Denver vinyl company exec lands on Billboard’s 40 Under 40

Cameron Schaefer, CEO of Denver’s fast-growing Vinyl Me, Please record club, has landed on Billboard’s prestigious 40 Under 40 List.

Schaefer, 39, has led the 10-year-old Vinyl Me, Please through a remarkable period of growth and publicity, including the April 2022 announcement of a purpose-built, 14,000-square-foot record pressing plant and lounge in the River North Art District (already open and operating at 1752 Platte St.).

Billboard lauded Schaefer as one of the engines powering the “the live sector’s post-shutdown resurgence.”

“In 2013, the former U.S. Air Force captain pivoted to selling music as part of Vinyl Me, Please’s founding team,” Billboard wrote. “By mid-2021, the company had 80,000 mail-order customers for its premium vinyl releases, and it keeps growing…”

How is that possible for a record company that doesn’t sign artists — or book and host concerts?

“At the core of our business is the idea of exploring music together,” Schaefer told The Denver Post in an April interview. “So everything that we do, whether it’s a vinyl box set or a piece of editorial in our online magazine or a playlist, is all focused on that idea of exploration.”

Schaefer is both the beneficiary of and a driving factor in vinyl records’ resurgence, which last year found sales of vinyl LPs outstripping CDs for the first time since 1987. New and longtime listeners pushed vinyl to its highest retail profile in decades, making up about 70% of all physical music sales (the other 30% was mostly CDs).

As Schaefer knows, these are not just one-off pressings from indie labels; multiplatinum pop stars Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, and Olivia Rodrigo led vinyl sales in 2022, according to data from the Recording Industry Association of America, resulting in $1.2 billion in vinyl revenue.