At the beginning of the year, our co-founder Ursina Beerli was interviewed on Monocle Radio: Entrepreneurs. She shared the vision behind Precious Sound, what we have been up to, and where we are going. On this special edition of On The Record, we present to you the conversation between Ursina and Monocle host, Tom Edwards.

You're listening to Eureka on Monocle Radio, brought to you by the team behind the entrepreneurs, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies, and fresh ideas in global business. I am Tom Edwards. Today’s show is going platinum. Ursina Beerli is the co-founder and CEO of Precious Sound, a Zurich-based company that makes playable records using recycled precious metals to create enduring artifacts fans can treasure. The records are cut and pressed using a patented process at a production base in Karlsfeld, just outside Munich. And it's a booming business. Luxury records are in demand; sales of vinyl, CDs, even the humble cassette tapes are proving to be much more resilient than most earlier music industry projections. So, how do you turn silver, gold, and platinum into playable discs? Well, here is Ursina with more on the start of the journey and the brand's first partnerships.

So, we are a young company that has developed the first truly playable gold records in the world. You may think, "Oh, but haven’t gold records been done before?" And that's actually what inspired us, because several years back we learned that all of those gold, diamond, platinum record awards that you see on the walls of artists, their managers, their mixing engineers; those are not playable. And often, it's actually not even the album that it's celebrating.

 

Making the stamper, one of the many steps in our production process.  

There's a story—I don't know how much of it is true or not—that John Densmore of The Doors actually broke into one of his gold records because he was looking at the album and it didn't look like the right number of tracks. There wasn't, you know, the right number of spacings. And so he opened it up and it ended up being highly, highly distorted and it was a reading of a poem.

So, not at all the music that it was supposed to celebrate. And that really inspired us to say, "Well, we know precious metals. We know this is going to be hard. Metals behave very differently from vinyl. But could we make it happen?"

And now, we are ready to announce our very first official collaboration, which is with Third Eye Blind, to bring out their song "Jumper" on the playable gold records as well as playable silver records.

 

Our Third Eye Blind x Precious Sound record in gold.

There's a kind of resurgence of vinyl if you look just at the data, but what you see across different fandoms, not just music fandom is people are looking for tactile experiences, for analog experiences. The activity that you're doing when we listen to music on our phones, which I'm sure for most of us is the majority of the time, you know, it's background music, it's while we're driving, while we're cooking dinner. But sometimes you want to have that special experience and I think that's why we've seen I think now 17 years of growth in the vinyl industry.

And so I think respecting that experience, and that's also opened up the more high-end segment or the more premium segment in that space. We've seen wonderful box sets come out. we've seen wonderful collaborations in terms of redoing album art, celebrating album art. So I think there's a lot there for the music fans to enjoy.

When we hand someone one of our records or when they experience our records for the first time, “wow, it's heavy, it's weighty”. They are a copper core coated in silver, that's .99 silver, which is 24 karat silver. And we have the equivalent in gold as well.

And then we are able to make pure gold as well and pure silver. Obviously there, we're then talking about a very, very limited number of units.

And it is a luxury product. And a luxury product is different. We hope that that will give that experience of luxury, that experience of truly being unique, not just because the product is made with a patent or because it's made with very precious rare metals or that it's a limited edition, but that the experience itself is unique.

We're from outside the music business. So, we, a little bit over a year ago, started making lists of bands and artists, often that we loved, but also ones that we thought would fit well with our product. That might be artists that have dared to do something innovative in the past, artists that have those songs that you remember from high school, that you danced to at your wedding, that are very meaningful.

And the same happened with Third Eye Blind. They were on our list. We tried to find out who their team might be, which is not easy in the music business. People like to be very protective of their contact information. And we were able to get in touch with their manager and team at Megaforce, and actually within, I think, one or two weeks of being in touch, they were on board. So it was very fast decision-making on their side. They knew they wanted to do this and then we said, "Okay, let's talk about the songs.”And “Jumper” was just so obvious.

For many of us who listened to Third Eye Blind growing up, myself included, you know, they’re a band for me that I associated with that time when I first learned to drive and my CDs in my car included the self-titled album. When Stephan Jenkins wrote “Jumper”, he wrote it as if addressing a friend who had jumped off the Coronado Bridge and what he would have liked to say to this friend. And he himself will say, it was written as a dark song, but over time, performing the song, it has become a message of light. And when you see Third Eye Blind performing this song, the fans are singing along, they're, you know, they're holding out the microphone on the “I would understand” and everyone is screaming, jumping, because it's such an important message.

It's incredible that this is the first song we will be bringing out to fans.

 

Cleaning the Precious Sound record

We had this idea after visiting a wonderful record player company in Austria and somehow we came back and suddenly we thought, "Oh, we saw these stabilizers and they're made of metal, but they just don't look that exciting when they're on top of your vinyl record on your turntable. Could we make this fun?"

That's how the idea came about to make a vinyl record stabilizer, which is pretty much a weight that goes on top of your vinyl when you're playing your record to help weigh it down or stabilize it, so that you have better sound playback. And what we did is the flat top part of what kind of looks like a puck is interchangeable and so we have three Beatles motifs.

We admittedly pitched another classic rock band first because we thought we would never get to the Beatles and our contact said to us, "You know, I think you should talk to the Beatles about this. Wouldn't it be fun?” And this was summer of last year and they said, "Remember, it's the 60th anniversary of the Beatles coming to New York and landing at JFK on February 7th of this year and so wouldn't it be a perfect moment to celebrate the Beatles?" So that's what we ended up doing. We started off wanting to have fun with this and it has been a lot of fun.

So I think our hopes and dreams is that we become a brand that artists approach to say “we would love to work with you”. So that partnerships come driven from the artists that feel it's a good fit for them.

 

Our Limited Edition Beatles Stabilizer Set 

We have a few more projects in the works. So there should be some additional fun exciting announcements coming up. I can't speak about those yet, but if you think about some of the songs that might have come out in 1974 and are celebrating 50th anniversaries, there's some very good music in that time frame. So we hope to make a few more exciting announcements and launch some more records this year as well as another stabilizer set that we're already working on.

In terms of people reaching out to us, or finding out more about us. We have a website at PreciousSound.com. We're also active on Instagram quite a bit, which is a bit more fun. And people can reach out to us anytime. We have our information very available because I think a key aspect for us is being good partners and part of being good partners is being good communicators and being able to chat and brainstorm and work together.

That was Ursina Beerli, the co-founder and CEO of Precious Sound. You can learn more about the project by heading to PreciousSound.com. And that's it for this episode of Eureka.