Pressing Plants Have Never Made More Records, and Small Labels Are Still Waiting Half a Year

Vinyl pressing plants are running harder than they ever have, and it still isn't enough. US vinyl sales passed $1 billion in 2025 for the first time since 1983, with 46.8 million units sold, marking a 19th consecutive year of growth, according to RIAA figures reported by The Hollywood Reporter. Plants have expanded to meet that curve. And yet if you run a small label and you're not on a major's speed dial, you are probably still looking at months of dead air between mastering a record and holding it in your hands.

That gap between "the industry built more capacity" and "my order still isn't done" is the actual story here, and it's one we know from the inside. RTS.FM has been pressing its own vinyl since long before the current boom, and the queue has never gotten short. Here's what's actually happening at the plant level, why it keeps happening even as the industry expands, and what small labels can realistically do about it.

How much has vinyl pressing capacity actually grown?

Global pressing capacity has expanded substantially since the pandemic-era bottleneck, with trade estimates now putting worldwide output somewhere in the range of 140 to 160 million units a year, up from roughly 100 million units in 2021. That's a real, structural expansion, not a one-off surge. It's been driven by a handful of large plants investing heavily in new presses, new floor space, and new territories, at exactly the same time as demand has kept climbing rather than leveling off.

The clearest single data point on where that capacity is concentrated: GZ Media, the Czech manufacturer that operates the world's largest single vinyl plant near Prague, says it presses roughly one out of every four vinyl records sold anywhere on earth. No other manufacturer comes close to that share, which tells you a lot about why a handful of decisions made in Loděnice, Czech Republic ripple through every small label's release calendar worldwide.

Why is GZ Media the plant everyone talks about?

Because it is, by a wide margin, the biggest. GZ Media's flagship Czech facility anchors a network that now spans three continents. In June 2022, the company opened Nashville Record Pressing, its third North American plant alongside Memphis Record Pressing and Precision Record Pressing in Burlington, Ontario, which GZ opened back in 2016 specifically to chase North American demand it couldn't fully serve from Europe. The Nashville plant alone was funded with an investment north of 300 million Czech crowns and was targeting 85,000 records a day in its first year of operation, with GZ Media's CEO Michal Štěrba framing the expansion around US demand growing "the fastest in the world."

That kind of scale matters because it sets the ceiling for what everyone else can access, and GZ's own network has been the industry's most explicit bet that the current demand curve isn't temporary.

Which other plants are absorbing the overflow?

GZ isn't alone, and the diversification of pressing capacity across a handful of serious operators is part of why the worst of the 2021 to 2022 bottleneck has eased, even if it hasn't disappeared.

Record Industry, the Netherlands

Europe's other pressing giant merged with distributor Bertus in 2022, a deal that owner Ton Vermeulen told Music Business Worldwide would "not only improve delivery times" but let the combined operation "supply more artists and bands with vinyl." The merger practically doubled combined pressing capacity toward roughly 25 million units a year, run across dozens of presses in Haarlem, and Record Industry remains one of the most automated, most quality-obsessed plants in Europe, a reputation that keeps its own books full.

United Record Pressing, Nashville

America's oldest and one of its largest plants has spent the past few years on a deliberate capacity and process overhaul rather than just adding presses. In its own 2025 year-end recap, United Record Pressing reported a 21% increase in records pressed and shipped compared to 2024, alongside cutting average test-press turnaround from 21 days down to 10, with a 99% first-pass approval rate. That's the kind of operational tightening that doesn't show up in capacity headlines but directly shortens the calendar for the labels already in the queue.

Pallas, Germany

Operating out of Diepholz since 1948, Pallas is the elder statesman of European pressing, built its reputation on audiophile-grade quality control, and remains a go-to for labels who care as much about surface noise and center-hole accuracy as about turnaround time.

Precision Record Pressing, Canada

As part of the GZ network, Precision has grown into one of North America's largest plants in its own right, and in January 2025 it formalized a closer partnership with Memphis Record Pressing under a shared "GZ North America" structure, another sign of consolidation among the operators big enough to keep expanding.

Why does vinyl demand keep growing when everyone streams?

This is the part that surprises people outside the record business: streaming's total dominance hasn't killed the appetite for physical formats, it's arguably fed it. Streaming remains the overwhelming majority of recorded music revenue, but vinyl has now outsold CDs on units every year since 2022, and catalog releases (anything older than 18 months) still account for roughly 70% of vinyl sales, meaning a huge share of demand is collectors and fans replenishing or upgrading a physical collection rather than chasing new frontline releases. For a lot of listeners, streaming is how you discover and live with music day to day, and vinyl is how you actually own a piece of it. Those two behaviors turned out to be complementary, not competing, which is exactly why capacity keeps getting added and keeps getting absorbed just as fast.

