Amid the many return-to-analog trends in the U.S., vinyl records have held their footing as a popular medium since the early 2000s. In 2025, vinyl sales in the U.S. had their best year since the 1980s, surpassing $1 billion for the first time ever. However, most vinyl record pressing is done overseas, with just over 40 record pressing plants currently manufacturing in the U.S.
Object Permanence Records, based in Salem, is the newest vinyl pressing plant in Oregon. It’s also now the state’s only manufacturer, since Cascade Record Pressing in Milwaukie closed its doors last month.
Object Permanence has been in operation for just over three weeks. Co-owners Carrie Morrissey and Adam Philips join us with the details of vinyl pressing and why they moved from Brooklyn, NY, to Salem to start their small-press record manufacturing business.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. We end today with the owners of a new vinyl pressing business in Oregon. As a Salem Reporter wrote recently, Object Permanence has been operating in Salem for just over three weeks. It is now Oregon’s only record making factory, and it’s part of an astonishing resurgence in vinyl. Physical record sales brought in less than $9 million in 2005. Last year, it was over a billion dollars.
Carrie Morrissey and Adam Philips are two of the co-owners of Object Permanence. They both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on the show.
Carrie Morrissey: Thank you so much.
Adam Philips: Thanks so much.
Miller: Carrie, first – before you both became record pressers, record makers in Salem, the two of you, along with your third business partner, Jason Wojciechowski, were all three living in Brooklyn, New York. What were you doing there?
Morrissey: I actually had a laser-cut acrylic jewelry business. We made jewelry and sunglasses for the last 15 years. [It was] called I Still Love You NYC, and I had a store in Chelsea Market, Manhattan. So I was designing, manufacturing jewelry, selling it wholesale across the globe, doing Fashion Week things and that kind of stuff.
Miller: OK. And then Adam, what about you? What were you doing pre-record making?
Philips: I was working in advertising. I’ve been working in the advertising industry for about 20 years and it was, I think, time for a change. The industry’s going through a lot of changes right now, especially with AI and new media. And this opportunity came at a really, really great time when I was sort of transitioning into something else.
Miller: When you say AI, you mean you saw that there was gonna be less demand for human labor like yours in the advertising world?
Philips: There was definitely the effort to try and make that happen. Whether that’s actually going to be successful or not is another question, but there was definitely the very, very concerted push to cut staff and replace things with AI, replace creative with AI, which is not really a direction that I wanted to go.
Miller: Carrie, you were making physical stuff, but did you see anything similar? I mean, did you feel like you also were on a career path that was not going in the direction you wanted?
Morrissey: For sure, yeah. So when I started, I was really a trailblazer within jewelry design and within the kind of markets that I was doing. There wasn’t a lot of small jewelry businesses like me out there. And over 15 years, creating trends and being the forefront of stuff, a lot more people have joined the jewelry industry. So it’s become incredibly crowded and it’s much more difficult to kind of make a space for yourself.
Miller: OK, so you’re both ready for some kind of change, and I understand your co-owner was as well. How do you go from that desire to saying, ah, the answer is making records?
Morrissey: I think that we were all coming up with a lot of different ideas. As an entrepreneur, I’m constantly thinking of different things. We’ve been married for almost 15 years and together for over 20. We always are coming up with different ideas of things to do. So when we became friends with Jason, the three of us were all kind of coming up with different possible future paths. Jason actually started writing an article about record pressing and the record pressing industry. And it was really fascinating, because it was an area where there’s an opportunity for growth. And he kind of came to us with the idea and said, in our text chat, “are you guys interested in doing this?
Adam was actually away in England at that time. Jason and I were just kind of going back and forth being like, OK, there’s really something here. And one of my first things that I chose to do was to look at the market share and projected growth of the industry. As you mentioned in the opening, it’s made $1 billion this past year, and it’s projected to grow about $8 billion over the next 8 years. So, coming from jewelry where I was in sunglasses, actually at the forefront of a similar type of growth back in 2017, I wasn’t able to grab hold of any significant part of that, but I understood more of like, when you look at projections, what that means for an industry. I really recognized a lot of potential there.
Miller: You wanted to get in closer to the ground floor.
Morrissey: Yes, and harness it and be more prepared.
Miller: So let’s turn to why. The numbers, as I said, they’re extraordinary: from $8 [million] or $9 million just 20 years ago to over $1 billion last year. This is for sales of LPs and EPs, actual vinyl, as opposed to digital downloads … I guess cassettes are their own world of returns, which we’ll do a show about some other day. But in a sense, maybe there is a connection here. So, Adam, how do you explain this? What’s driving this major resurgence in interest in these objects?
Philips: Well, I think it’s a few things. I mean, first off, you’ve got to look at an industry that has almost completely died out in the late ‘90s, early 2000s.
Miller: Killed by CDs.
