The Achieve Podcast - Jason Zeimet (UnoriginalVinyl)

Welcome to the Achieve Podcast, where the show we highlight leaders, creators, and entrepreneurs who are building meaningful businesses, shaping their industries, and having an impact on society. I'm Taylor Baker Baker, your host, and excited today to be joined by Jason Zimet, the founder and president of Unoriginal Vinyl, and you can find them at unoriginalvinyl.com. Now Jason, you're in a bit of a niche here in this space. How did you get into this space and who are you currently serving?

It's a great question. So this is a music industry graphic design service reissue label. We work with artists and major labels in the United States and actually internationally as well. My co-founder is located in Switzerland and he has a visual arts degree as well. And so we work with artists that you may have heard of, such as Zac Brown Band, or Max McNown is a recent success story for us in the country music space. But then there's a lot of hardcore, punk, ska, country music, all sorts of artists across different industries who look to us to help tell their stories in packaging. So that could be packaging, whether it's vinyl records primarily, or cassette tapes or Blu-rays or anything else in the, visual space that we can help to tell their story in a permanent way through some form of physical media.

I love that. I love that, bringing back that classic, because there is something original with that feel and sound. Yes. And so how big is the organization right now?

So there's about 5 of us on the team, and we work with, as I said, multiple artists in multiple different channels of business from distribution, so working with distribution partners, such as The Orchard in the United States to major labels like Sony and Universal and Capitol Music. And oftentimes when an artist is seeking a more tailored experience, something akin to a Sotheby's as opposed to a more generic realtor experience, they come to us for full service. So that means telling their story in retrospectives and finding visuals that may have accompanied an original release from 20 or 30 years ago that maybe didn't have vinyl technology at their disposal or the resources and the marketing budget at the time when the vinyl industry wasn't a billion-dollar industry. Of course, in the late '90s and early 2000s, that seems to be our bread and butter of artists that seek us out and want to create sometimes the first experience that their fans can enjoy their music on vinyl. And that goes very deep. We go very deep in the well working with the original mastering recordings and the producers and the best pressing plants around the world to ultimately achieve their ultimate vision of the, of the project and get it into the fans' hands. So thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands in some cases, of records have our logo on the back of them as a signature that tells the audience that this is going to be above and beyond in terms of quality.

That's awesome. I love that. I really love that. Now, at this stage, what would you say is driving growth for the business?

Well, the industry thankfully has been on this continual uptick since somewhere in the 2012 time frame when the physical media space was considered to be dying out. Suddenly vinyl had this big resurgence. Uh, it was partially brought into the public consciousness with the advent of something called Record Store Day in the late 2000s era, and people started lining up for special edition releases, and there became much more of a major label interest in back catalog, non-streaming ways to continue to celebrate artists. But, you know, when the vinyl thing started to happen for fans, it was thought of as more of a marketing tool from the reissue standpoint. But now, especially since the 2020s, we have this idea of physical media and creature comforts returning in a tangible way to every age demographic. You see that across the board. Success stories such as Barnes Noble, which have had a tour de force sort of resurrection of success and building their brand and growing their real estate footprint around the country. Physical media and vinyl has accompanied that in such a major way to now be about the quality, the quality of the audio, the quality of the experience, the quality of the visuals and the way that they're being presented. It's almost minimum table stakes to have something extra come along with the packaging. And you know, it's funny, Taylor, I just presented this brand at the career day at my daughter's school for middle schoolers. So I showed them the history of physical media starting with the Edison cylinder. I have an Edison cylinder player and I showed them what the Edison cylinder was, the first type of recorded music there ever was. All the way to the now, the Taylor Swiftification of all physical media. And I explained it to them that the attraction for you, a young person, in vinyl and buying vinyl might come from the idea that you can experience all 5 senses with this product. You can listen to the sounds, you can hold it in your hands, you can think about and read these essays and the lyrics because streaming doesn't enable for these things to happen. The algorithm or the, uh, playlists that have 17 different artists on them, while helpful in music discovery, don't give you that deep dive gratification that you might feel. The only sense I don't think that I would recommend relative to vinyl records is the taste. They don't taste particularly good.

That's the next evolution. You're gonna have a taste edible vinyls.

It's right around the corner. It's gonna be like a lickable vinyl like they had in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Like the wall.

Scratch and sniff, for sure. Yeah, there you go, you got a niche marker right there.

