Cameron Schaefer had big news. It was fall 2021, nearly a year after Schaefer took over as CEO of Vinyl Me, Please, the popular LP subscription club that by then had grown to become a veritable reissue label and respected music publication. Now, he claimed, the company was expanding into the record-pressing business, too.

The staff had assembled at Devil’s Thumb Ranch, a resort in the Rocky Mountains, 80 miles outside Vinyl Me, Please’s Denver office, for a corporate retreat. The team enjoyed several days of bucolic activities, such as archery and horseback-riding, in between meetings led by C-suite executives. During one meeting, Schaefer, a former air force pilot who employees say spoke like a tech mogul and was obsessed with NASA, gathered the team in a rustic lodge and unveiled a shiny PowerPoint presentation, using space metaphors to describe VMP’s ambitious future.

Schaefer informed staff that the company was going to open its own pressing plant inside a 14,000-square-foot structure in Denver’s River North Art District. The plan, as later recounted in a local magazine, was for the plant to produce up to two million VMP-branded records a year, specializing in 140- or 180-gram discs and alleviating the vinyl production delays of the early pandemic. There would even be a “listening lounge” and retail area showcasing VMP stock. Schaefer declared that the company, which was shipping nearly a million units a year at the time, would manufacture more vinyl than ever, and it would be among the highest-quality vinyl in the world.

Staffers buzzed with a mix of excitement and bewilderment: How could a modest company full of overworked employees sustain this kind of growth?

Within four years, they got their answer: It couldn’t. A month ago, VMP members were informed that the company was heading towards liquidation, its assets being managed by a third party, Vinyl Liquidators LLC, carrying out an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors. Now the company has been newly acquired by VNYL Inc., saving it from imminent bankruptcy and promising to restore it to good health.

But, after years of decline, restoring VMP to its former glory is a tall order. The company’s relationships with licensing partners have deteriorated due to unpaid debts. And its loyal customers, frustrated by unanswered questions and unfulfilled orders, are losing the faith.

“[VMP] had this thing that was really thoughtful and intentional and that you could build a community around,” says music fan Chris Arnold, a longtime member who has around 150 VMP titles in his collection. “They built that community and then somehow blew up that great little thing that was the basis of it all. As someone who’s helped shepherd companies through various crises, it’s just been sad to see the demise of this once great little brand.”

Most shockingly, Schaefer’s dream of a vertically integrated vinyl empire has collapsed. In 2024, the company’s board fired him and two other executives, Chief Financial Officer Adam Block and Chief Strategy Officer Rich Kylberg, then sued them for allegedly diverting VMP money to construction of the pressing plant without the board’s permission. (Kylberg declined to comment for this story; Schaefer and Block, who filed a countersuit against the company last July, did not respond to interview requests. The company itself also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

How did it all go wrong? Former employees say the once-beloved company crumbled in a haze of greed, corporate arrogance, old-fashioned misogyny, and self-serving executives who didn’t seem to understand what made VMP great. This account is based on interviews with nine former VMP employees or close associates, conversations with several longtime members, and analysis of internal documents and lawsuits, as well as contemporaneous press coverage.

“When They Were Good, They Were The Best”

At its peak, Vinyl Me, Please was beloved by customers for its thoughtful curation and boutique pressings of albums both classic and obscure. These pressings were often remastered and accompanied by newly penned liner notes by respected critics.

“When Vinyl Me, Please did it right, they got these mastering engineers who would do these audiophile-quality records,” says Chris Collette, a Virginia-based customer who fell in love with VMP after getting their rerelease of MF DOOM’s Mm..Food. “When they were good, they were, like, the best.”

Collette says that VMP’s record of the month selections expanded his tastes and made him fall in love with artists like BADBADNOTGOOD and Herbie Hancock. Collette gradually became active on the VMP Discord, finding a community of fellow vinyl junkies. “The employees, they interacted with us,” he says. “They were passionate about the music they were putting out. And they got us passionate about it as well.”

