East 36th Street between Superior and St. Clair avenues is a world unto itself, with Ante Up Audio and CloserLook Recording Studios, all kinds of warehouses and traffic – not something one usually associates with downtown Cleveland.
Deep in the mix is Gotta Groove Records, Vince Slusarz’ 6,000-square-foot vinyl record plant in Tyler Village, a collection of businesses that run along that long East 36th block. Slusarz started Gotta Groove in March 2009. Its first record, a split 45 featuring the bands Deathers and Freedom, came out last August. An Americana fan, he likes vinyl records, always has.
How fitting that a lawyer who used to work for a water processing equipment manufacturer is riding retro into the future. “I wanted to do something in manufacturing that I liked,” says Slusarz amid the Groove factory environs. “I like music, I like vinyl, so that was kind of the starting point.
"When I started to research how records were made, I found that the market for vinyl has been growing for years, but the manufacturing capacity is fixed.”
According to the Recording Industry Association of America, vinyl record sales have been growing steadily since 2006. In 2008, Nielsen SoundScan reported 1.88 million sales of new LPs, an 89 percent sales increase over 2007. In November 2009, Billboard reported that vinyl record sales topped 2 million year-to-date, representing a year-over-year jump of about 37 percent. At the same time, sales of digital albums were expected to top the 2008 total of 65 million and sales of digital tracks were to surpass 1 billion. So vinyl’s a tiny piece of the market, but it’s growing. According to Slusarz, those figures don’t take into account sales from independent record stores, such as Music Saves, a Waterloo-area store where vinyl figures heavily in the store's inventory.
Melanie Hershberger, who owns Music Saves with her husband, Kevin Neudecker, shares employee Tim Thornton with Gotta Groove. She figures Music Saves sells 65 percent vinyl, 35 percent CD. Vinyl sales have been growing steadily there since it opened in July 2004.
“We cater to people who are still interested in the physical format of music. And because of the Internet, a lot of people don’t have use for CDs anymore,” says Hershberger. “You can put tons and tons of albums on an iPod and take them with you. CDs originally appeared because they were a more portable format; that’s slowly being replaced by the digital format –MP3 files – and people who are still interested in the physical form for listening at home are starting to buy vinyl.
"A lot of independent labels never stopped putting out vinyl records. A lot of labels are reissuing things on vinyl and major labels are putting out vinyl. I don’t think it’s a trend, I think it’s something that’s here to stay.”
Like other area independents such as Bent Crayon, My Mind’s Eye, Loop and Record Den, Music Saves falls below the radar of official record sales statistics. It’s not part of SoundScan, which tracks such figures. As for Gotta Groove, Hershberger thinks it’s “really cool. It’s great, especially for Cleveland bands; I’ve heard stories of how bands have gotten vinyl pressed in other states and then had to pay to ship it, which really cuts into their costs. They can have their records pressed here and just pick them up.”
Besides Thornton, Gotta Groove staff includes Slusarz' daughter and son, Emily and Vince; Dan Greathouse, who heads operations and was his former operations manager at Kinetico; and Matt Earley and Tyler Kremburg, who respectively work on graphics and artwork, and sales and marketing, under contract. Most staff members play in bands that have released vinyl records.
Five of Groove's six presses are for 12-inch records, or LPs. One is dedicated to 7-inch 45s; one is for 180-gram, audiophile records; and the other four are for other Gotta Groove records of 140 to 150 grams in weight. “We're trying to position ourselves as a quality shop,” says Slusarz.
Slusarz bought them from a now-defunct plant, Dynamic Sun, in East Newark, New Jersey, for a “sizable, six-figure investment. The equipment was one thing, but moving it out and getting the infrastructure in place was pretty expensive, too.”
There are roughly 13 such plants in the States, one in Canada, one getting under way in Brazil and several in Europe. “With six presses up and running, by my calculations, we’ll be about the sixth-biggest,” says Slusarz.
His largest market is indie rock “from all over the place. We contract either directly with the bands, the artists themselves or their label.
"We’re doing business all over the county, and even out in the world. We’ve done several projects for a customer in China, and several for Australia.”
Gotta Groove records are both color and black (it doesn’t do picture discs). This one-stop shop also produces labels and jackets, insert printing, digital download code hosting, mastering services and custom packaging.
The route from raw vinyl pellets to a record is complicated. The first step is taking the sound files – analog tape, which is rare these days, or digital ones – to a cutting engineer to load into a computer. Then those files are transferred to a cutting lathe to carve into an aluminum disc coated with lacquer. The cutting lathe work is done off-site under contract with local musician-engineer Clint Holley. The lacquer disc goes to a plating operation where it’s sprayed with silver. That “mother” is taken off that lacquer disc and put in a plating bath; through electricity, those nickel ions are attracted to that silver plate. That’s pulled off of the mother and turned into a stamper, with the raised grooves of the B side on the top and of the A on the bottom, and inserted into a press. Meanwhile, the PVC is melted in an extruder to form a biscuit, labels are affixed, the press squishes the biscuit like a pancake, the record comes out, the “extra flash” is trimmed, and you have a vinyl record.
Set up involves making sure the “back side of the stamper and the surface of the die are clean, so we check the first record, and every 25th record we play all the lead-ins and lead-out to every song.” Slusarz buys the raw vinyl from TPC, a California-based distributor that gets its raw material from Taiwan.
Among Gotta Groove’s local customers is Exit Stencil Recordings, which just released “Palma” by the Cleveland group Like Bells on random colored vinyl. Among other customers: Paper & Plastick Records and Robbed the Bank Records. Each record costs about $1.30 to produce after the fixed costs of cutting the lacquer and having stampers made. Business is good. In its first three months, Gotta Groove had about 40 jobs; this year, “we’re up to over 180. There are plenty of growth opportunities left for us,” says Slusarz.
The Like Bells LPs came out fine, notes Ryan Weitzel, one of three owners of Exit Stencil. In a phone interview from the label’s new office in the Greenpoint area of Brooklyn, New York, Weitzel says “they look fantastic and sound really good. It’s been a pleasure working with them. Vince is just really excited about the project, and he’s putting a lot into making sure the records are high-quality. I’m excited that the plant is there, and he’s also supporting hiring a lot of people from the music community to work there.” Because Slusarz has invested in a cutting lathe, “everything’s cut and pressed in Cleveland.” Weitzel says Exit Stencil used to have vinyl records made at plants in Detroit, Nashville and Columbus, but now that Gotta Groove is here, it will be Exit Stencil’s plant of choice. Every Like Bells LP is “individual as far as colors are concerned,” he says. “We’re trying to go in more of a unique per-piece thing.”
(Exit Stencil will retain its studio in the Waterloo Arts District. It moved the label offices to New York to be where the action is. “We decided it might be good from a label perspective to be here, to try to work with several agencies and just be involved in the scene.”)
Gotta Groove is learning as it goes along. Part of the process is figuring out what it can control and what it can’t. One common mistake: Bands that submit their files to Gotta Groove often master them the same for vinyl as for a CD version; the latter requires mastering as loud as possible, where vinyl is, in a sense a more subtle process. “We try to have recordings mastered specifically for vinyl,” says Slusarz.
There’s a larger purpose to Gotta Groove. “I’m a lifelong resident of this area and just feel that manufacturing is important to the economic well-being of a region,” says Slusarz. “The offshoring of manufacturing has caused the departure of a lot of well paying jobs and a lot of wealth creation. I think it’s important to have a manufacturing base in the United States in the central cities.”
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