I’ve been collecting records for nearly twenty years. I found my parent’s record collection when I was in high school and immediately started buying classics from used shops around Boston and new releases from local chain Newbury Comics. In college, when I moved to New York, I started exploring all the stores across the boroughs as soon as I moved out of the dorms and began to fill every apartment I’ve lived in over the past twelve years with an ever growing collection that now includes around a thousand LPs. Building my collection has been a major hobby for almost two decades, but next year looks to change all of that.
For me, the quest of finding new records, both old and new, has been as important as actually playing albums. Finding new stores and sifting through crafts is a meditative activity and the possibility of unearthing a gem can heighten the experience. There is also something special about being in a record store and hearing what the employees have chosen to spin. One particularly fruitful visit to East Williamsburg’s Human Head Records turned me on to Latin Jazz sensation Esquivel due to a clerk having one of his records playing as I happened to be browsing in the shop. I’ve tried to snag anything by the artists I’ve come across ever since. It’s a method I trust more than algorithms and having a connection to an artist or album like that will always feel special to me.
For audiophiles and collectors, record stores are a holy grail, but in some places they’re a dying breed. Stores full of vintage, used records in addition to new indie releases are few and far between these days even as vinyl has seen a rise in popularity over the past ten years. Major retail chains like Urban Outfitters, Target, and Wal-Mart stock vinyl across the country and on their website, but their merchandise, for the most part, is rather limited in variety. Despite this, Urban Outfitters has been one of the largest sellers of vinyl in recent years and Amazon has now also tried to capitalize on the momentum with a monthly vinyl club where they’ll send you new records at a discounted price aimed specifically at newcomers looking to build up their collection. However, as highlighted by AC Newman of indie rock band The New Pornographers in a recent tweet, stores like Target offer slim pickings in terms of variety, but they do play a major role in the means of production.
Vinyl distribution is about to hit a wall. Production is backed up on a global scale to the point where new albums are now seeing over a year in delays before they’re available for sales. In a forever competitive landscape, major labels are doing anything they can to boost and capitalize on the resurgence in vinyl’s popularity. However, while they may be helping drive interest in the format, indie artists and labels who rely on vinyl sales as a means of survival are about to see an already grim situation become much, much worse.
As demand has skyrocketed over the years, production means have not scaled in comparison. As bands up their orders to meet the growing demands for vinyl, plants aren’t ready for the volume. Throwing major recording artists into the mix has only added to the problem.
Adele’s new album, 30, is out tomorrow. The album was finished earlier in the year, but her label ordered 500,000 copies so in order to ensure the albums were ready on release date, there was a six month wait. This virtually disrupted the entire industry. Half a million vinyl records is a lot. Even when you’re the biggest pop star in the world. And filling that order comes with a consequence.
There aren’t many places in the world where you can press a vinyl record and just like so many other things in the pandemic, the supply chain issues are creating enormous problems for artists who still rely on the sale of physical albums to make money. Adele is not one of those artists.
Adele makes millions in licensing, sponsorships, concerts, and other recording contracts. Sales from streaming may impact her, slightly, but if Adele didn’t sell her albums on vinyl, she probably wouldn’t notice a difference. The majority of her fans would also probably not mind buying a CD or listening to the album on Spotify, or even YouTube. The issue isn’t Adele alone, but rather a weird problem that has been slightly caused by the skyrocketing popularity of buying vinyl. Any music fan can tell you that the past decade has seen incredible growth in sales of physical music when it comes to records and last year was the first time that vinyl sales actually outsold CDs.
Again, this isn’t Adele’s fault, but she (and probably more accurately her team) are feeding into the issue. Fans are now collecting records the same way they would buy t-shirts or posters to hang on their walls and in a lot of cases with pop music in particular, fans don’t really care about listening to the record itself (and they most certainly don’t buy it because of the audiophile quality), but because they can display it alongside all of their other memorabilia. In a lot of cases, the shrinkwrap never even comes off.
Ed Sheeran weighed in on the conversation when promoting his new album and gave a bit more detail on how even he (one of the other biggest pop stars in the world) had trouble competing with Adele. “There’s like three vinyl factories in the world, so you have to do it like really upfront — and Adele had basically booked out all the vinyl factories, so we had to get a slot and get our album in there. It was like me, Coldplay, Adele, Taylor [Swift], ABBA, Elton [John], all of us were trying to get our vinyls printed at the same time.”
There are in fact more than three vinyl factories in the world, but not many more and when you think of the quantities being ordered by the artists he mentioned, plus the desire for exclusive colors and box sets from retail monsters like Target and Wal Mart it gets nearly impossible for anyone else to make a record. Earlier this year, Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish announced new records on vinyl with handfuls of limited colorways and variants (once again giving into the idea that vinyl might be more for the look than the sound quality). As exciting as it is to see fans buy records, it’s hard to watch so many artists devour the market. It’s no coincidence that this was all a large plan from Adele’s team to get her album out just in time for the holidays so more units would be shipped to meet the demand for Christmas.
