When the startup Tiny Vinyl launched last year, its product was simultaneously more than a century old and brand new. The Nashville-based company had taken the vinyl record and shrunk it down to the handheld size of just 4 inches in diameter, and made it possible to play a single song on each side on most conventional record players. At the time, Neil Kohler, the cofounder, told me that turning the vinyl format into a miniature version was a feat of engineering. “The physics of playing vinyl at that scale were not trivial to overcome,” he said.
Now, Tiny Vinyl has taken on the challenge of shrinking the other essential piece of the record format: the record player.
This month, the company will begin selling the Tiny Vinyl Player—a very small record player—through its exclusive partnership with Target. Priced at just $49.99, it is a stand-alone player for 4-inch Tiny Vinyl records, with built-in stereo speakers set in a faux leather clamshell cabinet. Sitting somewhere between a collector’s display piece and a kid-friendly entry level device, the Tiny Vinyl Player is a cutesy miniature version of a familiar format.
The idea for a tiny record player has been in the works since the earliest days of the company, which was founded in 2023 by Kohler, a toy industry veteran, and Jesse Mann, a music festival producer and promoter. Since partnering with Target to sell Tiny Vinyl records at its 1,800-plus U.S. stores last fall, the company has pressed more than 1 million records. “As soon as we had product in the market, we started getting inbound inquiries about a player,” Kohler says. “And then Target asked, would you guys make one?”
That set Kohler and Mann on a yearlong journey to figure out how to shrink the record player. Some parts, like a relatively small needle cartridge, were readily available from suppliers, but many other components had to be made from scratch. The company had to work with suppliers to create its own tone arm, platter, and calibration tool to get the small discs to spin at the standard 33 revolutions per minute.
“The tooling was a little challenging, to be able to get all of those components together,” Mann says. “But we really wanted to make it feel like it was something that you would be proud to display.”
There was one big constraint: the price point. “The turntable buying team at Target gave us some insights and said, look, we really think since this is going to only play Tiny Vinyl, it probably needs to be an opening price point in our turntable assortment. It can’t be a $150 tiny vinyl turntable when we’re selling a $99 Victrola opening price point turntable,” says Mann. “So we designed it and engineered it to be $50 retail.”
That naturally led to some limitations. A player the company loaned Fast Company had a slight but noticeable wobble in its playback, adding an extra twang to the tiny Creedence Clearwater Revival record they’d sent along with it. Kohler says that wobble will likely go away over time as the player gets used more, but he concedes that the Tiny Vinyl Player is not intended to be a hi-fi experience. “We tried to design a turntable that could retail for $50. It is not an audiophile’s [turntable], like, put your headphones on and listen to ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ in the dark.”
The player has built-in stereo speakers, which are convenient if a bit tinny. It’s also capable of connecting to other speakers via Bluetooth, which can offer a bigger sound. But the point of the player is less about the quality of the audio than the record playing—and record collecting—experience.
Since its founding, Tiny Vinyl has targeted the record collector market, offering a cute object fans could put on display or buy at the merch table during a concert. With the release of the Tiny Vinyl Player, the company is also releasing a miniature storage crate for collectors, and a 4-by-4-inch display frame for the roughly 50% of vinyl record buyers who do not even have turntables—tiny or otherwise—on which to play them.
The tiny record player adds some depth to that collector experience, and is a visually engaging piece of hardware. “We wanted to make sure it wasn’t a toy and it didn’t feel like a toy. The cabinetry is kind of unique and it definitely feels hefty and has some substance to it. That was as important to us as making sure that it played audio at a B-plus or better quality.”
For even the biggest fan, it’s hard to imagine the Tiny Vinyl Player taking over as the music player of choice. But Kohler and Mann say that’s not the point. Rather, the player is an attempt to broaden the ways music fans connect with artists and their music, as well as to put their fandom on display. For people accustomed to paying $50 for a concert T-shirt, the $50 Tiny Vinyl Player might just be another relatively affordable way to be a music fan.
“We’re trying to establish something rather than compete with other things that are out there,” Mann says.
