Vinyl record-pressing business proposed for downtown Asheville

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A new vinyl record-pressing plant may land in downtown Asheville, according to city construction permits.

A construction permit filed Monday asks for “early assistance” for a proposal to build a music cafe complete with a restaurant, bar, as well as a record pressing facility and record store. The project name is listed as “AVL Vinyl.”

The location is 14 O.Henry Ave. That location is known as the Asheville Citizen-Times building. The newspaper’s corporate parent, Gannett, sold the three-story newspaper building to David and Nathan Brown, a father-and-son team in Asheville last year for $5.25 million. The newspaper plans to remain on one floor of the building, but the developers said at the time of the sale that they were looking for new ground-floor tenants while developing the top floors for residential use.

There’s a website for AVL Vinyl, but it doesn’t have any content yet. A website description for AVL Vinyl states: “Pioneered by a small group of local music industry vets, AVL-VINYL aims to offer full service vinyl record pressing for music groups of all sizes by 2019.”

The resurgent popularity of vinyl records has been well-documented over the past several years, despite gains in the popularity of streaming music sites like Spotify. Millennials are driving the renewed interest in records.

We’ll keep tabs on this story as it develops.