On Tuesday (June 3), VNYL Inc. announced it has acquired record subscription service Vinyl Me, Please. VMP, which launched in 2013, was facing bankruptcy and liquidation.
VNYL will relaunch the brand and service under new ownership and with a new leadership team that includes Nick Alt as CEO and Emily Muhoberac as president. “This isn’t about reinventing Vinyl Me, Please,” said Alt in a statement. “It’s about restoring its true form as the ‘Best Damn Record Club.’”
VNYL already has two subscription services under its umbrella: VinylBox and the VNYL brand. According to a release, the three brands will be marketed to specific audiences: VMP for audiophiles, VinylBox for millennials and VNYL for Gen Z and Alpha.
“Our philosophy is simple: not every collector is the same,” said Alt. “We’re building different clubs to serve different types of listeners — with pricing and curation that actually match their needs.”
In 2021, amidst a pandemic boom for the format, VMP grew to 80,000 active customers and finished its highest-performing quarter with a 74% growth in membership from the same time period the previous year, as Billboard previously reported. (2021 was the largest year for vinyl album sales since Luminate started tracking sales in 1991.)
Reflecting in the same 2021 article with Billboard, VMP co-founder/CEO Cameron Schaefer said: “What stands out to me now looking back at the origin of VMP is the simplicity of what we were trying to do. We were trying to just pick one record a month that we thought would be worth your time and attention, and that was it.”
In 2022, VMP announced plans to open its own pressing plant in a 14,000 sq. ft., audiophile-grade, Denver-based space. It was going to be used for manufacturing and production, tours and special events.
Looking ahead, VNYL hopes to bring VMP back to its original mission that Schaefer laid out. As Muhoberac said in a statement: “Vinyl customers deserve a white glove experience and that’s far from what they’ve gotten recently. We intend to do that by getting back to the fundamentals of VMP with a great customer experience.”