The Plant Behind RSD
Goldmine toured Microforum Service Group and reported it is Record Store Day’s pressing plant — a full‑service vinyl and CD manufacturing facility covering about 60,000 square feet. The piece profiles the plant’s role in producing the limited runs that fuel the event’s collector market. (goldminemag.com)
Record Store Day’s limited-run records are being made at Microforum Service Group, a 60,000-square-foot vinyl and compact disc plant Goldmine toured in an article published April 11. (goldminemag.com) Goldmine identified Microforum as “Record Store Day’s pressing plant” and said the facility handles vinyl and compact disc manufacturing, printing and album-cover design under one roof. Microforum’s own site says it offers mastering, cutting, electroplating, pressing and in-house packaging. (goldminemag.com) (microforum.ca) That matters a week before Record Store Day 2026, which falls on Saturday, April 18. Record Store Day’s official site says the event began in 2008 to celebrate independent record stores and now spans about 1,400 stores in the United States and thousands more internationally. (recordstoreday.com) (recordstoreday.strictlydiscs.com) The event runs on scarcity. Record Store Day’s official release pages and retailer guides say this year’s list includes more than 350 limited-edition titles that are sold through participating independent stores rather than directly by the organization. (recordstoreday.com) (wildcountry.fm) A plant like Microforum sits in the middle of that chain because vinyl manufacturing is a multi-step process. Microforum says it can take a record from audio mastering to lacquer cutting, metal plating, pressing, printed jackets and final packaging without sending the job to multiple vendors. (microforum.ca) (vinyl-pressing-plants.com) That setup helps explain how Record Store Day can deliver colored vinyl, picture discs and elaborate sleeves on a fixed calendar. Microforum says it offers 12-inch long-playing records, colored vinyl and custom packaging, while Goldmine described the plant as full-service. (microforum.ca) (goldminemag.com) Microforum is based in the Toronto area and says it has spent more than 25 years in the business. Its site also says the company still manufactures compact discs, digital versatile discs and Blu-ray discs alongside records, with glass mastering, injection molding and offset printing in-house. (microforum.ca 1) (microforum.ca 2) Record Store Day has long turned pressing capacity into a bottleneck for labels and stores because every exclusive title has to be finished before one Saturday in April. Goldmine’s tour puts a specific factory behind that annual rush: the place stamping the records that collectors will line up for on April 18. (goldminemag.com) (recordstoreday.com)
