Vinyl Me, Please Bought by VNYL; New Owners Vow to Restore Troubled Service

The once beloved, recently troubled record subscription service Vinyl Me, Please has been acquired out of bankruptcy and looming liquidation by VNYL Inc., a company that already runs two other vinyl clubs, with new owners who are vowing to assuage VMP’s unhappy customers and restore the company to its former glory.

The purchase went through last Wednesday and was revealed Tuesday morning by Vinyl Me, Please’s new CEO, entrepreneur Nick Alt, and new president, direct-to-consumer expert Emily Muhoberac, who hold similar titles at VNYL Inc., the parent company. They come to these new roles running VMP having experience having already been in charge of two other subscription services, VinylBox and the VNYL brand, which will continue as sister operations under the VNYL Inc. umbrella.

Since last year, Vinyl Me, Please has been beset by customer complaints of unfulfilled orders, concurrent with the founders who started the company in 2012 leaving and new operators overseeing a service headed for bankruptcy. This spring, VMP looked to be going down in a sea of liquidation. Now Alt and Muhoberac say they are rescuing the service from that fate, and that they have the means and know-how to return it to what drew vinyl aficionados as loyal subscribers for the last 13 years.

Alt tells Variety, “They went into a bankruptcy situation in which they found different parties to come in and bid on taking over the business, and so we had a bidding war with a couple other parties. The other parties were not as interested in the continuity of the service, vut we were the ones that were basically saying, ‘Hey, this brand still has a lot of goodwill and a lot of great, engaged customers.’ And for us, we saw it as an opportunity to jump in and fix and clean up a lot of the shortcomings that have been pushed onto customers. Over the last year, there’s a lot of people that have bought records that haven’t received them. And so with us jumping in, we’re gonna start fixing that. We’ve already started fixing that, but we really will dig in, in the weeks ahead.”

“This is the third time we’ve done this, and we’ve really built a strong operational playbook to do it,” adds Muhoberac. “We’ve been quietly acquiring vinyl subscription brands over the last year; we’ve done the same thing with a company called Bandbox, as well as VinylBox, which is currently based in the U.K. And so taking these really great creative brands and aligning it with some really strong business operational processes has made it so we just have a really easy playbook to go and turn these around quickly. As Nick said, over the last year, we’ve just seen a lot of really loyal, really incredible customers not getting their records, and at the end of the day, this is all about getting the records in the hands of the loyal consumers who want them.”

“One of the reasons we were so excited for this opportunity is because, when you look through the shit show on Reddit — and we’re in all of these spaces, seeing all of this and reading the comments —you see that these customers are still so inherently loyal and they want this to work,” Alt says.

They both well know that restoring trust when many customers are owed records they paid for as long ago as last year will not be instantaneous.

“We’re ready and unbothered by the skepticism, because it’s very healthy and it’s been earned — they have been wronged time and time again,” Alt says. “Even if I was going to send all these records via DoorDash, somebody would still be mad about something, and that’s to be expected. But I think the skepticism is very healthy. And I also think that you just have to look at what we’ve done on these other services that we’ve righted the ship on in terms of: Hey, look, we’re not looking to kind of quietly sell it in pieces to these different outlets, which is what a lot of other people would’ve done in this situation, whereas we still see tremendous opportunities with the brand. So we have every intention of getting customers their product, and getting orders that they place.

“The internet would lead you to believe it’s over, which is unfortunate, but I think the minute these records start shipping again, you’ll have a very different perspective on that if you’re a customer. … We’ve taken on a big undertaking. We could be accused of being complete fools for doing so, but I’m a lifer in this business, and I just feel that you have to know how to serve the customer. Otherwise, what are you doing? Our ask is just to keep an open mind and let us prove ourselves. We’re ready for it.”

The new owners have hit the ground running; although in some sense they say this has been in the works for the past year, only in the last two months did things get serious. In the meantime, consumers were getting increasingly confused, as news of the liquidation went public, while the storefront remained essentially unchanged and was still taking orders.

“Just like everyone, we saw some of the hardship the company was facing a year ago and were starting to pay attention,” Alt says. “And I had reconnected with the founders who were brought back in to kind of clean up a mess that they hadn’t really created. it started as very casual, once-in-a-while conversations, and over time it turned into more of just being a sounding board, just just being there to kind of either commiserate or just jtalk through optionality for them as to: what do you do here? It didn’t eventually go into this liquidation process until early April when some of these communications came out. The intent was to have that all wrapped up by mid-May. so it took a couple more weeks than I think people were planning. but we took ownership of it as of last Wednesday.”

What does VNYL Inc. have that previous operators didn’t that can make the ship stay afloat this time? Proprietary technology, for one thing, they say, that predicts what users will truly want based on their online habits, which they believe will put a halt to what was seen as the habit of overpressing records that turned out not to be reasonable sellers for VMP.

Muhoberac says, “Forgive me if it’s erroneous, but I think we’re the only one of these services that was venture-backed originally, from my background being in technology and in the mobile space. And we’re the only one that has a proprietary tech stack. We have built out really strong IP and a really strong tech stack to be able to predict demand on records that are coming out and what is most likely to be well-received by the market. We have data from Spotify and from Apple Music that helps us curate.