In the beginning, though, it was just two music nerds with an idea. In 2012, Matt Fiedler, a 25-year-old product manager who had grown up sifting through his dad’s record collection, realized that people wanted to get into vinyl but often weren’t sure where to start. He and co-founder Tyler Barstow decided to “take the idea of a record club and make it for the modern generation,” as Fiedler later told Forbes. According to company lore, the two maxed out their own credit cards to get the business going, buying and shipping vinyl to a dozen subscribers.

Their concept was simple: For $23 a month, subscribers would receive a handpicked “Record of the Month” in the mail. Early on, the founders came across a Tumblr called “Vinyl & Cocktails,” created by an Air Force captain from Laramie, Wyoming, named Cameron Schaefer. They paid Schaefer $400 a month to run VMP’s marketing and social media and began including customized cocktail recipes with each record.

Officially launched in early 2013, Vinyl Me, Please soon overcame its silly name and humble roots to ride the wave of the vinyl revival. By 2014, Fiedler had moved to Colorado for a tech job, but as VMP took off — growing to “a few thousand” subscribers by August of that year — he and Barstow quit their day jobs to run the business. In interviews, the two spoke eloquently about their passion for the vinyl format and the value of “getting people to slow down.”

Meanwhile, Schaefer left the military and joined VMP full-time. “I started travelling to New York and Los Angeles to build our industry relationships because we had none and none of us worked in the music industry,” Schaefer later recalled. “We didn’t know anything. We didn’t know what a distributor was.”

They were outsiders, but they were passionate, and subscribers were drawn to their eclectic curation. VMP’s monthly selections were chosen by music-loving humans, not algorithms; they ranged from canonized classics (Madvillainy, Odelay) to newer indie gems (TORRES’ Sprinter) to relatively obscure oddities (Hungarian guitarist Gábor Szabó’s 1968 album Dreams). In 2016, the company hired writer/editor Andrew Winistorfer as its sixth full-time employee and had enough cash to turn its site into an enviable music publication, publishing thoughtful essays from freelancers and a book called 100 Albums You Need In Your Collection.

Initially just a middleman between labels and customers — basically a Columbia Record Club for the millennial set — VMP soon became a reissue label in its own right, producing and releasing its own exclusive pressings. There was a limited-edition pressing of Anderson Paak’s Venice on hot pink vinyl that sold out in minutes; a 15th-anniversary reissue of Feist’s 2004 album Let It Die on heavyweight vinyl; a first-ever vinyl reissue of Gorillaz’s sophomore effort Demon Days. Labels eagerly partnered with VMP to offer exclusive variants of their own new releases, such as a pressing of Madlib’s 2021 album Sound Ancestors, limited to 2,000 copies.

To its credit, VMP anticipated the growing market for rap vinyl: In 2016, the company persuaded a skeptical Atlantic to let them release Young Thug’s Barter 6 mixtape on vinyl, selling out a run of 1,000 copies in an hour. “We were like, Oh, there’s a market for this right now that’s not being satisfied,” VMP head of A&R Alexandra Berenson later told Pitchfork.

By 2018, Vinyl Me, Please was touted as an inspiring industry success story, shipping around 40,000 to 45,000 units a month. The company had established a home base in Denver, with 25 full-time employees. That year, Fiedler was profiled in Forbes, which marveled at VMP’s growth rate and reported that the 30-year-old CEO had “grown his music company into a multimillion-dollar business in five years.” By 2020, the company had around 30,000 subscribers.

“The Inventory Issues Were Never Solved”

With all this success came growing pains.

One of the biggest and most vexing headaches for Vinyl Me, Please was inventory planning. Because production time for high-end vinyl pressing tends to be six months or more, VMP was constantly trying to guess how many subscribers it would have in six to eight months. But VMP’s membership grew at unpredictable rates, and the company never really knew how many Record of the Month copies to produce. (If customers didn’t want a particular Record of the Month, they could choose to swap for something else in the catalog. By 2020, VMP had expanded to include multiple Records of the Month corresponding with different genre “tracks” — rock, hip-hop, country, etc.)

