Metallica Just Bought Their Own Vinyl Pressing Plant

Anton Corbijn

Metallica Just Bought Their Own Vinyl Pressing Plant

Anton Corbijn

For the superstar class, vinyl is big business these days. You’ve heard about pop stars like Taylor Swift and Adele pressing up hundreds of thousands of LPs, many of them to be purchased as collector’s items and home furnishings, and delaying access to the press for indie artists in the process. But top-tier classic rock bands are moving a lot of wax too. Case in point: Metallica just bought their own vinyl pressing plant to keep up with demand for their catalog.

According to Billboard, the metal legends sold nearly a million vinyl records last year — 902,500 discs spread across 620,000 packages, about half of which sold in the US — and now have worked out a deal to acquire their longtime partner Furnace Record Pressing in Alexandria, VA. “We couldn’t be more happy to take our partnership with Furnace” and its founders “to the next level,” Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich said in a statement. His bandmate James Hetfield added that the plant has been “great to Metallica and more importantly to our fans” and that buying it will guarantee that potential vinyl buyers “will have continued access to high quality records in the future.”

Metallica have been working with Furnace since their 2008 audiophile pressing of the “black album.” They rated as the #6 vinyl selling artist in the US last year despite having no new album since 2016. With new album 72 Seasons coming in April, expect their big sales figures to continue. As for Furnace, the plant expects to carry on business as usual and will continue to press vinyl for other artists. “They want to keep the quality and service the whole industry,” Furnace founder and CEO Eric Astor told Billboard. “It will give us the opportunity to invest more.”

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