With their starpower and mega-budgets behind them, these pop stars disrupt production for indie artists who will be moved to the back of production lines and are now being met with unbelievable expectations for when their records may become available. Taylor’s latest release, Red (Taylor’s Version), is out on 4 vinyl discs (at 45rpm, no less, which caused quite a stir for and some slight entertainment) and a 30th anniversary edition of Nirvana's Nevermind on 8(!) LPs also impacted the speed of releases. In addition to also being able to determine the order of production, they also clog up timelines with such insane bulk orders. 500,000 copies of the new Adele is literally a million discs. Indie bands are struggling to get a few thousand.
To express an idea of what the timeline now looks like, Laura Jane Grace, the lead singer of punk band Against Me!, noted that unless a band finished mixing and mastering their album in the next three months (dated from October 2021), they shouldn’t expect a vinyl copy to be ready until sometime in 2023. That’s over a year of a delay and over a year where a band or artist can’t sell their record and will receive only several dollars from streaming revenue in a year. If they can’t tour due to COVID, that eliminates their major forms of revenue. Simply put, they might be fucked.
For me, I’ve already seen the impact. I ordered Promises by Floating Points and Phoaroah Sanders in March 2021 and it arrived in September. I ordered Vijay Iyer’s Uneasy in May and only learned this week when I emailed Rough Trade for an update that the order had just been cancelled by their supplier. In October, the artist posted that he was trying to fill orders from Bandcamp but his recent shipment from pressing plants wasn’t actually his album, but rather copies of the soundtrack to Disney’s The Little Mermaid. Seriously. Radiohead’s Kid A Mnesiae box set was set to be available in September, but the latest update says it should arrive in early 2022. Hopefully.
Cassandra Jenkins is a local Brooklyn artist who has gained some critical attention this year for her brilliant album An Overview on Phenomenal Nature. To combat her delayed touring schedule due to the pandemic, she put together a companion EP to her new album. This EP is also being released tomorrow (November 19), but unlike Adele, her vinyl orders aren’t expected until April 2022.
Effectively, if the record isn’t already pressed and in the hands of the artist ready to be sold, it won’t happen for a long, long time. Major artists have the benefit of long press cycles to drum up anticipation around albums and have the advantage of possibly teasing a release for months in order to shorten timelines. Silk Sonic, the duo of Bruno Mars and Anderson .Paak, announced their first single on March 5 ahead of their album finally dropping last week. The long rollout allowed them to share two songs and videos prior to the release as well as a few TV appearances to help build the attention surrounding their debut. Indie bands don’t generally follow that path and in the past have needed to work in shorter cycles to capture their fans directly in the moment of an announcement.
Damon Krukoswki, previously of iconic slowcore group Galaxie 500 and now of Damon & Naomi, shared that physical and digital releases split his income as a musician. Not being able to release his latest album on vinyl means that he’s lost half of his sales and not being able to book tours due to the pandemic means he could be in for a rough situation. Even if the bottleneck around touring breaks and bands are able to safely play more shows, they won’t be able to sell records at the merch table.
Separately, it’s not so much that the inability to get vinyl pressed is really the issue at hand, but the fact that making money as a musician is already incredibly problematic. Spotify can somehow manage to pay medical advisor to the insane and mega-asshole Joe Rogan an absurd amount of money to be the exclusive source for his podcast, but can’t pay decent (read: living wages) profits to any music artist, Adele included. It’s no wonder we’re seeing legacy acts like Bob Dylan and Paul Simon sell their entire catalogues for millions upon millions of dollars. If the biggest names in the game are doing this as a way to continue to make money, imagine how dire the situation is for a band looking to sell a few thousand copies of an album (on vinyl or CD).
If bands are currently seeing a year long delay to have new records pressed, it also means past catalogues that have gone out of print also can’t be repressed and added back to their stores unless you’re already a major artist. Again, if you’re Galaxie 500, a relatively unknown band with only three albums from the late ‘80s and ‘90s you’re not able to get your older albums reissued, but if you’re someone like Neil Young, your label can somehow manage to get a 50th anniversary of After the Gold Rush not only pressed, but sold for $100. Again, this isn’t to blame the artist, but again the major labels who are making the orders and setting the prices.
Here’s a slight tip: If you’re a fan of classic music, you can probably find used, high-quality pressings for fractions of that price.
In the ‘90s, there was concern that Virgin Megastores and Tower Records would obliterate every small record shop, but against the odds, many stores survived and rode the vinyl resurgence throughout the 2010s. There’s a slight hope that those who buy a record from a major pop star could also start to build a collection and look beyond major retailers and towards actual record stores or from an artist’s merch table at shows.
I love collecting records and don’t plan on scaling back my buying habits (despite what my wallet and apartment size tell me). Even if new releases become scarce, I’ll still be able to dig through the shelves of any store I can find in search of original, used albums. I’ll even make special trips in search of vinyl to build out my collection. The best part of the hobby is the infinite quest. It never ends and in some ways is the driving force in building out the collection. I’ll continue to pre-order albums and hope for the best. I recently pre-ordered Jack White’s new albums which won’t arrive until Summer 2022, at best, and even that was a small thrill through a glimmer of anticipation. Jack is another artist who will most likely make do even with the industry on the brink of collapse, but my heart goes out to the bands who won’t.