East 36th Street between Superior and St. Clair avenues is a world unto itself, with Ante Up Audio and CloserLook Recording Studios, all kinds of warehouses and traffic – not something one usually associates with downtown Cleveland.
Deep in the mix is Gotta Groove Records, Vince Slusarz’ 6,000-square-foot vinyl record plant in Tyler Village, a collection of businesses that run along that long East 36th block. Slusarz started Gotta Groove in March 2009. Its first record, a split 45 featuring the bands Deathers and Freedom, came out last August. An Americana fan, he likes vinyl records, always has.
How fitting that a lawyer who used to work for a water processing equipment manufacturer is riding retro into the future. “I wanted to do something in manufacturing that I liked,” says Slusarz amid the Groove factory environs. “I like music, I like vinyl, so that was kind of the starting point.
"When I started to research how records were made, I found that the market for vinyl has been growing for years, but the manufacturing capacity is fixed.”
According to the Recording Industry Association of America, vinyl record sales have been growing steadily since 2006. In 2008, Nielsen SoundScan reported 1.88 million sales of new LPs, an 89 percent sales increase over 2007. In November 2009, Billboard reported that vinyl record sales topped 2 million year-to-date, representing a year-over-year jump of about 37 percent. At the same time, sales of digital albums were expected to top the 2008 total of 65 million and sales of digital tracks were to surpass 1 billion. So vinyl’s a tiny piece of the market, but it’s growing. According to Slusarz, those figures don’t take into account sales from independent record stores, such as Music Saves, a Waterloo-area store where vinyl figures heavily in the store's inventory.
Melanie Hershberger, who owns Music Saves with her husband, Kevin Neudecker, shares employee Tim Thornton with Gotta Groove. She figures Music Saves sells 65 percent vinyl, 35 percent CD. Vinyl sales have been growing steadily there since it opened in July 2004.
“We cater to people who are still interested in the physical format of music. And because of the Internet, a lot of people don’t have use for CDs anymore,” says Hershberger. “You can put tons and tons of albums on an iPod and take them with you. CDs originally appeared because they were a more portable format; that’s slowly being replaced by the digital format –MP3 files – and people who are still interested in the physical form for listening at home are starting to buy vinyl.
"A lot of independent labels never stopped putting out vinyl records. A lot of labels are reissuing things on vinyl and major labels are putting out vinyl. I don’t think it’s a trend, I think it’s something that’s here to stay.”
Like other area independents such as Bent Crayon, My Mind’s Eye, Loop and Record Den, Music Saves falls below the radar of official record sales statistics. It’s not part of SoundScan, which tracks such figures. As for Gotta Groove, Hershberger thinks it’s “really cool. It’s great, especially for Cleveland bands; I’ve heard stories of how bands have gotten vinyl pressed in other states and then had to pay to ship it, which really cuts into their costs. They can have their records pressed here and just pick them up.”
