It’s magic. It really is.
In today’s modern world it seems easy to comprehend the digital music process. Zeros and ones plot sound files and record music and these transferred files are embedded on plastic discs read by optical sensors or converted to MP3 files for easy movement amongst digital playback devices.

Ah, but a record. That’s something completely different. A wild voodoo of blue nickel liquid solution, vinyl beads (not those, get your head out of the gutter) melted in donut-shaped discs, 1,800 pounds of pressure and a metal needle sailing along a wave sea of plastic.

Last week I was in Nashville for the annual convention of the Coalition of Independent Music Stores and as part of our week of activities filled with seminars devoted to best practices for selling on-line, the merchandising of categories such as books or negotiating the most cost effective insurance policies for our business we toured United Record Pressing, the largest and last real record pressing plant in America.

Founded in 1949, a year after the 12-inch album format was introduced and the same year the 7-inch single was born, United was originally named Southern Plastics and holds the distinction of pressing the first Beatles single in the United States, for Vee Jay, not Capitol, in case music history geeks are reading this.

Historical for playing a positive role in race issues in the ‘60s, Southern built the “Motown Suite” upstairs of the plant to provide touring Motown acts, where all of the Motor-City record label’s output, was manufactured, as a place to stay since most hotels, motels and restaurants would not allow black-Americans to enter in those days.

Southern would change its name to United Record Pressing in 1971 and today the plant is running from 6 a.m. to midnight every day. “We would run 24 hours a day but then that would not allow us any room to add extra production when deadlines are an issue,” explained Jay Millar, Sales and Marketing Manager for URP. The daily output of 20,000 to 40,000 records a day may seem small but when you consider each album is inspected and hand packed into inner sleeves and outer jackets with just 60 employees and 25 pressing machines that date back over four decades gives the old concrete block warehouse facility a mystical Southern Pole vibe without a fat man in a red suit.

We saw the whole process of transforming a tape, CD or reel-to-reel into a large etched shiny black piece of manna, from the master plate being cut and soaked in a blue nickel liquid compound to add an electro-magnetic charge to the creation of the reverse master with ridges instead of grooves to the pellets of vinyl that are melted into donut-like discs that are fed into old pumping and wheezing industrial machines that smash the almost 2-inch thick hockey-puck of plastic into a one-sixteenth of an inch 120-ram foot-long piece of plastic after which the excess outer edge is trimmed like wood shavings from a carving.

It seemed like some long-forgotten magic, these old machines huffing and puffing out what many consider archaic physical items, and it didn’t feel like a last-ditch effort to keep some kind of Merlin or Knights Templar concept from disappearing into museums, rather it was alive and exciting.

On the day we toured the plant they were pressing the 20th anniversary edition of Pearl Jam’s “Ten” and this was the second go round. The band rejected the first 27,000 units, not because they were flawed but because of issues surrounding the paper label affixed in the middle of the disc. At the same time these rejects were being melted down to be reused for those customers who would later order mixed-color vinyl pressings.

For the 60-some indie retailers touring the plant it was a geek-fest to rival something as big as Comic Con. For us it was magical. And everyday we deliver that magic to millions of Americans who still believe, not in the Easter Bunny and other myths, but in the power of analog sound.

Real magic.