Metallica, masters of business, buy vinyl plant
Metallica has purchased Furnace Record Pressing, a plant they have been working with for a decade
Music News Metallica
What do Adele, Taylor Swift, Metallica, and Chinese takeout containers have in common? They all use a lot of polyvinyl chloride (PVC), a synthetic plastic essential to pressing vinyl records that has been in shortage for the past few years. But while both Adele and Taylor Swift have caught heat—fairly or not—for overproducing their recent releases (30 and Red (Taylor’s Version) respectively), causing already long record-pressing wait times for smaller artists to grow even longer, Metallica is doubling down.
Per Billboard, the band announced that they had purchased Virginia-based plant Furnace Record Pressing, a large facility that has worked to keep the band within the top 10 best-selling acts on vinyl for a decade. “We couldn’t be more happy to take our partnership with Furnace—and [its founders]—to the next level,” said drummer Lars Ulrich. “Their indie spirit, the passion they have for their craft… culturally we’re kindred souls.”
In a time when physical media is becoming increasingly rare, Metallica has remained committed to providing high-quality products to their legion of devoted fans (largely thanks to their long partnership with Furnace), and their fans have answered the call in a major way. Last year, the band pressed almost 100 thousand pieces of vinyl for over 620 thousand packages, roughly half of which were sold in the U.S. (per Billboard)—an especially impressive feat for a band who hasn’t released a new LP since 2016's Hardwired…To Self-Destruct.
While this is still a fairly new announcement, the band does not seem to be receiving the same sort of frustration heaped on their pop counterparts (although this seems to be more of a projection of frustration with the music industry’s inability to keep up with vinyl demand as a whole). This may be because Metallica has not only been working with Furnace for so long (meaning the acquisition won’t set back other artists’ place on the waiting list) but also remains committed to using their partnership to benefit the industry as a whole. “They want to keep the quality and service the whole industry,” said Furnace CEO Eric Astor. “It will give us the opportunity to invest more.”
Marc Reiter, who helps run the band’s label, Blackened Recordings, agrees. “They have the same indie spirit we have,” he said, “and they like doing things the right way, which is also the Metallica way.”
25 Comments
Huh, I didn’t even know vinyl grew on plants.
Where do you think cuttin’ and scratchin’ came from? All those sharp and itchy vinyl bushes!
Don’t you know that ant can’t move a vinyl tree plant?
I spent a summer backpacking round the vinyl presses of Europe, squashing the vinyl barefoot in the giant wooden tubs amongst the local peasants.
Why not? For ages bands and artists have wanted to start their own labels to really have total control over their products but were hung up by the manufacturing and distributing bits, so said labels ended up being vanity projects distributed by the majors. A band investing in a record making plant seems more relevant than buying a mink farm in Memphis Texas.
Se also, Jack White, who is s been keeping record pressing going for some time now.
What’s the retrospective view on Metallica and the whole Napster saga? Back then, they got a lot of shit, with the general thought being that free play helps get their music out there, or that it’s a non-issue because they make more money on touring and merch than anything else. These days, people seem pretty mad about how places like Spotify are paying bands fractions of pennies per view, though, and tend to appreciate it when big names like Taylor Swift take legal action that helps their industry (but also benefits themselves greatly). Did positions change? Was it handled wrong initially?
These days, the reaction is probably “Napster? Was that something that Dad used when he was a kid?”
Kids are dumb, their opinions don’t count. I’m moreso curious about those that lived the experience, y’know man?
So, I was pretty much the prime demo for Napster: I was 15 when the whole Metallica/Napster shit went down. A lot of it came down to the fact that Lars took point and he comes off as super smarmy.I do feel like if Kirk were on point, he probably would’ve come off as more earnest in their stance that it was bad for all artists and that it wasn’t about Metallica’s bottom line specifically.
I always thought it was ridiculous. Napster WAS being used to consume massive amounts of music that prior to that was required to be purchased, without the labels nor the artists consent.Trading cassettes is one thing—-after all, unless you were trading tapes with people who had component cassette decks and used Type II/Type IV tapes, the sound quality would be noticeably inferior to a retail product. Nor was it a near-instant share with thousands of people.The problem with Metallica in the Napster era is that Lars comes off as a d-bag a lot, but he really was in the right to protest that.
i was not a napster user, but i was in the pertinent demographic.
at that point, if a band said they were opposed to it (like metallica did), then, to me, it was theft to download their music, so i didn’t.
it still blows my mind that these past few generations don’t know what it’s like to actually own physical media.
On the plus side, it seems that when people are actually buying physical media its vinyl.
I think in retrospect, the problem wasn’t that they were right, it’s that the complaint about lost revenue was coming from the biggest band on the planet. The whole “free play leads to promotion that will lead to touring profit” failed to take into account the costs of studio production and touring itself. Home recording wasn’t nearly as advanced back then, so only bands that had already made it big enough to pay for studio time and the costs of going on the road could actually take advantage of all that free promotion.
I understand why Metallica did what they did, and seeing how Spotify rips off the artists, they were prescient.
Unfortunately they were also vanguards in demonstrating how internet opinion could turn overnight and kill their image. It’s a shame they didn’t craft their message to be a little more effective to address the imbalance in artist compensation. Ironically Napster now is among the top-paying streaming services.
Do they care? Probably not…they’re as popular as ever and are successful on a level that is hard to imagine any “thrash band” could ever achieve.
But Lars is still a dick and can barely drum the songs anymore.
It’s a shame they didn’t craft their message to be a little more effective to address the imbalance in artist compensation.They were pretty clear about the effects on smaller artists at the time. It really is a simple matter of public perception shifting over time to actually give a damn.
Honestly Lars being a dick and how they crafted the message wouldn’t have mattered people were just douchebags who wanted free stuff.
I think they’re two different issues.Consumers are legally allowed to copy music. Distributing that copied music commercially is illegal, though. Napster wasn’t (initially) a for-profit company. Metallica sued Napster for something like 10 million dollars. That’s a dick move. It’s difficult to prove a direct connection between Napster and a drop in Metallica’s revenue (especially at that point in their career).
Spotify doesn’t pay artists enough money, even though they’re a very successful for-profit company. That’s a dick move.I think it comes down to who has the power and the money. I also think that people will generally be on the side of the entity that makes things better for the consumer.
I think Metallica also seemed like anti-tech dinosaurs who weren’t ready for the coming digital revolution.If record companies had been smart enough, they would have bought Napster before it got as big as it did, and people probably wouldn’t have gotten used to getting music for free.
Yeah, nothin’ says “indie” like Metallica.
Records need to die so I agree with you that they shouldn’t have bought the manufacturer.
These guys are such asswipes now.
Maybe they should have spent that money on drumming lessons for Lars.HAR HAR HAR
Or Wah-Wah pedal intervention for Kirk.
I’m not sure I like the idea of these guys owning a record pressing plant when they have some of the worst-mastered albums out there. They along with RHCP were some of the worst for brickwalling the audio into a distorted mess because “it sounds good loud as possible”. You simply can’t do that on a record and expect it to play correctly.
Just about every single rock band does that nowadays, though.Also with the quantized overprocessed sound which is impossible for human beings to actually sound that perfect in real life. Might as well just program guitars, drums, bass on the computer altogether and forget about playing.