About a decade into his career at Universal Music Group (UMG) — primarily head of A&R and working as a staff producer for Harvest Records — Tim Anderson had a front-row seat to the vinyl boom of the late 2010s. “It was still an archaic, dinosaur thing,” he recalls of how labels approached record publishing. He began to wonder why records were so difficult to make and had such long production times — and what he could do about it.
Until the hit of Pandemic, Anderson — who is also a songwriter-producer, composing for Suits and working with acts like Banks, Halsey and twenty-one pilots — had given up his major-label gig and had little interest in producing. Unsure of what to do next, his wife kept reminding him that music is what he knows best and suggested he tackle the vinyl thing that had plagued him years ago.
Twenty minutes later, Anderson made his first call to Scotty Coats, an old friend of his wife's and onetime director of vinyl marketing for Capitol Music Group. Coats immediately expressed his belief in the idea of a more sustainable approach to vinyl manufacturing. The call motivated Anderson — who has no environmental background, admitting he gets confused trying to properly sort his recycling — to figure out how to make his vision a reality.
He found a video posted online by Dutch company Green Vinyl Records detailing the development of an environmentally friendly alternative to polyvinyl chloride-free record manufacturing. “I've been told my whole life that you need PVC to make a record sound great, and I just believed it,” says Coats. “Until Tim came along and inspired me to find a better way.”
“We saw right away when we met them that they had built something that could be this huge unlock,” Anderson recalls of GVR. He says the company needed a partner to help scale what it had built, and Good Neighbor was able to provide manufacturing contacts to many independents and large companies, especially in the United States. “They needed us and we needed them,” he says.
Soon after, Anderson met Reyna Bryan, president of innovative packaging company RCD, and in late 2023, he quietly launched Good Neighbor, a first-of-its-kind record company that makes fully recyclable discs, with Reyna as CEO and Coats . as vice president of sales and marketing. He later hired Coats' friend and UMG manufacturing veteran Jonny O'Hara as vice president of production and operations. “As more people got back into the world of vinyl, a lot of artists said, 'Is there a more environmentally friendly alternative?' ,' O'Hara recalls. “There were better options online, but they were never to the same degree as Good Neighbor.”
“In my supply chain transformation business, any opportunity to reduce carbon output or eliminate chemicals of concern from the process is a major win,” adds Bryan. “The good neighbor achieves both.”
Good Neighbors key stakeholders, from left: Tim Anderson, Scotty Coats, Reyna Bryan and Jonny O'Hara.
Ryan Contra
Instead of a traditional hydraulic press, which uses energy for heating and cooling, GVR's “futuristic” machine (as O'Hara describes it) uses polyethylene terephthalate (PET plastic) injection molding, which reduces energy by 60% and increases production by three times. (GVR's single press in the Netherlands, running three eight-hour shifts, has an estimated capacity of 1.2 million records annually.) A second press will arrive in the United States in mid-September. (Good Neighbor is currently raising money through the group's pro-skater friends and music managers.)
GVR's Pierre van Dongen and Harm Theunisse report that they looked to the pressing process for CDs and DVDs as an inspiration, noting how precise and adaptable it was. And while they say some research into testing this process with disks was done in the 80s, it was never completed — until now. It took them six years to “perfect the development,” as they say, which included testing more than 200 materials, optimizing the mold, and developing the printer directly on a label.
Coats and O'Hara are especially excited about how this new process eliminates labels in the center of the paper that require high-temperature baking to adhere to the PVC. Instead, Good Neighbor's labels will be printed directly onto the PET plastic, allowing files to be individually customized — a viable step forward for exclusivity. Meanwhile, Anderson is excited that the machine is “material agnostic,” meaning it can format any material onto a disc, but Anderson says most of it doesn't sound great — yet. The company is currently testing recycled bottles.
And while Anderson says he relied on his “purist” friends for feedback on test pressures of the PET plastic, and that no one balked at the quality after listening, he still acknowledges that “audiophiles may not be our target consumer.” . With Good Neighbor, he says, the goal is not to shame vinyl connoisseurs for their existing collections, but to set a new precedent for sustainability in record production.
“If this industry continues to grow at this rate, it needs to change… When the biggest artists in the world start selling millions and millions of them [vinyl]That's when I said, “That feels like something that would be fun to disrupt.”
A version of this article will appear in the June 8, 2024 issue Advertising sign.
from our partners at https://www.billboard.com/pro/good-neighbor-record-manufacturing-sustainable-approach/
