Cameron Schaefer, CEO of Denver’s fast-growing Vinyl Me, Please record club, has landed on Billboard’s prestigious 40 Under 40 List.
Schaefer, 39, has led the 10-year-old Vinyl Me, Please through a remarkable period of growth and publicity, including the April 2022 announcement of a purpose-built, 14,000-square-foot record pressing plant and lounge in the River North Art District (already open and operating at 1752 Platte St.).
Billboard lauded Schaefer as one of the engines powering the “the live sector’s post-shutdown resurgence.”
“In 2013, the former U.S. Air Force captain pivoted to selling music as part of Vinyl Me, Please’s founding team,” Billboard wrote. “By mid-2021, the company had 80,000 mail-order customers for its premium vinyl releases, and it keeps growing…”
How is that possible for a record company that doesn’t sign artists — or book and host concerts?
“At the core of our business is the idea of exploring music together,” Schaefer told The Denver Post in an April interview. “So everything that we do, whether it’s a vinyl box set or a piece of editorial in our online magazine or a playlist, is all focused on that idea of exploration.”
Schaefer is both the beneficiary of and a driving factor in vinyl records’ resurgence, which last year found sales of vinyl LPs outstripping CDs for the first time since 1987. New and longtime listeners pushed vinyl to its highest retail profile in decades, making up about 70% of all physical music sales (the other 30% was mostly CDs).
As Schaefer knows, these are not just one-off pressings from indie labels; multiplatinum pop stars Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, and Olivia Rodrigo led vinyl sales in 2022, according to data from the Recording Industry Association of America, resulting in $1.2 billion in vinyl revenue.
Global demand last year hit 300 million units of vinyl, or about twice the capacity for producing it. Poor-quality products have also been infiltrating the market to meet that demand, and Vinyl Me Please’s new plant will work to raise those standards again, Schaefer said.
Last year Vinyl Me, Please sold about 750,000 records, and has set a goal of selling 1 million this year. The service runs $33 to $43 per month, or about $500 annually, and features exclusive pressings and re-pressings, box set re-releases, podcasts and more — often on colored, limited-edition and highly collectable vinyl.
In recent years it has brokered deals with iconic jazz labels and rights-holders for releases from Willie Nelson and The Grateful Dead, and expanded its main subscription-service genres into hip-hop and country.
“A lot of people are like, ‘Are you a label or a retailer or… what are you?’ ” Schaefer said. “And answer the answer is, we’re a music company. We probably blur a lot of those lines, and it’s never been really something super intentional. What our company rallies around is trying to provide tangible, transcendent experiences with music.”