Yeah, but it's been a thrill to watch in the last 10 years since we started. We started around 2017 working with local artists who had albums that had been released only ever on CD or perhaps cassette, asking to hold something tangible and start to share with their families. And then we started to look at the scale, so What are the economics? What are the minimum order quantities at vinyl pressing plants that would enable for this to be a $30 retail price point as opposed to a $40 retail price point? And, you know, as you scale up in terms of how many you order, the costs obviously are going to go down. So you want to try to find projects that hit the sweet spot in terms of being able to sell out and become success stories and keep the wheels turning forward and the new projects coming across your desk versus really just blowing it on the first 4 or 5 releases, you know, and sort of being overly enthusiastic or ambitious about how many copies you think you can sell. So we've started at the D2C model, honestly. And so most of the projects we began with were all D2C, direct-to-consumer commissions from record labels who just wanted to sell directly to fans for, uh, their audiences. And we have since been able to scale at retail more significantly, getting distribution into places like I mentioned Barnes Noble or even Walmart, places like that, indie record stores. We have a big release coming out for Record Store Day this year, which we're really excited about, for the first time on vinyl ever. An artist who, uh, was initially cautious about having his story told because he got away from the music industry about 20 years ago and hasn't spoken of it since. So it was a thrill to go be a little bit of an archaeologist and tell that person's story in physical media packaging.

That's awesome. Now, looking back for you personally, what turning points, positive or negative, have molded the way you think about running the organization?

It's a great question. The turning points for me have come from the hardest lessons that you learn related to the balance when you're talking about an artist's vision And you're talking about an artist wanting to achieve the penultimate release, which is artistically showcasing every single step of their creative process that went into making that album happen. That could be demo recordings, that could be scrap notes that they had written on napkins of the original lyrics, and all of these things in their minds deserve to be part of the packaging of this deluxe edition reissue. And you weigh that against the— let's call that the, the x-axis that's going up vertically. And then there's the y-axis, which is the economic reality of how many do we have to sell in order to make that a $50 box set? How many will sell at the $50 price point versus how many, uh, can we sell if we take some of those bonus features out and make it more mass-produced, a little bit more of a generic product. So where a, where a big aha moment came for me was probably in about 2020, 2021, about 3, 4 years into the business, where I realized that Unoriginal Vinyl is not here to serve either of those. It's actually on the z-axis, so it's headed directly towards a different intended goal, which is its audience. Its audience needs to be pleased with the end result. It doesn't have to be a fluff piece or a massage of the ego of the artist. It doesn't also have to be the thing that is guaranteed to sell out because we scaled it properly. The aha came from realizing when feedback started coming to us about how much this album meant and how this particular version of this release is the one to own. When you start to see consumer reviews of your product in those terms, and you start to understand— where we began was as fans of the physical media and wanting to go out to a record store and buy a record and see that it was not held to the standards that we would have as fans who wanted to just open that thing up and read all the stories and get really engaged with that content. We didn't have that opportunity with a lot of the records we were buying in the 2000s to 2000 20. So we just decided to do things a little different and put that as our gold standard. Our audience is the intended target here, and if it makes them happy— and in translation, selfishly, if it makes me happy as a fan of the music and as somebody who would feel really good and confident going out there and buying my own record that I worked on in a record store day, which I have every intention of doing on record store days here— I'm going to go out to the record store even though I've worked on the package and I have the album that I've been working on direct from the hands of the pressing plant myself, there's a great feeling you have when you know that you have hit your audience target. And that was a little bit of a change to tell a record label or an artist, putting this robot logo on the back of your jacket means this, it means this to your fans, and it means this to the integrity of the quality of the piece. You will never have to— you can, but you would never need to reissue another version of this again because it will be inferior. And that's a bold claim, but it's the truth.

I love that. I love that. I love that confidence and the quality that you're bringing to the market in the space and the end users in mind. Now, as you guys try to grow and expand, what have been some of the biggest bottlenecks or obstacles that show up?