“The inventory issues were never really solved,” says a former VMP employee, who, like most sources for this piece, spoke on condition of anonymity. “You’re trying to figure out what’s going to be popular with your main cohort of customers, and then going out to see if you can actually get the rights to make it. There’s always this fear of selling out. And not enough fear of being left holding thousands of records. I mean, that’s a hard prediction game to play.”

Some months, the company ordered too many records and wound up with substantial overstock. Executives didn’t have a legible plan for what to do with the extra records, which collected dust in a warehouse. VMP never established much of a physical retail program, and executives were reluctant to offload leftover stock on Amazon, believing it could harm the brand.

“We kept putting in these large orders and getting stuck with extra pressings,” the former employee says. “The issue was, the people picking the records were always a huge fan of the record they had picked. So there was always the inflation of, like, ‘No, I think this is gonna sell even more than you think.'”

Other months, the company didn’t order enough records to meet demand and essentially had to kick subscribers off their membership. That happened as recently as last September, when the Ramones’ Rocket To Russia was the Record of the Month.

Instead of solving the inventory problems, executives raised the subscription price three times in the last six years. VMP’s new president, Emily Muhoberac, now says VNYL Inc. has proprietary technology that can “predict demand on records that are coming out” and curb the company’s overpressing habit. Setting aside potential differences between people’s streaming habits and physical media purchases, using cold hard stats to determine how much stock to press could theoretically end the guessing game that hampered VMP. But relying on Spotify and Apple Music data to make curatorial decisions would also flatten the eclectic taste-making that VMP customers enjoyed and runs counter to the company’s crate-digging spirit.

Other recurring issues revolved around the company’s website, which in its early days crashed frequently during big launches. For a while, the plan was for the company’s head of engineering to refactor the tech stack and build out VMP’s own technology infrastructure. Then the head of engineering quit, and those plans went sideways because nobody at VMP seemed to understand how the back-end worked.

Finally, around 2019, the executive team decided to nix that idea and outsource VMP’s E-Commerce technology to Shopify instead. The migration was chaotic and under-resourced, and the launch of the new site was filled with bugs, leaving employees frustrated and demoralized.

“He Was A Piranha Let Loose In A School Of Nemos”

Insiders say the company culture at Vinyl Me, Please shifted around 2019, when Lloyd Starr, a former Beatport executive, became president and COO. “It felt like he was a piranha let loose in a school of Nemos,” says one former employee. “He came from a different world than the rest of us.” (Starr did not respond to a request for comment for this article.)

Indeed, Starr came from a tech background; what once felt like a company run by and for music nerds now began to feel like a high-pressure startup. Fiedler, the founder and CEO, was well-liked but relatively young and inexperienced in corporate leadership. He seemed happy to cede decisions to Starr. And Starr had plenty of ideas about how things should be run, how meetings should be structured, and so on.

Multiple ex-employees say Starr had a manipulative and vindictive streak, and that he sometimes targeted female employees for disproportionate criticism, policing their tones or styles of communication. “He was the one who would make me write emails to the whole company apologizing for dumb stuff,” says Neeru Ram, who worked at VMP in various roles, including E-commerce Manager, for nearly three years. “He pretty much gaslit me for the whole time he was my manager.”

Meanwhile, some staffers found it troubling that a company that profited from celebrating and reissuing extraordinary Black music — Sly And The Family Stone’s masterpiece There’s A Riot Goin’ On, Public Enemy’s revolutionary Fear Of A Black Planet, Alice Coltrane’s spiritually minded Transfiguration, to name a few Records of the Month — was predominantly run by white men. “There was talk about making some more diverse hires,” says a former employee. “But nothing ever came to fruition while I was there.”

By summer 2020, as the music industry scrambled to pledge support for the Black Lives Matter movement, Vinyl Me, Please had only one full-time Black employee. Several employees encouraged Fiedler to hire an outside expert to address diversity and inclusion issues at the company; he allegedly declined to do so. Some staffers also formed a small, makeshift DEI committee around then, but were told it was not company-sanctioned.

