South Florida Sun-Sentinel Palm Beach (Sunday)
It’s getting hard to make vinyl records
Within the Indianapolis office of Joyful Noise Recordings, a specialty label that caters to vinyl-loving fans of underground rock, is a corner that employees call the “lathe cave.”
There sits a Presto 6N record lathe, a 1940s-vintage machine the size of a microwave that makes records by cutting a groove into a blank vinyl platter. Unlike most standard records, which are pressed by the hundreds or thousands, each lathe-cut disc must be created individually.
“It’s incredibly laborious,” said Karl Hofstetter, the label’s founder. “If a song is three minutes long, it takes three minutes to make every one.”
This ancient technology — scuffed and dinged, the lathe looks like something from a World War II submarine — is a key part of Joyful Noise’s strategy to survive the very surge of vinyl popularity the label has helped fuel. Left for dead with the advent of CDs in the 1980s, vinyl records are now the music industry’s most popular and highest-grossing physical format, with fans choosing it for collectibility, sound quality or simply the tactile experience of music in an age of digital ephemerality. After growing steadily for more than a decade, LP sales exploded during the pandemic.
In the first six months of this year, 17 million vinyl records were sold in the United States, generating $467 million in retail revenue, nearly double the amount from the same period in 2020, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. Sixteen million CDs were also sold in the first half of 2021, worth $205 million. Physical recordings are now just a sliver of the overall music business — streaming is 84% of domestic revenue — but they can be a strong indication of fan loyalty, and stars such as Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo make vinyl an important part of their marketing.
Yet there are worrying signs that the vinyl bonanza has exceeded the industrial capacity needed to sustain it. Production logjams and a reliance on balky, decadesold pressing machines have led to what executives say are unprecedented delays. A couple of years ago, a new record could be turned around in a few months; now it can take up to a year, wreaking havoc on artists’ release plans.
Kevin Morby, a singersongwriter from Kansas City, Kansas, said that his latest LP, “A Night at the Little Los Angeles,” barely arrived in time to sell on his fall tour. And he is one of the lucky ones. Artists from the Beach Boys to Tyler, the Creator have seen their vinyl held up recently.
Others are just as frustrated. Thrill Jockey, a Chicago label for indierock connoisseurs, wants to celebrate its 30th anniversary next year with a series of reissues, but its founder, Bettina Richards, said she has no idea which titles can be made in time. John Brien of Important Records, which releases work by contemporary composers, recently declared online that “vinyl is dead” but clarified in an interview that the format is too essential to abandon.
Not even the biggest stars are immune. In an interview this month with BBC Radio, Adele, whose album “30” is due Nov. 19 — and is sure to be a blockbuster on LP — said her release date had been set six months ago to get vinyl and CDs made in time.
“There was, like, a 25-week lead time!” she said. “So many CD factories and vinyl factories, they ... closed down even before COVID because no one ... prints them anymore.”
Music and manufacturing experts cite a variety of factors behind the holdup. The pandemic shut down many plants for a time, and problems in the global supply chain have slowed the movement of everything from cardboard and polyvinyl chloride — the “vinyl” that records are made from — to finished albums. In early 2020, a fire destroyed one of only two plants in the world that made lacquer discs, an essential part of the record-making process.
But the bigger issue may be simple supply and demand. Consumption of vinyl LPs has grown much faster than the industry’s ability to make records. The business relies on an aging infrastructure of pressing machines, most of which date to the 1970s or earlier and can be costly to maintain. New machines came along only in recent years and can cost up to $300,000 each. There’s a backlog of orders for those too.
Exotic problems pop up that would never interfere with a release on YouTube or SoundCloud. “We had a raccoon infestation,” said Caren Kelleher of Gold Rush Vinyl, a boutique plant in Austin, Texas. “That set us back a week.”
The limits of this infrastructure are being tested as major artists and retailers increasingly push vinyl. It is not hard to see why: At a time when CD sales are vanishing and streaming has left artists complaining about minuscule payouts, a new LP, especially if offered in eye-catching colors or in collector-baiting designs, can sell for $25 or more. As some see it, releases by top pop acts are gumming up the production chain, crowding out smaller artists and labels.
“What worries me more than anything is that the major labels will dominate and take over all of the capacity, which I don’t think is a good idea,” said Rick Hashimoto of Record Technology Inc., a midsize plant in Camarillo, California, that works with many indie labels.
Others say the big labels are just a convenient target.
The real problem, they believe, isn’t celebrities jumping on the vinyl bandwagon but that the industrial network simply has not expanded quickly enough to meet growing demand.
“Am I mad that Olivia Rodrigo sold 76,000 vinyl copies of her album?” said Ben Blackwell of Third Man, the record label and vinyl empire that counts Jack White of the White Stripes as one of its founders. “Not at all! This is what I would have dreamed of when we started Third
Man, that the biggest frontline artists are all pushing vinyl and that young kids are into it.
Still, there are worries that the renaissance may be at risk if further delays frustrate consumers and artists or if vinyl comes to be treated as just another merchandise item, such as T-shirts or keychains, from which fickle fans will simply move on.
For artists, especially ones without major-label backing, sticking with vinyl has now become a question about whether it is worth the trouble.
“Right now vinyl feels legitimizing,” said Cassandra Jenkins, a singer-songwriter in New York whose last album, “An Overview on Phenomenal Nature,” was a surprise vinyl hit. It started with a pressing of 300 copies and eventually went to 7,000.
“It’s an investment for an artist,” she said. “I want these objects that I can sell, so I am going to invest in that.”