Beleaguered record club Vinyl Me, Please will relaunch under the ownership of VNYL Inc. after taking steps to enter liquidation earlier this year. The company has instated a new leadership team that promises to honor past obligations—notably the rash of unfulfilled orders that has exasperated customers—and, as new chief executive Nick Alt said in a press release, restore the company to “its true form as the ‘Best Damn Record Club.’” Going forward, the owners intend to integrate Vinyl Me, Please with its VinylBox and VNYL brands as a sister operation specializing in premium audio.
VNYL acquired Vinyl Me, Please after a post-bankruptcy bidding war, the new owners told Variety. The company’s new president, the direct-to-consumer operator Emily Muhoberac, said in the press release, “Vinyl customers deserve a white glove experience and that’s far from what they’ve gotten recently. We intend to do that by getting back to the fundamentals of VMP with a great customer experience.”
They plan to keep the company afloat with the help of its proprietary technology, which they say uses streaming and other record sales data to parse trends that inform which records get pressed, thus improving efficiency. Alt added in the press release, “Our philosophy is simple: not every collector is the same. Some customers want a Blue Note Anthology box set. Others are counting the days until the new Reneé Rapp LP drops. We’re building different clubs to serve different types of listeners—with pricing and curation that actually match their needs.”
In the Variety interview, Alt assured unhappy customers that a campaign is under way to fulfill orders as quickly as possible. “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.” He continued, “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.”