Between 2020 and 2022, two former employees, both women, separately filed discrimination lawsuits against Vinyl Me, Please. In one of these suits, former head of A&R Alexandra Berenson alleged that she “experienced a race-based hostile environment at VMP” and that VMP had paid her a lower salary than “some male employees who were at or below her level.”

According to court documents, Berenson complained about discrimination and retaliation at the company in a November, 2021, email to Cameron Schaefer and was fired by Schaefer less than a week later. The company reportedly settled the lawsuit earlier this year. Berenson declined to comment for this piece.

“It Felt Like A Boys’ Club”

Like many online, direct-to-consumer businesses, Vinyl Me, Please did well during the early COVID years. With concerts on pause, music fans stayed home and ordered records, and vinyl demand skyrocketed. In June, 2021, Billboard reported that VMP had seen a staggering 74% growth in membership in one year and boasted 80,000 active customers. Schaefer told the publication that teens and twenty-somethings were signing up and that, by 2020, VMP’s growth had “outpaced that of overall US vinyl sales.”

But behind the scenes, these were tumultuous, tense years during which female employees say they were routinely undermined, distrusted, and, in some cases, retaliated against by the men who ran the company. Sources say the power structure at VMP was largely gendered; the “director” level, which was largely women, did much of the hard work of keeping the business going while the men in the C-Suite took credit, traveled around, and generally reveled in the lifestyle of music-industry success. Former employees also say that high-ranking female employees were routinely excluded from executive team meetings and left out of decision-making processes.

“There were no women on leadership for over half the time I was working there,” Ram says. “It felt like a boys’ club most of the time.”

Another former employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity, corroborates this perception, “Ultimately, yes, it was a sexist workplace,” the former employee says. “My opinion wasn’t as valued as men’s in the room. I was told once that I was too emotional to have certain conversations, which was total bullshit.”

There was a pervasive sense that female employees were treated differently than men — that their ideas were not taken seriously, their perspectives not valued. Sources say that male executives could yell, cry, and throw tantrums, but women were reprimanded when they spoke too bluntly; they were told that they were “triggered” or being too “aggressive.”

“It was the worst job I’ve ever had, probably,” says Ram, who recalls being told during a performance review that she was “too direct speaking to people.”

“If a mistake were to happen from someone on leadership, it would kinda get glossed over: Oh, he didn’t mean it,” Ram adds. “If I made a small mistake, my manager would make me write an email to the whole company apologizing. And he would proofread my email and change my language to make it sound more apologetic.”

Ram’s trajectory at VMP, though unique, helps illustrate larger patterns at the company. She first joined as E-commerce manager in 2017. By 2019, Ram was so unhappy that she expressed a desire to quit. Her bosses persuaded her to stay and offered her a new title: Director of E-Commerce and Demand Planning. Ram says she told them, “OK, but I don’t 100% know how to do this,” and was reassured that they would provide external training, which never materialized. “There was no indication of any sort of expectations for me,” Ram says, “even though I would ask constantly.”

Less than a year later, Ram says she was fired. “The only reason they gave me was that it wasn’t a good fit,” she says. Though she moved on and found a new job, Ram says that the criticism she received at Vinyl Me, Please lingered in her mind for years.

“It really made me question who I am and how I carry myself, which I think is really fucked up,” Ram says. “Just made me question my own personality and like, can I work with other people? Are my ideas even valuable? Should I speak up? I carried that forward a little bit. Before that, I was a little bit of an overachiever. I really wanted to contribute and do the best job that I could. This experience kinda made me want to turn into Peter from Office Space.

“They just treated me like shit,” Ram adds. “A lot of those things lingered. It made me a little bit distrustful of, like, men.”

“We Are Geniuses Of Vinyl”

Was Vinyl Me, Please a victim of its own success?

In 2020, the company shipped around 500,000 LPs; in 2021, that number nearly doubled. But executives seemed to take all the wrong lessons from this growth. Instead of recognizing that extraordinary circumstances were inflating the vinyl market, they apparently believed the line would keep going up — that VMP’s success was, in essence, a done deal.