Well, there's an economic reality that's at work here, uh, in terms of a lot of pressing plants. Now that this is a billion-dollar industry in 2026— it was just announced this week, it's a billion-dollar industry— the vinyl record industry has finally sold more records than any year since 1983. And those things mean that there's a lot of Tom, Dick, and Harry pressing plants kind of springing up and vying for business. So In some ways, the costs are rising of just the, the product, the physical product that's being produced, uh, the PVC that is inherent to the manufacturing process to make vinyl, the jackets, the cost of cardboard that goes into the jackets are all rising. But you also have in tandem a little bit of a heated race to do drawing new business from these pressing plants. So there's a lot of people vying for a small group of people's attention, the majors. There's only probably 5 major labels in the United States who are responsible for something in the order of, I don't know, like, you know, $750 million of those dollars are coming directly from the 5 majors and the rest is sort of independent private enterprise. We're probably going to be in that $250 million sort of space, definitely. But, you know, I think that the biggest thing that we face in terms of an obstacle is recognizing the quality partners. Who will take the extra time and be as dedicated to their craft in the manufacturing process as we are into the design process. So that looks like, in my case, the person who sniffs out bad quality versus good quality records, oftentimes having to reject a lot of the product that we receive in, in the vinyl manufacturing process. There's something called test pressings. They come up to you, you get to listen to the first 5 copies that are ever going to exist of that album, or test pressings. And, and most of the time I'm sniffing out for any imperfections and happy to be the person to reject. And that makes me a little bit of an uncommon nuisance to some of these manufacturing plants. But at the end of the day, they start to receive the accolades from the audience of, this thing sounds sonically superior. I can tell that something extra went into the QC, the quality control process of this, than some of the other junk I bought at a generic junk record store.

I love that, I love that. And yes, especially with the quality of the headphones, like you can pick up on those, those, those details and they matter.

I've noticed lately it's been a lot of just the music that is mastered for digital streaming platforms is mastered a completely different way than sort of a traditional analog process. If you looked at them as lines on a, on a chart, you would see it's much more angular lines coming down as you look at parabolic sort of shapes. And the analog sound waves are much softer and curvy and delicate. So what that turns into, if it's not mastered properly in the metalwork or something like that, is a very harsh S sound across, which is called sibilance in the music sort of audiophile language. You'd hear a record that would hear really harsh, snaky kind of S's across everybody saying S's, which doesn't sound so bad when you're talking country music and the songs are about Long Neck, Ice Cold Beer never broke my heart. But if you're talking Latinx music that has a lot of S's in it inherent to the words and the lyrics to the songs, you're going to hear those S's and they're going to come across really harsh. So that's just a fun fact that I'll throw out there as something that I have to spend an exorbitant amount of time paying closer attention to. Wow.

Now, when it comes to your messaging, your outreach, your marketing systems, what's been working well and where do you fill the gaps and frustrations?

I would say that the outreach is— this is community-driven, community-grown, and it really is risen up through— the efficacy comes from spending time within these communities and the spaces that we put releases for. So in our case, that's a lot of the times the hardcore and punk communities. They see us at the show, they see us in the middle of the mosh pit, like getting rowdy. Oftentimes we've done album releases for artists by standing on stage before the band is about to go on and saying, we're going to release this record. This is the only venue and the only time that you'll be able to buy this record. And the only place that you can get the record from is me in the middle of the pit. I'll see you in there in 5 minutes. When the audience has that kind of experience viscerally with a brand, they're really kind of doing that guerrilla-style marketing. They become the apostles and the people who are going out there telling their friends and, and spreading the word. And we're not in the business of going out and buying an audience or finding followers through a lot of paid sponsored advertising and things like that. Perhaps we could be, and perhaps we should be raising the word and awareness that way, but this has been such a labor of love and a passion for us that we don't want to lose any sort of enthusiasm in the process of trying to corporatize and, and scale and build. Like, we're building— in 10 years, we've released something in the order of 130 different projects. And, you know, like I've said, we've, we've sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of records in partnership with all these labels we've worked with who have been extremely kind to be generous and provide us the opportunity to work with these artists and trusted us with our capabilities and skill sets that we feel really good about the integrity and the ability to go sell to Walmart, but then also sell at that punk rock show is kind of what makes us unique and stand out, and especially now. So more in the world of the artist, the artists are seeking us out. We're not having to go solicit this and go pitch ourselves with our pitch decks. We just say we are here and we're going to tell your story really well.

That's awesome.

We show it to them.

Now, when it comes to AI and automation and using those tools, where have you guys found ways internally to utilize it, and where do you still see opportunity?

