Business Member Spotlight: Mark Rainey, Cascade Record Pressing
[Gen Z has entered the chat] : The Vinyl Revival Endures
By Missi Hasting | June 1, 2022
Demand for vinyl held steady far longer than the major labels may have predicted back in the 90s. And it’s now a growing interest for younger music lovers: Gen Z’s vinyl purchases exceeded that of millennials in 2021. Vinyl sales nearly doubled from 2020 to 2021 when it outperformed CD sales for the first time in thirty years. The days of record albums being the lone (nostalgic) purview of your parents and grandparents is long gone.
As the only large scale vinyl record pressing company in the Pacific Northwest, Cascade Record Pressing has thrived since Mark Rainey founded the company seven years ago. We caught up with him recently to see how they’re growing and responding to the increased demand.
Can you take us on a brief history tour of CRP and tell us how you’re faring after the pandemic that we hope is almost over?
[laughs] Uh, yeah, NOT for record pressing, at least. It's a long way from finishing up. We’re still very much in the hole with a backlog of orders.
But here’s the brief history: Cascade was conceived in 2014 by myself and some partners. We were lucky to locate vintage pressing equipment in Canada, and at the time, new presses hadn’t been made available, so it was a scarce commodity and literally a worldwide search. Though we weren’t traveling all over the world, we were in touch with people in Europe, the Caribbean, South America, North Africa, everywhere.
We got the presses in November 2014, we broke ground on our facility in Jan 2015, and by June 1 we produced our first commercially viable unit and started fulfilling our first customer order. At the time we had six people working the floor.
Our current staff is around twenty-five people. Just about everybody’s full time. We run seven days a week, ten hours everyday, except one day that’s a twelve hour swing shift. I don’t know if you can hear it over the mic, but that’s the hum of hydraulics in the background. (Note to reader: We’re conducting this interview well after 6 pm on a weeknight.)
There’s certainly enough demand for us to run seven days a week, three shifts. There’s easily enough work to justify that. But finding reliable, experienced people who are interested in this work is difficult, especially when it comes to press operators. Remember, we’re running vintage machines from the 1970s. They can be very temperamental and operating them requires a certain level of attention and care -- so someone who’s not experienced or doesn’t have the right inclinations can end up causing a lot of damage in a very short period of time if they aren’t careful.
So, how many machines are you running now?
We own nine machines total and we’re currenting running five. Of the offline preses, there are some that are installed but need repair, others need full restoration. We have six presses dedicated to 12” production and another that’s set up for 7 inch. Right now we do not accept new 12” orders from non established customers. We’re backlogged to the point that right now we’re running 12” orders from last March and April. But with that said, we’re achieving a fifty percent bump due to adding to our newly extended schedule, so we expect turnaround times to get shorter, hopefully within six months or so.
You guys are focused a lot on local customers, right?
Yeah, when we were starting the company, we saw a need [with independent artists and labels] that wasn’t being met, and our goal was to help fill it. The major labels stopped manufacturing their own vinyl in the 1990s and sold off their equipment because CDs were so much quicker to make and ship. When they returned to the vinyl market twenty years later, they no longer owned their own plants, so they had to rely on the limited capacity of the few remaining independently owned pressing operations. This meant indie artists and labels getting sidelined by the plants they had helped keep open once the majors had initially abandoned the vinyl format. Then, add Record Store Day on top of that, etc. Cascade made a point of trying to specifically cater to the independent customers who were getting left out in the cold. For example, we didn’t follow Record Store Day deadlines, we wouldn’t bump your project for a major label, that sort of thing. And thanks to that, we’ve since accumulated a roster of loyal clients who keep us busy.
And vinyl is still really happening. There was this idea, I think, that the return to vinyl ten or fifteen years ago might be a fad. Has everybody dusted off their turntables and opted back in?
The defining moment for me was Record Store Day in 2013. I was at my record store fielding phone calls from twelve year-old girl superfans of one of the boy bands who had an exclusive release for RSD that year, One Direction or the Jonas Brothers, I can’t remember which. Young teens wanting to buy records. And the demand’s only grown since. Records are a specialty item now, not mass media like the 70’s and 80’s. But the continued growth in records’ popularity isn’t due to old guys in their forties and fifties (who were already collecting records) simply buying more records. It’s young people discovering the format. There’s a whole generation who previously have never experienced music outside of digital encapsulation. Here’s another memory from around that time: a young guy came into the store asking for a record by (his pronunciation) The Stoo-Gees. It took me a minute to realize he’s asking about The Stooges. He’d previously never heard the band’s name pronounced aloud, he’d just read it online. My point is that the act of leaving your house, going to a record store and buying a physical copy of music you love, an experience folks from our generation take for granted, is a completely new way to interact with music for this younger generation. And it’s in stark contrast to listening to downloaded or streaming audio files on your computer. These young people are driving this current revival of the vinyl format.
One last thing, can you tell us how being a business member of MusicPortland is valuable to you?
Well, I’m a reluctant “businessman.” So I don’t feel much like a “business member.” But as far as being a proud member of MusicPortland, the real benefits are seeing MusicPortland mobilize our industry locally, as a real formation, like a truly self-aware movement.
Meara [McLaughlin] makes a very good point that we can quantify the music industry’s economic value to the local community and to the city government, and that's real people power, you know? It's us acting as a collective, and that's really why I'm excited about this organization, and why I think that, while we’ve had some recent gains, MusicPortland is really just getting started.