Alan North
As the chaotic rollout of President Donald Trump’s tariffs last week rattled the nerves of companies across nearly every industry in America and around the globe, one small business owner in the San Francisco Bay Area was trying to figure out if he could finagle his way through a loophole.
Eric Mueller of the punk rock record label Pirates Press was wondering whether he could classify his company’s records—which include colored vinyl releases by bands like Rancid, the Slackers, and Cock Sparrer—as “informational material.” Doing so would allow the records to be imported from overseas pressing plants without incurring a tariff under a little-known law.
More than anything Mueller is hoping to find peace of mind. “The volatility is insane,” he says. “We had a couple dozen shipments leave in the past few days, and we’re trying to figure out what we’re supposed to bill people!”
The Trump administration’s erratic on-again, off-again approach to tariffs is seeding general confusion throughout the record industry. Manufacturers and brokers, mom-and-pop and otherwise, are aligned in recognizing that any additional costs incurred by tariffs will ultimately be passed onto consumers. Even a 10 percent increase incurred by Trump’s (as of this moment) revised, across-the-board tariffs could make a significant dent in an industry already negatively impacted by inflation and rising costs. Recent industry estimates suggest that the proposed tariffs could jack up costs by 24 percent and could lead to more production being offshored. Mueller estimates that a new vinyl record may retail for $30 to $40, up from $15 to $25 just a few years ago.
“Look at the math: Peoples’ incomes haven’t gone up by that much,” he says. “The industry is definitely receding. Factories are struggling. If the cost of records goes up, it’s not a good thing. It’s not going to help anybody.”
But the industry’s potential, label-saving exception comes from the Berman Amendment, which provides exemptions to “informational materials” like books, films, tapes, CDs, and other media containing material protected under the First Amendment, regardless of their country of origin. Passed by Congress in 1988 and authored by Democratic Representative Howard Berman, the amendment was one of the earliest obstructions in lawmakers’ attempts to ban TikTok, with a Washington Post headline calling it “an obscure hurdle.”
“What this exemption does,” Mueller explains, “is make sure there’s still a free flow of information.”
A representative of the Recording Industry Association of America, a trade organization representing the US music industry, tentatively confirms that the “current understanding” is that imports of records are excluded from Trump’s tariffs.
For the record industry, that’s good news. Despite the uptick in homegrown manufacturing over the past decade, which has followed from the resurgent popularity of vinyl records themselves, a great many of the albums stocking shelves of record stores are manufactured abroad. Czech-based conglomerate GZ Media is the largest record presser in the world, churning out about 70 million records a year. Under the current Berman Amendment carve-outs, all of those records could be imported Stateside without being impacted by massive tariffs. But that doesn’t mean the US vinyl industry is out of the woods. (A spokesperson for GZ declined to speak to WIRED, saying that the company has “decided not to comment on topics related to politics or tariffs.”)