So my graphic design head of, head of all graphic design is in Switzerland. He got his degree in visual arts in, in Lisbon, Portugal, and, um, he is oftentimes tasked with a lot of scaling of AI in his day-to-day job of building catalogs, things like the Swiss brand or something like that. You know what I mean? We see these tools being leveraged to help summarize sellable goods and summarize features and benefits of a product. But when it comes to the nature of our business and the storytelling, the thing that AI has been the most useful for quite, quite simply is what we're doing right now and talking and having the ability to have the note-taker summarize and really capture key themes of a conversation I'll have with an artist. I might sit across the table from an artist for 90 minutes and have a discussion about their whole story and what they remember about recording that album and how it has impacted their life and shaped the person that they are today. And how the audience ultimately— how they want to be remembered by their audience. And I think AI is very useful for, for capturing those themes. But at the end of the day, I need AI also to leverage the automation of the typing of all of that stuff, because I used to do it all manually before there was this advent, like, in the last 2 years. Uh, I was basically relying on a really bad transcript from either a Zoom call or a voice memo that I then had to go hand transcribe. And I'm from the analog era, so I don't mind that process. I think I get good content and quality material out of synthesizing all of that myself and thinking about the key themes. But to be able to see all of those 12,000 words as a transcript instantly and then ask AI to Take it down to 6. Okay, 6 is too many. Let's take it down to 4,000 words. How does that look on the layout? Okay, what are the key things that you pulled out? Let me ask AI what they pulled out of it that might be missing from the storyline. That's really an important theme I don't want to miss. I think those things really just help to make the packaging communicate itself better.

Yeah, yeah, it's great filter. I can see that. Now, Jason, when you think about the next stages of the business, what are you most excited about?

I think there's a unique iconography that comes with certain brands that people hold dear, and longevity certainly has a lot to do with that. When you think about, in my community, punk bands with really great logos that stay on t-shirts for 30, 40, 50 years or something like that. I think I have always started with the Unoriginal Vinyl idea as being this brand that is working across multiple genres of entertainment media. So I've, I've worked on several documentary films as a producer, as an executive producer, and the logo shows up in those movies, you know what I mean? Or it shows up on the packaging of those movies, or it shows up on the visuals of those movies. Our favorite project we got to work on was a documentary on the history of ska music called Pick It Up: Ska in the '90s. And it talked about the boom of ska music that happened toward the late '90s. And I felt really proud to be able to produce not only the movie but the soundtrack. And so as the brand evolves, I want that robot to be a through line for people, a point of entry and access to saying, This feels like it's not just now Sotheby's, um, listing houses, i.e., the robot is only going to put out vinyl, but the Unoriginal Vinyl brand and the visual behind it represents curated tastemaking. Somebody's personal feelings went into this product, whatever this product is. It's not just products now, it's like, I want to wear that clothing, I want to be able to experience that interaction with that person at that show where they are recognizing the robot logo on somebody else's shirt and they kind of get it immediately. It's like if you saw somebody in the music realm, I would use Sub Pop as kind of a good template for that. Sub Pop has a lot of meaning for people as a brand now. It's not just where kind of Pearl Jam and the Seattle Nirvana of it all started, but it It represents a community. It represents an understanding amongst perfect strangers at the grocery store, and that's where I want to see it grow.

I love that. Now, when you look at your own journey, the wins, the mistakes, what lessons stand out to you, and what do you wish you understood sooner?

So agility and speed are really key in this industry because it is moving so fast. And the rules are changing. I'm launching a brand in the form of a band this year in 2026 that I'm really excited about. They're called Doc Turbo, and I love their music, and I'm thrilled about it. And I've built an entire structure for them to think about launching their band and their music videos and their album all in one year. And I have checked across all of my resources and and all of my contacts and all of the community for somebody to provide me with a template as to what this looks like. And the reality is everybody's answer is like, I had one a year ago, but it's too different now. And it will yet still be even more different in, um, a year's time from now. So that agility and that quickness, which with which you can capture and respond to trends, be a part of something without being really gimmicky and kind of like a copycat of it, but reacting to those moments that happen. It's just a matter of time before you are sort of the person that rises, or you're the brand that rises to the top of that viral moment. And so I think you have to kind of be agile to that. And I would also say the things that I've learned the hardest lessons from are being really upfront and clear with the expectations. Because coming alongside somebody as an advisor and as a fan, and with the fans in mind, there's an economic reality that you have to satiate when you're working in business with other business partners in order to move the business forward and the project forward. And in the artistic space within art communities and with band managers and egos and things like that. Sometimes those might look like conflict, but they're not. They're just, let's lay the groundwork down, let's lay the foundation for what this is going to cost. The economic reality of this project is X, Y, or Z. And if you don't like that, that's okay that we don't work together. I don't think I would have said that in my first 3 to 5 years. I think when you're starting, you're just glad to be here. You can't believe you got invited to the party. You know what I mean? And you're trying to do everything you can to not get kicked out of the party and hang long enough to make enough contacts where you get invited back to the next time there's a cool party.

I love that. The— just taking that real evaluation of the economic reality. It's like, this is what it is.

