VNYL Inc., the online vinyl record subscription company with its warehouse logistics facility in downtown St. Louis, has been on an acquisition spree. Most recently, in May, that included purchasing a company with a similar business model, Vinyl Me Please.
But with the purchases have come a slew of angry, disgruntled customers, who believe they were shortchanged by the entities acquired by VNYL Inc. VNYL president Emily Muhoberac says, “Our role is to make sure that these customers, to the extent that we are able, get the records that they are owed. We didn’t create the issues that resulted in the former version of Vinyl Me Please not being successful, but when we signed on for this, to take on this company, it was certainly not because it was going to be easy.”
Keep up with local business news and trends
Subscribe to the St. Louis Business newsletter to get the latest insights sent to your inbox every morning.
CEO Nick Alt founded VNYL in 2014 with the idea to be “the Netflix of records,” allowing people to check out vinyl records by mail just like they would a DVD. Alt grew up in California listening to records, and even worked in a record store. (Alt moved to St. Louis in 2020, and like Muhoberac, remains based here.)
Despite his eagerness, Alt quickly learned that copyright laws prevent the renting of records. At that point, Alt pivoted and created a subscription service: VNYL promised to connect to subscribers’ personal Spotify, then send them records based on their taste in music. The target audience, according to the company’s website, is “Gen Z/ Alpha seeking affordable curated vinyl for new turntables.”
His timing was good: Interest in vinyl records began growing again after years of dominance by cassettes and CDs. Vinyl comprised a $1.4 billion industry as of last year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. VNYL says its software makes it unique in helping vinyl lovers acquire the records they want.
Other companies had similar ideas, but weren’t as successful as Alt—offering room for acquisitions. VNYL’s first, at the beginning of 2024, was VinylBox, a U.K-based record company that still sells a monthly subscription service. Next, VNYL purchased vinyl subscription company BandBox.
Alt currently operates VNYL and VinylBox under separate brands, which he plans to also do with Vinyl Me Please. The combined companies now have 20–30 employees, Muhoberac says.
Each has its own appeal: In addition to VNYL’s younger customers, Vinyl Me Please is for people with “vinyl collections seeking premium audio experiences,” he says, whereas VinylBox is “for millennials balancing aesthetic and specific collection needs.”
“Our philosophy is simple: not every collector is the same,” he explains. “Some customers want a Blue Note Anthology box set. Others are counting the days until the new Reneé Rapp LP drops. We’re building different clubs to serve different types of listeners—with pricing and curation that actually match their needs.”
With growth has come a series of controversies. The company’s first experience with angry customers came at a time when the world was in chaos. During the pandemic, as people opted for online shopping and staying at home to listen to music instead of going out, VNYL subscriptions boomed. But supply chain issues led to delays and complaints on Reddit.
“During the pandemic, we saw a surge in memberships and brought on a third-party shipping vendor we thought we could trust to help with getting people their curated vinyl,” Alt explains. “Unfortunately, they were fraudulently generating shipping labels without actually shipping orders, which really disrupted our operations. We reacted quickly to bring everything back in-house.”
Alt says the experience helped him learn how to deal with the disgruntled BandBox customers he inherited. Prior to the acquisition, he says, the company had continuously promised customers records, but wasn’t delivering.
Alt and Muhoberac sat down with SLM over coffee to explain how they’ve handled the controversies with an open, but careful, attitude. Muhoberac explains that she moved to St. Louis from her hometown, Branson, to attend Saint Louis University in 2010, and has been here since. Muhoberac had dreamt of being a musician growing up, but pursued business instead, making a vinyl company the perfect place for both her passions.
The two made the decision to send Alt into the fire on the Reddit pages. Usually, on Reddit, users have full anonymity, but Alt decided to use his real name. The idea was transparency: “Hey, just throwing my hand up here, I know you’re owed these records, just shoot me a note so I can help you,” as Alt explains.
Alt even made a website called “BandBox.Sucks” to allow customers to share what they were owed and then try to deliver it. (Part of the problem, he says, is that there were so many unfulfilled purchases to sort through: They developed an algorithm to go through and help match customers with what records they were owed, rather than having to go through each order individually.)
“We have a taste for making things right for these customers that had been so deeply wronged, but there’s thousands of customers in this situation,” he says. “It’s an insane amount of orders to kind of clean up and do that with.”
VNYL, now a parent company to Vinylbox and Vinyl Me Please, did not receive the initial payments for the orders from Vinyl Me Please. “We did not receive any revenue from the prior sales of these titles,” Muhoberac says. And so, Alt explains, they are not in a place to offer refunds for the records that were sold.
They did however, inherit boxes and boxes of records, which Muhoberac herself has been sorting through.
While Alt and Muhoberac say they have worked through their list of most of the wronged customers at BandBox, they acknowledge some people are still owed records.
“There are some we are still working through, as they’re not as simple as the earlier ones,” Alt says.
Alt and Muhoberac say they are using what they learned from handling the situation with BandBox to help Vinyl Me Please’s customers. But they warn that it will take time, and they need direct feedback from the community first. They pair recently held a nearly 90-minute AMA on Reddit, attempting to answer each question in real time.
“Vinyl customers deserve a white-glove experience and that’s far from what they’ve gotten recently,” Muhoberac said in a statement. “We intend to do that by getting back to the fundamentals of [Vinyl Me Please] with a great customer experience.”
Says Alt, “To me and to Emily, these customers are highly important consumers of culture and art, and to betray them in such a way to where you’re selling things that don’t ship, or you’re taking their money to pay for a different project, is so insulting to this great community. We have this sense that we need to serve them to try to make it right.”
He continues, “We’re so excited about the acquisition of this company, it’s for the love of music, that’s why we do this. We have big plans to grow this community and welcome a new generation of collectors, but first, we have to do right by the customers who built it. That means making things right, listening closely, and proving—through action—that VMP is still worth believing in.”