Philips: Killed by CDs, very deliberately killed by CDs. So major labels, not only did CDs overtake records and things, they made a very, very deliberate switch to CDs and actually decommissioned all of the capabilities to press records. So it was a very deliberate switch and a very deliberate killing of the industry that was kept alive by just a few enthusiasts in a few small pockets.
And then, as we get into sort of CDs get taken over by streaming, what we see is an era where people don’t really own music, they don’t have a physical object, there’s less of a connection to the artists, and there’s really a yearning to have an object, to have the physicality of it, to listen to it, to unpackage it. There’s also something that we find with the beauty of inconvenience. The thing that’s happened over and over in the name of convenience is we’ve been separated from the experience of the thing. So, going to a store, waiting in line, talking to people, ordering food online – all of these things have been sort of eradicated in the name of convenience, which is, on one level, very nice. But on another level, you miss all of those opportunities for connecting with people, interacting with people, interacting with the community, making an effort to do something or gaining something.
It used to be you go to a record store and you have to talk to people and you have to actually engage with it, and that’s been kind of taken away by the algorithm. And I think a lot of people have a yearning for that, for the physicality of it, and a yearning to engage with their music properly, which is why you see vinyl specifically, above a lot of other physical media, kind of coming back. We don’t predict that it will go back to the ‘70s, where it’s like the dominant media form, but it’s created a very viable space. And the more things go virtual, the more things go streaming, the more we see people wanting to carve out that space and want to engage with that space.
Miller: And Carrie, when Adam says “people,” what ages come to mind for you? I mean, I guess I’m wondering if this is 15-year-olds, who absolutely would have been buying albums with whatever money they could scrounge together in the ‘50s, ‘60s, ‘70s, up to mid ‘80s, maybe even late ‘80s when CDs obviously took over. So, 15-year-olds today, or are you talking about 45-year-olds, 75-year-olds … Who do you see as the real core customers?
Morrissey: That’s an awesome question. So there’s definitely all of the people who’ve been in the game and remember it, but there is a really big population of Gen Z and below – Alpha – who are getting into records, getting into their parents and grandparents’ collections, and then going out and starting to buy their own records. Taylor Swift did have a huge part to do with that. She came out with several vinyl releases and that drove a lot of people to even just recognize this as a media.
Miller: Do you think people bought record players because of Taylor Swift?
Morrissey: Yes, I do. Yeah. But what’s interesting is that 50% of the Gen Z people buying records don’t own record players, and they’re buying it to collect the art and to know that they have it, that they can hold on to it.
Miller: Let’s talk about this for a second. I mean, I don’t know how to think about this. Adam, how do you feel about that weird fact?
Philips: It is a very weird fact. I think it’s really great that people are discovering it, and honestly, I think it’s interesting that they’re getting it in that direction. But I think it is gonna be a thing that’s gonna persuade them to get … maybe they got the Taylor Swift record because it was a release, it was a limited edition and there’s a special…
Miller: An actual physical picture, as opposed to a digital download that just has some pixels on a screen and then you pull up.
Philips: And it might come with some special edition things. And maybe they got it and they don’t have a record player, but that’s gonna be an encouragement for them to get a record player and then say, oh, what else can I get? And what other records can I … And that’s the beginning of a beautiful journey into vinyl.
Miller: Or else it’s just a fetishistic object that never is used for what it was created as.
Philips: Yeah, and we’re definitely proponents of having a record player and playing these things, because they sound wonderful.
Miller: Without going into the entire physical process, I’d love to hear a little bit about how records are actually made. Carrie, can you give us the short version?
Morrissey: I think so, yeah. So what’s really cool about the machine that we’re operating is that we have an Allegro M-Tech, and it is one of the newest machines on the market now. A lot of the machines are very old. Most factories use 50-year-old machines. So we have a really amazing, efficient process that’s all within one machine.
The vinyl pellets, the PVC pellets, which are like the size of a lentil, get put into the extruder from the hopper, and then it gets heated into a puck. The puck gets joined with the center labels and put into the hydraulic press, which is, how many thousands of pounds?
Philips: Many. It’s like 300 tons.
Morrissey: Yes, 300 tons of pressure, and that creates the record itself. Each record has its own stamper, which is a completely different part of the process. And that is a long process that has several steps, but each record has its own negative, basically, that you use to press the final record.
Miller: That has the opposite of the grooves.
Morrissey: Exactly.
Miller: And do you make those, or that’s made somewhere else?
Philips: Those are done through our partners. We work with a few cutting engineers and plating plants, so the cutting engineers will take the audio and basically feed it through a backwards record player.
Miller: So instead of reading the grooves that turn this physical landscape into sound, it’s cutting the grooves as…
Morrissey: : As a diamond.