Why do small independent labels wait so much longer than majors?

This is the structural problem nobody's expansion plan actually solves. Plants run on scheduling logic that rewards volume and standing relationships: a major label ordering tens of thousands of units across a release slate, on a recurring contract, gets production slots blocked out in advance. A small label placing a one-off order for 300 to 500 copies of a 12-inch is, by comparison, easy to bump when a bigger, more predictable client needs the machine time. Grammy.com's reporting on the vinyl shortage lays this out plainly: major-label production demands strain plants first, and "smaller, independent labels can find their orders receiving lower priority" as a direct result. Third Man Records' Jack White went as far as publicly urging major labels to build their own in-house plants specifically to relieve pressure on the shared facilities independents rely on.

The practical outcome is a two-tier system. Well-connected labels with standing capacity agreements are typically looking at 12 to 16 week turnarounds in peak season. Everyone else, especially smaller underground and electronic labels placing occasional, smaller-batch orders, is realistically planning for 6 to 9 months, sometimes longer if a repress is needed and the original slot has already closed.

It's a dynamic that echoes a broader pattern we've written about before: independent labels collectively hold enormous market share on paper, but a huge amount of the actual physical and financial infrastructure the industry runs on, pressing plants very much included, still sits with the biggest players. Owning your masters doesn't mean owning a place in line at the plant.

What can a small label actually do about it?

None of this is unique to us. RTS.FM presses its own vinyl for our catalog, and every release goes through some version of this exact calculus. A few things genuinely help:

Plan the pressing before you plan the release date. Treat vinyl lead time as a fixed cost of doing business, not a variable you can compress with urgency. If a plant tells you 6 to 9 months, build your release calendar backward from that number rather than hoping it moves.

Keep runs realistic. Smaller batches, often in the 100 to 300 unit range for a debut or a niche title, are easier for a plant to slot in around bigger jobs, and they reduce your financial exposure if a repress takes months to schedule.

Use pre-orders to fund and justify the run. A pre-order window does two things at once: it puts real money against pressing and mastering costs up front, and it gives you hard demand numbers to size the order correctly instead of guessing.

Don't rely on a single plant. Spreading relationships across more than one facility, including some of the smaller regional operators that have opened in the past several years to soak up overflow demand, gives you a fallback when your primary plant's schedule slips.

Treat digital and streaming as the bridge, not an afterthought. Since vinyl will almost always lag the digital release, plan a release strategy that keeps momentum alive in the months between. That's a big part of why we run RTS.FM's live stream at rts.fm year-round and post new label output on our Bandcamp catalog the moment it's ready, so a record has an audience waiting well before the wax itself lands.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do vinyl orders take so long even with more pressing capacity available?

Capacity has grown, but demand has grown alongside it, and plants prioritize large, recurring orders from major labels over one-off small-label runs. That scheduling logic, not a lack of overall capacity, is what keeps independent lead times long even in a bigger industry.

How far in advance should a small label plan a vinyl release?

Treat 6 to 9 months as the realistic floor for a non-priority order, and longer if you'll need a repress. The safest approach is to lock in a pressing slot before finalizing any public release date, rather than announcing a date and hoping the plant keeps pace.

Are vinyl pressing prices rising along with demand?

Material and labor costs have risen with demand, and plants running near full capacity have less incentive to discount short runs. Smaller labels typically absorb this through smaller batch sizes and pre-order funding rather than by paying a premium for rush production.

Is the vinyl pressing bottleneck the same crisis it was in 2021?

No. The worst stretch, with lead times reaching 12 to 18 months, was 2021 and 2022. Expanded capacity from GZ Media, Record Industry, United Record Pressing, and others has brought typical independent lead times down to roughly 6 to 9 months, real progress, but still far from the weeks-long turnarounds of a decade ago.

Does pressing your own vinyl make sense for a small underground label?

It can, but go in with realistic expectations about timelines and minimum order economics. Running smaller, pre-order-backed batches and building relationships with more than one plant tends to work better for underground labels than trying to compete with major-label volume for priority slots.

Nothing here changes the underlying math: the plants are bigger, the wait is shorter than it was during the worst of the pandemic backlog, and it's still nowhere close to fast. If you're planning a run for the first time or your fifth, the labels doing this well are the ones treating the pressing timeline as the actual start of their release calendar, not an afterthought bolted on at the end. We'll keep talking through what we learn pressing our own catalog on RTS.FM's Telegram, and we'd rather hear what's working at your plant than pretend anyone's fully solved this.