“Instead of figuring out, how do we operate in a world where people can go out again, I think they took those two years as, We are geniuses of vinyl. And we know everything,” says a former staffer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “And they kept spending Vinyl Me, Please’s money like we were never going to have a downturn.”

During VMP’s boom years (roughly 2017–2022), sources say executives were profligate with spending. There were expensive brand activations, company retreats, long-term contracts with industry consultants that employees found mystifying; there were periods when managers were told to hire, hire, hire, then suddenly warned that they might have to do layoffs. “Money was going out the door and that should have been questioned more,” says one former employee. “We spent a ton of money every month to produce an unboxing video of people pulling the record out of the box and playing it.”

At one point, Kylberg, the Chief Strategy Officer, helped his stepson land a salaried position at VMP; multiple ex-employees say the stepson routinely skipped meetings and seemed to do little work yet received a raise and earned more than some long-term employees. “He literally did nothing,” one former staffer says.

Yet none of these expenses compared to the 14,000-square-foot elephant in the room: the pressing plant. It’s not clear when executives first hatched this idea. Early on, those who spearheaded it kept it secret internally and used codenames to refer to it. In June, 2021, Chief Financial Officer Adam Block reportedly had NDAs drafted, ensuring that the plant would not be mentioned to anyone but himself, Schaefer, Kylberg, and an unnamed “fourth executive.”

Notably, that list did not include Fiedler or Barstow. The way court documents tell it, the company’s founders were blissfully unaware of the plans being set in motion by the MBA-holding executives steering the ship.

The Plant Keeps Coming Up Again

For years, Matt Fiedler and Cameron Schaefer had been close friends and colleagues. Then their relationship unraveled in dramatic fashion.

Fiedler had always seemed more down-to-earth, more cautious. “He just had decision paralysis and nothing was getting done,” one former employee says. Schaefer was the flashier and more charismatic executive. He relished the attention that came with VMP’s success and, according to people who worked for him, seemed eager to be perceived as cool within the music industry. He idolized Elon Musk and Nike — his pillars of corporate success.

“Despite his bad choices, he was a fantastic leader in that he really made people believe in what we were doing,” the former employee says. “We really thought we were gonna change the world with all of the music we were putting out. He was so passionate about it.”

Eventually, in November 2020, Schaefer replaced Fiedler as CEO. The rumor within the company was that Schaefer had gone to the Board of Managers behind Fiedler’s back and convinced them to give him the top job; Fiedler, in turn, lost his job but became chairman of the board.

Not until a year later — in November 2021 — did Schaefer, Block, and Kylberg propose to the board their plan for building a pressing plant as an “independent business entity that would have an ownership structure that was separate from VMP’s ownership structure,” court docs say. The board narrowly approved their resolution, with a four-to-three vote. However, the company’s lawsuit alleges that the executives misled the board about how the plant would be funded and concealed how much of VMP’s money they had already directed to the project. In other words: muddying the waters between company expenses and personal gain.

Among other things, the lawsuit alleges that the three execs “used VMP resources to pay nearly two hundred thousand dollars” forin record-pressing equipment; that they “used VMP resources to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for leases for the Pressing Plant”; and that they concealed these expenditures from the board.

To serve as general manager of the plant, Schaefer and his colleagues selected Gary Salstrom, an industry veteran who’s been pressing records since 1979. But, according to the suit, VMP was paying Salstrom’s substantial salary (later reported to be $156,000) and bonuses, not the plant, even though “substantially all of Salstrom’s time and efforts were devoted to the Pressing Plant.” (Note: Salstrom is not a defendant in the suit. He was not available for interview for this article.)

Now, here’s the confusing wrinkle: Wasn’t the pressing plant supposed to be owned by VMP? That’s the impression Schaefer gave employees when he announced it at that company retreat. And that’s the impression he gave a reporter for the Denver Post, who in 2022 interviewed Schaefer for an article headlined “Vinyl Me, Please to build a 14,000-square-foot ‘audiophile’ record plant, listening room in RiNo.” A sign on the plant’s exterior even bore the VMP logo.