Philips: Into a much softer substrate than the vinyl, and then what happens with that is that gets good, it goes to a plating plant. It’s like an electroplating process where the nickel is grown over the top of it to create the initial mold, and then you can make other molds off of that.
Miller: And then you can press it, eventually, something like 1,000 times before you have to get a new stamper, I’ve read.
Philips: Each stamper can do around 1,000 before it starts degrading the audio quality.
Miller: What has the learning curve been like for you? Carrie, it seems like you have some experience in light manufacturing, but Adam, you were in advertising. Your co-owner is a writer. What’s it been like to learn how to make stuff at this scale?
Morrissey: Well, I think definitely the years of wholesale that I did for Nordstrom, Nasty Gal, Urban Outfitters, etc. really brought a lot to the plate, to the table here of being able to understand how to bring in SOPs that are gonna create like the processes that we use and really define efficiencies. That’s definitely helped off the bat. But it is a different process and there’s new ways. We have to create how to intake the different things that we’re receiving, such as the stampers or the material. [We have to determine] how we’re securely getting people’s music, storing that – all of the different stages within the process of making sure the graphic design is approved and that goes forward, that the sound engineering happens and then that moves forward. All of the different stages happen without anything getting lost along the way. So, setting all of that stuff up has been definitely a collaborative effort, using CRM and other exciting programs.
Philips: There’s a ton to learn, but one of the really interesting things about this industry specifically is because it sort of died out and then was reborn, there’s a whole group of people who, as Carrie said earlier, are using like machines from the ‘70s and ‘60s, and then some other smaller presses like ours that are using newer machines, but those machines have only been around for the last 15 years.
So there’s a really wonderful community of small-scale vinyl pressers and people who have shops like this around the country and around the world. And because everyone is a little new to this, because the new phase of the industry hasn’t been around for that long, it is a really amazingly collaborative space where we actually are just on the phone with a lot of people who have really great shops all over the country.
Miller: You know what’s fascinating hearing both of you talk about that in particular, it reminds me a little bit of the way brewers would talk 15 or 20 years ago, that once upon a time, every little town and every little city had tons and tons of breweries. And then craft brewing or local brewing died out. Then there was a resurgence. And at that time, it was much more of a local, collaborative, “let’s figure this out together” kind of a vibe that I remember hearing about 15, 20 years ago.
Why did you end up in Salem? So the two of you and your co-owner were all in Brooklyn looking for something new. You landed on record pressing as the answer, but why do it in Salem?
Morrissey: Well, we started looking in Brooklyn, and financially, it was just gonna be an astronomical expense to even just get a factory, let alone do the build out and everything there. Jason is from Salem and he had suggested Oregon as a potential location for this. So we said, “OK, yeah, that might be cool. Maybe we’ll do half here and half there or figure out what the balance is gonna be.” And then in the end we ended up meeting Jason Carter from Atomic Disc, who is the country’s second largest manufacturer of CDs. And he’s based in Salem, Oregon.
Basically when we met him, he said, “I’ve been searching everywhere to get a record press plant to take all of our record pressing orders that we have. They’re currently going overseas. All of the small record pressing companies had enough work, so they weren’t able to take on that work.” So we said, “Well, we’re looking to start a record pressing factory. We can set it up here and then create this vendor relationship where we’re vertically integrating with the business.” So operationally, it’s allowing us to get going quickly…
Miller: With access to customers who are eager to make records.
One of the commenters in the Salem Reporter article I mentioned wrote: “One more unique bit of musical magic about this town.” Adam, how would you describe the music scene in Salem? What have you found?
Philips: It’s amazing. Like Carrie said, we were not really planning on coming to Salem. It wasn’t on our list of places, and then these opportunities opened up. So we’re like, all right, I guess we’ll give it a shot. But since we’ve been there, it’s just been really magical. It’s such a wonderful place and it’s such a musical town. It’s a very casually musical town, so it’s like the kind of place where like everyone plays an instrument, lots of people are in a band on the side. And also we’re finding a lot of professional musicians who’ve chosen that as a place to sort of end up, which has made for a really, really cool community.
We were just involved with Make Music Day, which is funny because it started in France, I believe, but Salem is apparently one of the biggest venues for it, where there’s bands on every corner in every street, on every possible place you could put a band. And it’s that kind of spirit of everybody sort of playing, everybody being involved in it, and just valuing independent musicians and supporting independent musicians. It’s just a really, really, really cool culture and it’s a culture that’s absolutely embraced what we’re doing. So many people have come up to us and just been like, “we’re so happy that you’re doing this in Salem, this is such a great thing for the community.” And it’s really opened up a lot of doors for us.
Miller: Adam and Carrie, thanks very much.
Morrissey: Thank you so much.
Miller: Adam Philips and Carrie Morrissey are co-owners of Object Permanence. It is a record pressing company in Salem that’s been operating now for just about three weeks.
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