CEO Cameron Schaefer and The Vinyl Revolution

Do you know what “crate digging” is? If so, you might have a good assortment of vinyl records sitting at home, and if not, then you’ve likely never experienced the joy of crouching in a dimly lit corner of a second-hand shop, thumbing through a clutter of dusty milk crates stacked full of old and often obscure LPs. “Crate digging” is one of the most fruitful and least frustrating aspects of collecting vinyl records, which at times can feel like a wearisome hobby, because it's always an experience when dropping the needle on your turntable, turning up your speakers, sitting back in your favourite chair, and listen to the A-side of a big polymer disc with beautifully composed symphonies, funky disco club beats, or horrendous wails and howls cut into its grooves.

“Crate digging” isn’t for everyone, though, and many collectors prefer that someone else do the digging and curate records on their behalf, which is why so many audiophiles trust in Denver, Colorado-based company Vinyl Me, Please (VMP). Founded in 2013, VMP started off as a “record of the month” club, mailing out lesser-known vinyl gems every four weeks to about a dozen subscribers. VMP serves over 85,000 music lovers from more than 50 countries around the world, and each month allows its “record of the month” members to select an exclusive pressing from one of four categories: Essentials, Classics, Hip-Hop, or Country. Last year alone, VMP shipped about 750,000 records, which is why this summer VMP is opening a world-class record-pressing facility in the hip RiNo neighbourhood of downtown Denver.

The CEO of VMP is Cameron Schaefer, who has been with the company since its earliest days and has worked tirelessly to turn this once passion project into a thoroughly and thoughtfully built business that remains chaste as it grows and pushes through the narrow cracks of an established music industry. We sat down with Schaefer at VMP’s unfinished pressing plant to discuss his love for music, how he ended up at VMP, and why he thinks vinyl records offer the best, more satisfying listening experience.

Chris Nelson: For this interview in the &SONS “Pioneers” series, I want to discuss your business and how you helped grow Vinyl Me, Please (VMP) into what it is today, but I feel like I should start by recognising that you come from a long line of true pioneers.

Sometime in middle school, a Hastings store opened in Laramie. In the early to mid-'90s, CD culture was huge, and if you lived in a town with a big mall, you'd go to Sam Goody and drop, like, $18 on a new CD, but for us it was Hastings. The first CD I bought was En Vogue’s “Funky Divas.” When I was old enough to drive around in my Pontiac Grand Prix, I remember cranking “Intergalactic” by The Beastie Boys—that was a jam—and was really into the artists on No Limit Records, like Master P and Silkk the Shocker; I loved that their albums came in colourful neon cases. After picking up Blink-182’s “Enema of the State,” I kind of launched into my alternative and punk phase, with The Reverend Horton Heat, The Vandals, Me First and The Gimme Gimmes, and the like. Then a girl that I had a crush on really liked Nine Inch Nails, so at some point, I went down the Nine Inch Nails rabbit hole. I think two bands that really rocked my world when I was in middle school were Pearl Jam and Rage Against the Machine. To this day, my favourite Pearl Jam album is “No Code,” which is not the normal one that people would favour, but by far it’s my favourite.

I went to the Air Force Academy from 2002 to 2006, and it coincided with Apple’s introduction of the 99-cent download. In high school, Napster had come out, and we all did that and thought it was amazing, though now I feel sort of embarrassed or ashamed to say it. There was a thrill to having access to all this music, but looking at hard drives full of music, I realized how empty it was, so I decided to do the “right” thing and started buying songs on iTunes, rabidly. At the academy, your freshman year is kind of brutal, and you're not really allowed to leave the campus, so you are constantly holed up in your room. But I had my government-issued laptop with iTunes, so I spent hours and hours each weekend going down the iTunes “recommendation algorithm,” finding new artists. I'd just sit there for hours, just listening to artist after artist. That was kind of a weird therapy, in some ways, like a soothing way to kill a weekend, you know? After I graduated, I started flying overseas in C-17s, with 24-hour shifts and a crew of three rotating pilots. A lot of times I was back in the bulk of the crew area, listening to my iPod for hours on end, and then in 2011 I transferred to Las Vegas to remotely pilot MQ-1 Predator RPAs, or “drones” as most people call them, and that’s when my love for vinyl records returned. I reconnected with a buddy from the academy who had a massive record collection, and I ended up going to his house a bunch to listen to records, and he was introducing me to all kinds of bands that I didn't know and loved. So that really sparked something in me, like, “Oh, I want to get more into this.” For years I'd been carting around my parents’ record collection but hadn’t listened to them, so I bought a turntable and started buying records like crazy. I’d get tax-free combat pay while I was out flying around and would basically allocate a lot of that for buying records. I'd be overseas buying records, and then I'd get home and have, like, 30 records waiting for me.