But, according to the lawsuit, the plant was actually an independent entity from the beginning, and Schaefer, Block, and Kylberg “proposed that each of them would have an ownership interest in the Pressing Plant.” Adding to the confusion, they intended to name the plant Vinyl Media Pressing — different name, same acronym. Then, in March 2022, the three executives established a “Customer Agreement” between the plant and VMP, obligating VMP to provide the plant with “a total deposit of $1,500,000.”

“Outwardly, I was given the directive to make it seem like we were the same business,” says a former VMP employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But then internally, [Schaefer] was like, ‘No, it’s not the same thing.’ It felt shady.” Gradually, delays in opening the plant compromised the business of VMP, which could not press the records it had committed to pressing at the plant. “So then we were having to announce delays to our customers and just letting down our customer base,” the ex-employee says. “It was like an avalanche.”

Construction of the plant dragged on for several years. The lawsuit alleges that “VMP’s operating results declined throughout 2023 and into 2024” because executives were devoting “substantially more time and energy to the Pressing Plant than they did to perform their responsibilities at VMP.” In mid-2023, Starr, whose LinkedIn profile lists him as a “co-founder” of Vinyl Media Pressing, left Vinyl Me, Please to lead Discogs.

By late 2023, the pressing plant still wasn’t able to press records, VMP was falling behind on pre-orders, and board members were growing suspicious. According to the lawsuit, the board began to investigate the business and financial tanglings between VMP and the plant and subsequently fired all three executives in March 2024, suing them that May.

Several months later, Block and Schaefer countersued the company, arguing that they were unjustly terminated and owed monetary damages and six-figure severance payments. In their countersuit, Block and Schaefer alleged that VMP had fired them to avoid paying severance and that the lawsuit against them was being “pushed and paid for” by a wealthy board member “who has, in the past, openly boasted to these Defendants that he has in bad faith fired and then filed meritless lawsuits against former employees of other companies that he owns.”

Surprisingly, just as VMP seemed to be entering its death throes, the plant — renamed Paramount Pressing & Plating — finally sputtered to life last year. According to the Denver Post, the manufacturing facility “re-formed as an independent business,” with Salstrom as general manager and musician David Rawlings as its primary investor. Schaefer and Block are no longer involved, according to their LinkedIn profiles. Kylberg’s own LinkedIn describes him as “retired.”

“People would ask about Vinyl Me, Please, and it was very confusing,” the plant’s head of operations, who also happens to be Kylberg’s wife, told the Denver Post. “Now, not so much.”

“There Is A Sense Of Mourning”

In early May, Vinyl Me, Please members received an unusual email from the company.

“[W]e wanted to let you know that on April 4, 2025, the Company commenced an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors (ABC),” the email stated. “The Assignee has undertaken a process involving the sale of the business. We expect that at the conclusion of the sale process, the buyer of the Company’s business will try to resolve outstanding and future orders where feasible.”

Those who’d been paying attention — reading headlines, tracking the company’s woes on Reddit — weren’t surprised. The writing was on the wall. Shipments were being delayed and pre-orders weren’t being fulfilled. Customers struggled to get responses from customer service. “I had to wait over a year for one record,” says Chris Collette, the longtime subscriber. “I ordered it in January, 2024, and got it this past January.”

After that, Collette stopped dropping money on releases that weren’t already in stock. He doesn’t plan to renew his membership. “It was a slow decline,” he says. “Vinyl Me, Please was sort of built as a community. They had events you could go to. And all that’s kind of disappeared over time. There is a sense of mourning that this was one time a really fantastic service. A great club. A great product. It’s a shame to see it go away.”

