While biking across Iowa this summer, Mark Michaels enjoyed a rare moment of reflection. “You’re riding about 80 miles a day among cornfields, and it gives you a lot of time to think,” the United Record Pressing chairman/CEO says. “I spent a lot of time while I was peddling thinking about United,” he adds of the oldest and largest American-owned, U.S.-based vinyl pressing plant in the world, which will celebrate its 75th anniversary this fall.
Michaels is speaking from his Nashville office, where he’s surrounded by signed records from Buddy Guy, Jack White and more of his icons, all expressing their thanks to him and his manufacturing team. (In 2014, White made history by recording, pressing and releasing a 7-inch of his single “Lazaretto” in under four hours, thanks to URP.) “It’s easy to forget those moments of euphoria and gratitude because you’re so focused on ‘How many records of this did we ship?’ or ‘What’s going on with that press?’ ” Michaels says. “But you don’t want too much life to pass by where you don’t stop and reflect.”
URP was founded as Bullet Plastics in Nashville in 1949, becoming Southern Plastics in the ’50s before landing on United Record Pressing in 1971. By the ’60s, a deal was signed for the plant to handle singles pressings for Motown, and in 1963, the first Beatles 7-inch, “Please Please Me”/“From Me to You,” was pressed, with a typo that spelled the band’s name as The Beattles.
In 2007, a year before Record Store Day officially launched and just before the format was beginning its first-wave resurgence, Michaels bought the company — and helped sustain it through a particularly rough patch. As he recalls, half of URP’s output at the time was 12-inch singles created as promo records for DJs. “That was a lot of what we did, and shortly after I bought the company, the labels stopped doing that,” he says. “The DJs all got [music production software] Seratos, and the labels figured out that was a better business model. So all of a sudden, the health of the company was in serious jeopardy … We were doing everything to keep the lights on.”
By the summer of 2009, a career-changing order came in: a 50th-anniversary pressing of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue (a favorite of Michaels) — the plant’s biggest order to date. Michaels himself oversaw quality control, checking a record at random every 30 minutes. “I remember one night, it was two in the morning and I’m in my office listening to these records, and I thought, ‘This is crazy, but goddamn, I’m lucky.’ And it just gave me this boost of energy. The next month, we got another order of that size.” Since, URP has manufactured vinyl for every major artist, from Adele to Taylor Swift.
In the early 2020s, URP faced another challenging period: the coronavirus pandemic. “Demand for vinyl exploded” during lockdown, Michaels says, but the orders put an unprecedented pressure on pressing plants to keep up. He says that was the catalyst for URP to expand, resulting in an $11 million project that built new infrastructure and supporting equipment and added 26 new presses. “The challenge is you can’t do that overnight,” he says. And now, not only can URP meet demand, but “the plant runs better than ever.”
He and his team of approximately 130 employees — all of whom have been sporting anniversary T-shirts that detail the plant’s various logos over the years — are now ready to toast such a feat and storied history, with Michaels saying the energy “is palpable” at the plant these days. A forthcoming celebration will bring together partners, customers, vendors and “people who support the format … There’s a renewed sense of pride and interest in what we do.”
Already, Michaels is focused on how to maintain it for the next 75 years, doubling down on the honor he has in keeping the process — and workforce — in Music City. “Seventy-five-plus years of history gives you a lot of gas in your tank in terms of pride,” he says. “You don’t make the first Beatles record in America, you don’t make all these Motown records, you don’t accumulate all this history and know-how and not have something special. And I never want to lose that.”
This story appears in the Aug. 24, 2024 issue of Billboard.