“The reason a lot of these business fail is because they pick a number out of thin air and they make an absurd amount of these records without having any indicators of how it’s going to sell to their audience. And because we have these direct connections into what the listeners are doing in their streaming life, we have a really good sense of, ‘This will perform within a few standard deviations of this (amount), versus just you place an order for 10,000 units and you only sell 300 of them. That’s unsustainable. The only way you can do that is if you knew how to build great software and are interested in what the customer was doing outside of your service. … We trust the guts of our curators, but we verify with the data.”

Vinyl Me, Please is better known as a brand than the services that VNYL Inc. is already operating, but the company heads think they can all continue and co-exist because they serve different constituencies.

“VYNL and VMP came out around similar time frames,” Alt says, “and if you look at the customer segmentation, Vinyl Me, Please is really for who I think would be traditionally labeled as the audiophile/aficionado who really is into premium (releases). Whereas VYNL is inherently, at its core, a millennial/Gen Z product, or someone who is seeing vinyl records everywhere, but never really grew up with it. They didn’t grow up listening to physical music with their parents, but they want to explore it. So they go and they buy like the $50 turntable off of Amazon or somewhere, then they need new content, but they don’t have this benchmark of information to work from in terms of what should they be collecting. So these two brands have kind of played in the space together for a long time, and then others have come along since. But they have a very different kind of customer base.”

Alt admits he’s of the generation that grew up in the CD age, prior to streaming becoming dominant, and didn’t grow up cherishing vinyl, which had largely been set aside as a medium when he was a clerk for a Camelot Music outlet back in Ohio. One of the opportunities he sees for growth with VMP now is issuing more exclusives of records that might not even have come out originally on vinyl when the format was at its lowest point in the ’90s.

He comes to VMP having been a fan from the start, even as he was starting up a rival service. Alt remembers a sample title he found highly satisfying, as well as what VMP made more unique about it.

“When I joined the service back in 2014, as just a student of music retail and who’s been obsessed with collecting physical music for my whole life, I was very excited to get the J Dilla ‘Donuts’ and ‘Mad Villainy’ record,” he recalls. “I’m not a huge hip-hop head, but I just loved that, and I just remember that initial experience. And it came with a cocktail recipe, which I thought was just such a weird but nice touch. There was something magical about that, like: I’m gonna sit down this evening and instead of turning on the screen, or instead of going down the dopamine hit of flipping through TikTok, I’m gonna listen to this record with nothing else happening and I’m gonna go fix myself a drink and sit here and listen to this record like that. That vibe was really cool to me, and I thought that was where they had it. Then they broadened it and they had different categories of genres, and I think the tracks (of different genre subscriptions) made sense, but over time it, the cocktail recipes went away and the (extra) content went away and it kind of got a little bit less special.”

Genre diversity will continue to play a part. “There’s no wrong answer” when it comes to music tastes, Alt says. “I can switch gears and be super excited about a Blue Note boxed set, and then also be really stoked for this new Renee Rapp LP that’s coming soon; she’s gonna be like the next big Chapell Roan pop star. I’m equally excited about both those things. I think the culture of our company has always been like that, too.”

Alt is open to having VMP releases in physical retail stores. “Record Store Day is an incredible program, but I don’t feel like it’s frequent enough. I feel like people would be getting together to do listenings or hang out to talk about these projects with more frequency. And maybe it’s too aspirational, but I would love a scenario which where we’re partnering with record stores orlocal kind of things where we’re hosting these events that are like listening parties for upcoming releases. Because I think that is why we all are into it. I don’t typically listen to the vinyl with headphones on. It’s typically a community household experience.So I feel like creating that opportunity for these customers would also be kind of on the wishlist of things to bring back.

“In the past, I feel kind of the vibe was these physical stores and these sub clubs can’t coexist, or they have to kind of not talk to each other. Well, that’s insane. We are all are excited about this thing. Why wouldn’t you see a VMP record day-and-date at a record store, or get it from the club? I’d rather be understanding of how the customer wants to buy the record versus being so precious that, like, oh no, you have to get it from our box mailed to your door.”

As for his thought that some current disgruntled customers might only be satisfied if they got a DoorDash delivery of their overdue product… “Don’t put it past us,” he says, laughing. “We’ve done wilder stuff. I would love to roll up, Publisher Clearinghouse style, with just the giant box of records instead of the big check.”

Even if that doesn’t happen, “I think a lot of these customers haven’t heard anything for many weeks or maybe even months, and even if they did hear something, it might have been an AI chat bot or something that wasn’t an actual person that could have had any ownership in controlling the outcomes. If that was me in that, if I was in that situation, I’d be pissed off too. I’d be so furious. And so I think what you’ll notice is us taking a very different approach to the customer service element and just the humanity of dealing with these customers and not feeding them into kind of a weird customer service funnel. We’re working on a campaign right now to figure out how do we address these customers in the fastest way possible, but also add a layer that’s not just kind of the sterile over-email approach.”