At first, I ran all the marketing and social media for $400 a month, which was fine since at the time I was making a good living as a captain in the Air Force, and really none of us thought VMP was going to become a full-time business. I was reading everything I could about social media, which at the time felt more novel and less tired than it does now, and through that I learned what it means to build a brand that communicates well online and shows up digitally. I was listening to so much music that I started having more influence on the records that we were picking, and in July 2014 my role morphed into a full-time job, which is when I started travelling to New York and Los Angeles to build our industry relationships because we had none and none of us worked in the music industry. We didn't know anything, we didn't know what a distributor was, we didn't know how to get in contact with labels or who we were supposed to talk to at labels. For a few years, I spent a lot of time building up a kind of Rolodex for VMP, trying to explain what we were doing and to find support. That was a crucial thing for me because I went into that situation very aware that I was an outlier because the music industry is incredibly insular. I remember lots of times when I was talking about myself, or VMP, I would do it in kind of a jokey manner, almost like, “Isn't this crazy? Isn’t this funny?” And I remember very vividly a moment where I was talking with some older label folks who had been in the industry 20 years, and they got weirdly emotional when I was talking to them and said, “Look, you guys are building something that we wanted the music industry to be, so we are rooting for you to succeed … keep doing what you're doing.” It hit my heart, and I realized that this self-deprecation was, in a way, disrespectful to them.

Yes, exactly. It’s crazy to think that this year, Vinyl Me, Please turned 10 years old. If you look at it purely as a record club, we're the leading record club in the world for what we do, but now I look at it more as both a brand and a community that we built, centred on exploring music together. Too often these days, you’re trading the human analogue experience for digital convenience, and at VMP we recognize this tension exists in the world. At VMP, we're doing our best work when we're facilitating journeys through music that lead to those tangible and transcendent experiences because we believe that music is more than bits and bytes. These sounds frame your memories and over time shape your life. That's what we're about now, and we've been able to solidify our identity, and now we're more of a respected and known name in the industry, so we get a lot more amazing opportunities thrown our way from artists, labels, management, and different brands who want to work with us.

We’re opening a 14,000-square-foot, audiophile-grade pressing plant in downtown Denver, because we want to press the highest quality records in the world, and we feel like vinyl, is the best medium to explore music. And frankly, the artists and the customers deserve it. We want to treat music with a sacredness, where you do care about every little detail in the package, and we felt like the only way to do that on the product level was to take it into our own hands. We also want to do it in a way that people can come and walk through and see how records are made and experience that in a way that isn't intimidating. I think that's one of the been one of the issues with vinyl in general: it can be quite intimidating for people to get into. It will be a fun and enjoyable experience for anyone who says, “I love music, I want to explore it more deeply.” It is a tremendous blessing, but also equally weighted by a feeling of responsibility, because the music industry needs this.

When I drop the needle on one of those records, I love nothing more than hearing dead silence, and that’s why I'm excited that leading the charge at our pressing plant is Gary Salstrom, who is known for making records that are just dead silent. I remember one of the first times he pressed for us, when I dropped the needle on a test pressing and sat down, there was no sound, so I figured I must not have turned the volume up. As I was walking toward the turntable, the music kicked on, and it was incredible. So, sound quality is for sure a factor. People can do high-resolution digital recordings, but I don't think it sounds as real, and sometimes it sounds almost too perfect, but that’s subjective, which is why I leave sound quality last, unlike a lot of audiophiles who care about it most. From what I see, most people right now are starting to connect or reconnect with vinyl, not because of the sound quality but rather because they have something physical that reminds them of a memory or a time in their life or makes them feel a certain way. In a world with everything being digital, coming from a screen, I think more and more people are gravitating toward tangible experiences because it makes them feel more human.