State it, state it, and say, this is our terms, this is our fees, this is what it's going to cost. Because we have maintained profitability and grown profitability every single year that we've been in business. And I don't know another record label/service provider like this who can claim that. Yeah, most people are putting up mortgages to their houses or risking everything on that one release, and they're heartbroken when it doesn't work out. We've got 7 or 8 projects working in tandem at any given time because we're making sure that our process is very simple. We get paid right on the front end of the project. We tell them how much it's worth to us, and if the project has extra hours or something unforeseen that comes along, we can negotiate a secondary write-off of that project. But we're, we're going to be in the beginning of this project. We're going to get all the assets to you, and then you own a lot of the sales and the, the recoup on their sales and the investments that you've made because it's your art. And we think those artists deserve to be paid for their art. So that's why they partner with us, because we're a front-of-house service. We get everything done and staged for them, and then they go and make their money on their tours selling their unoriginal vinyl produced variants of their records.

I love that. So last question, Jason, if you had to pick one constraint to focus on and solve over the next 90 days, what would it be?

One constraint. I can't use this word liberally, but I think the biggest constraint right now is there's a lot of fear in the market toward people's disposable incomes. And so there's this weird razor's edge that I think the entertainment industry and especially physical media purchasers try to balance on constantly between, is this good for my mental health to own this thing, or is this reckless and stupid for me to be buying this right now in the face of $7 gas prices? So yeah, to solve for that as best as we can as a brand and as an enterprise is to reinforce the value proposition. And the community can rise to the occasion in that case. And you create a campaign that just talks about like, for the love of vinyl, for the love of Unoriginal Vinyl, for the love of my favorite record that they've released. Start a hashtag, start a community swell, start a stories thing that happens that, you know, you get 30, 40 80, 90, 200 people talking about their favorite unoriginal vinyl release and reposting it, because then you start to create meaning over value. Yeah, the word value starts to take on a different meaning than I spent $40 on a record, my wife's gonna kill me, you know. It's like, I'm gonna hold this thing in 7 years from now and go back and read the essay that I forgot all about because it exists and it's mine. It's not the internet's, it's not the algorithm's, it's not some streaming service's thing to remove because the sync licenses for the, I don't know, Frey How to Save a Life album are suddenly inaccessible to the major labels. It's your thing that you get to hold forever. And so we have to reiterate the value proposition of their spends. Especially in tough economic times.

That makes sense. And I love the clarity you're bringing around that, that ownership aspect, where it's like, yeah, I can listen to it just like I can listen to music in a store, but doesn't mean I own it. If I'm sitting down at a restaurant, I can hear it, doesn't mean I own it.

But when I own the actual tangible asset, I, I don't think there's a single person out there, even if they love and utilize Spotify or Apple Music every single day, who feels a true sense of ownership. They might feel like they're tastemakers or they're curators of their own musical sort of storytelling, but they don't feel like they own anything. And yeah, you go to a brewery and you watch somebody spinning vinyl records and they're having a theme night, it's hip-hop from the '90s and they're spinning only '90s hip-hop at that brewery or something like that on a Tuesday night. Guess what? You don't just see that that DJ owns those records, everybody in the room suddenly feels like owners. Yeah, that's different than what's happening on streaming.

Yeah, so true.

Wow.

Well, Jason, thank you for coming on and sharing. Any final words for our listeners, other leaders, and entrepreneurs?

No, I think that passion drives all of this. Passion for who we are trying to serve. Our community is, is sort of this audience who are zealots for music, and they're zealots for their ownership, and they're zealots for the physical media and audiophile experience. And so that represents us. So we feel as we're good stewards of that to them. And if you seek us out, I think it's going to be a rewarding experience because you get to discover new music as a result, maybe in genres you wouldn't have thought about listening to before. But then also, uh, you get to feel like, great, there's other people out there like me who would— if I was given the chance to just drop everything and start my own record label, what would it look like? We want to be kind of a North Star for that. Say it's possible, go do it. Let's have more good quality reissues at Walmart than we have right now.

Yeah, I mean, it's a billion-dollar industry, so absolutely. And again, those who want to reach out and learn more, they can go to LinkedIn or unoriginalvinyl.com, anywhere else, social medias, you can send them.

Absolutely. Our, our Instagram is constantly hopping. We're always, always telling stories over there, so check us out there for sure.

Awesome. Thank you so much. And thank you to today's sponsor of the episode, Achieve Fractional, who which provides fractional executive leadership for growing businesses. And if you enjoyed today's episode, share it with a friend, with a colleague, with a music enthusiast. Reach out to Jason and the team, get your own music that you own, and we will see you on the next episode of the Achieve Podcast.