wouldn’t be applied to music until punk rock emerged in the 1970s, but the business model dates back to at least the 1950s when independent record labels like Sun Records, Chess and, a bit later, Motown, set up shop in cities like Memphis, Chicago and Detroit. Recording engineers would capture studio sessions on magnetic tape machines (a technology that was largely perfected during the war). Those tapes would then be sent to record presses like United in Nashville and Archer in Detroit, where the music would be stamped onto millions of vinyl discs and shipped to retailers across the country.
This independent ecosystem of recording and manufacturing thrived for decades, contributing to a global vinyl production capacity that peaked at over one billion LPs (plus half a billion 7-inch records) in 1980. During the Reagan era, the DIY ethos thrived in punk and hardcore, as well as genres like techno and house. But by the 1990s, CDs overtook LPs as the preferred format for major labels and mainstream listeners, and most manufacturers were happy to pivot to the higher profit margins of digital.
Those profits didn’t last long, however, as music downloads decimated CD sales — and manufacturing along with it. By 2006, compact disc revenues were less than half what they had been five years earlier, while U.S. vinyl sales had plummeted to just $15.7M — a 99.85% decrease from 1978 (adjusted for inflation). At that point, it was assumed that the few surviving record manufacturers like United and Archer would simply carry on making fewer and fewer records until the wheels came off, either financially or literally, as the machines broke down.
Instead, vinyl sales began slowly returning in 2007, and within a few years, concern for the fate of the few record manufacturers remaining flipped 180 degrees to worry about whether supply could keep up with the growing demand, especially as machines and technicians continued to age out of operation. Then the pandemic hit, pouring gas on the vinyl craze. We know what happened next.
In 2023, opening a new record press might be the ultimate expression of DIY. Digital technology may have pushed the production and distribution cost of music to near zero. But even as everyone alive carries a complete media creation studio in their pocket, the ability to earn a living off creativity has waned dramatically in the age of platforms.
As a counter-balance, paying for physical media has come back into vogue. But making stuff is hard. And once manufacturing shuts down, it struggles to come back. A few companies, such as Viryl Technologies in Canada and Pheenix Alpha in Sweden have emerged with the first new record-pressing machines in half a century, designed with much more automation than the old war horses running at most record plants. But getting a new machine built and delivered can take years. And even with current technology, running and maintaining a record press requires expertise that few people possess.
“[Some of] the people buying [the machines] are also selling them because they don't have the know-how or the experience to run these things. We've seen a few of these things pop up for resale,” says Sutthisasanakul.
Espinosa follows, “This isn't just something where you just like, ‘Oh, no, there's a demand for this market. Let's drop 500 grand and build up a pressing plant.’ This is something that takes decades and decades of experience.”
Fortunately, Onyx has the expertise, especially in Tamazyan, who, up until recently, mastered and pressed records — including Drumcell releases — at his own Capsule Labs facility.
“He came across a pressing machine that was just used and completely broken down and actually taught himself from scratch how just to take this thing completely apart and rebuild it piece by piece by piece,” recalls Espinosa.
Soon, with one brand-new Pheenix Alpha machine going through the final installation and testing phase (and another press arriving in a few months), Onyx will be able to produce 86,000 records a month, making a significant impact on the global vinyl bottleneck.
The company began taking orders a few weeks ago, and they are pouring in from the exact customers they want — those from their shared DIY community hamstrung by the current wait times.
“Somebody just reached out to me recently that I'm a huge fan of,” Espinosa says with a smile. “I'm hesitant to actually say names right now because I don't actually want to give away customer privacy. We're also very excited to be working with a lot of our close friends, colleagues and musicians whom we really respect deeply and who appreciate what we're doing. It's been a fun process so far.”
Like we already said, if you want to watch our full 60-minute Cadence Talks conversation with the Onyx Record Press founders, click here and upgrade to one of our paid tiers to get access to all of the premium material.
TAKEAWAYS
Salient statements from this week’s music news.
1. Billboard’s First-Ever Definitive List of the Music Industry’s Top Artist Representatives
Some of our most beloved publicists top the list.
Takeaway: The publicists on this list are some of the most savvy, strategic — and, let’s face it, occasionally shameless — folks in the music business.
2. Ticketing Company Dice Raises $65 Million
Though small relative to Ticketmaster and AXS, investors see the potential for the app to make buying concert tickets cool.
Takeaway: The London-based company believes it will serve more than 55,000 artists and over 10,000 venues, festivals and promoters this year across 30 cities in the United Kingdom, United States, France, Germany, India, Italy and Spain.
3. YouTube is Testing a Search Feature That Lets You Hum to Identify Songs
Finally, a way to find those earworms you can’t quote put your finger on.
Takeaway: In comparison, Apple’s popular Shazam app and Siri are not able to recognize a tune that users sing or hum. Apple’s services require users to record a portion of the song to identify it.
