Heavy metal band Metallica has moved to buy their own vinyl record manufacturing plant amid the growing demand for this particular type of recording medium.
The legendary band has acquired a majority interest in Furnace Record Pressing, one of the largest vinyl pressing companies in the United States – a company that has already produced over five million vinyl records for Metallica since 2014, as one US magazine pointed out.
"We couldn’t be more happy to take our partnership with Furnace — and Eric, Ali and Mark specifically — to the next level," Lars Ulrich, Metallica's co-founder, said as quoted by media, referring to Furnace’s founder and CEO Eric Astor, COO Ali Miller and VP of Manufacturing Operations Mark Reiter.
This development comes as sales of vinyl records have been on the rise for over a decade, with revenues from these sales reaching $1.2 billion in 2022, according to a report by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
The report even suggests that vinyl sales in the US last year surpassed the sales of CDs for the first time since 1987, with 41 million vinyl albums and 33 million CDs being sold, respectively.