Well there it is, Vinyl Me Please has been sold to a liquidator. Notice from r/vinylmeplease pic.twitter.com/VtRsfJMGkX

— Vinyl on Sale (@vinylonsale) April 28, 2025

Last year, after Schaefer was pushed out, longtime employees sensed that the company was doomed and wondered if VMP would even be around in a week. Then Fiedler returned as Interim CEO, and some breathed a sigh of relief, hopeful that he would keep VMP afloat instead of getting distracted by a pressing plant.

But the damage wasn’t reversible. Fiedler informed some employees that the company was several millions of dollars in debt. “It was kind of like we were running uphill with 20-pound backpacks and not getting anywhere,” a former employee says. “Everything we were trying to do was to salvage the business, but we were just stuck between a rock and a hard place because we didn’t have the money to pay the labels to get the licenses released so that we could press the records that we had already sold to people. It was crazy.”

To staffers, it felt like trying to bail water on a ship that was already underwater. Multiple rounds of layoffs followed. On his LinkedIn profile, Fiedler notes that he “led organizational restructure, reducing overhead by 80%+.” Meanwhile, the legal drama dragged messily on, with motions, countersuits, and counterclaims flying back and forth.

In February 2025, VMP stopped releasing new Records of the Month. Instead, the company said, members “will receive a carefully curated selection from our inventory.” With its financial woes, VMP simply couldn’t afford to keep doing business the old way.

In March, the company laid off most of its remaining employees, some of whom had worked there for nearly a decade. Sources say nearly everyone got the axe, save for the fulfillment team. Meanwhile, VMP’s once-vibrant online publication morphed into a grim repository of AI-generated slop. Then came word of imminent liquidation. Longtime customers assumed the company was toast.

Instead, in a surprising twist, VMP found a last-minute buyer to save it from the brink of bankruptcy. On Tuesday, Variety reported that VNYL Inc. — which already owns two competing record clubs, VinylBox and the VNYL brand — had purchased Vinyl Me, Please and intends to “clean up a lot of the shortcomings that have been pushed onto customers.”

“[W]e had a bidding war with a couple other parties,” VNYL CEO Nick Alt told Variety. “The other parties were not as interested in the continuity of the service, but we were the ones that were basically saying, ‘Hey, this brand still has a lot of goodwill and a lot of great, engaged customers.'”

But most of the employees who made VMP special have been dismissed, and, judging from Reddit, VMP members are hopeful yet skeptical of VNYL’s rescue attempt. VinylBox’s previous acquisition of flailing record club Bandbox — which left both Bandbox customers and indie rock royalty Alvvays complaining of unfulfilled orders — does not inspire their confidence.

“The announcement brings me a small amount of hope that the two records VMP still owes me will eventually be sent, but I have little more faith than that,” Collette says. “VNYL’s track record of buying Bandbox and VinylBox has been underwhelming, to say the least. A lot of Bandbox subscribers are still waiting on orders more than a year later.”

Will he consider renewing his VMP subscription under new ownership? “My subscription to VMP officially ended on June 1 and that’s the end of that chapter for me,” Collette says.

“Ultimately, It’s Probably Ego…”

So, what was VMP’s undoing? How could such a thriving company fall so hard? And can an acquisition really reverse course?

Sources point to a combination of greed, hubris, and bad fiscal decision-making. “Ultimately, it’s probably ego,” says one anonymous former employee. “Isn’t that always the case? Just over-picking. Overbuying inventory.”

While multiple ex-employees believe that the pressing plant really did swallow up a major chunk of VMP’s resources, sealing its fate, others say the company was incompetently run long before the plant reared its cash-guzzling head. They paint a portrait of a savvy, music-loving startup that grew faster than its owners could handle, spent its resources recklessly, and too often treated workers as disposable.

“I think the people that were running Vinyl Me, Please were so consumed with the glitz and the glamour of the music industry and doing quote-unquote ‘cool shit,’ they really didn’t care about the people that were making that happen at all,” Neeru Ram says. “They just really didn’t care about the employees at all.

“It just blew up so quickly,” she adds. “And it wasn’t like, Let’s take a beat and try and build an infrastructure to support where we are now. It was like, No, let’s just keep trying to make it bigger and bigger.”