Nearly thirty years in the music business, much of it as a Memphis studio engineer, taught Brandon Seavers what a record is supposed to feel like before he ever had to manufacture one. Memphis Record Pressing didn’t even start as a vinyl company. Brandon co-founded it with Mark Yoshida in the 1990s as a CD and DVD manufacturer, and the turn came in 2013, when Fat Possum Records asked if they could press records. Neither had ever pressed vinyl before. They said yes anyway.

That bet turned MRP into one of the largest vinyl manufacturers in North America. “We didn’t even know how to press a record when we started,” Brandon has said. “We just figured it out. That’s very Memphis.” He’s stayed just as rooted off the factory floor, serving the Bartlett Area Chamber of Commerce and the Recording Academy’s Board of Governors, while MRP backs Music Export Memphis and the Memphis Listening Lab.

“You can’t come to Memphis waiting for the city to change you,” Brandon has said. “You come to Memphis to change it.” Every record pressed on that factory floor still carries the city’s name, proof Memphis’s music history is still being made, not just visited.