Support NeoGAF

[wenis]

Pitchfork.com - Joel Oliphint

Choice cuts:

“Every time I see a headline about Jack White’s latest gimmick, it’s kind of maddening,” one indie-label employee who declined to be named tells me. “While he’s making records ‘in one day,’ normal customers can go weeks not knowing the status of their orders.”

More and more people are buying vinyl; sales hit a record 6.1 million units in the U.S. last year. But as demand increases, the number of American pressing plants remains relatively fixed. No one is building new presses because, by all accounts, it would be prohibitively expensive. So the industry is limited to the dozen or so plants currently operating in the States. The biggest is Nashville’s United, which operates 22 presses that pump out 30,000 to 40,000 records a day. California-based Rainbo Records and Erika Records are similarly large outfits, and after that come mid-size operations like Record Technology, Inc., also in California, with nine presses, and Cleveland’s Gotta Groove Records, which turns out between 4,000 and 5,000 records a day on six presses. Boutique manufacturers like Musicol in Columbus, Archer in Detroit, and Palomino in Kentucky operate between one and five presses.

“You used to be able to turn over a record in four weeks,” says John Beeler, project manager at Asthmatic Kitty, the label home of Sufjan Stevens. “But I’m now telling my artists that we need at least three months from the time they turn it in to the time we get it back.”

Vinyl’s sharp rise began in 2008, when sales nearly doubled from the previous year’s 1 million to 1.9 million. The tallies have gone up each year since, and 2013’s 6.1 million is a 33 percent increase over 2012’s 4.6 million. (Those numbers are even larger when you account for releases that fall outside SoundScan’s reach.)...“Four years ago, maybe half our releases would get an LP option,” says James Cartwright, production manager at Merge Records. “Now every release we do has a vinyl format.”

Mounting today’s LPs side-by-side on a giant wall would offer a particularly kaleidoscopic display since a significant chunk of sales now come from colored discs. While some purists claim these sorts of limited-edition releases and Record Store Day exclusives are leading to the cartoonization of a format, it’s apparent after speaking with pressing plants, labels, and record stores that artists like Jack White are giving people what they want.

So who’s buying? Anecdotally, it’s a broad range. On a recent visit to Columbus shop Lost Weekend Records, owner Kyle Siegrist had just helped three customers who were purchasing vinyl for themselves and also for their dads for Father’s Day. The cycle seems to have gone something like this: Twenty years ago, diehard vinyl fans were still buying LPs and saying, “The kids don’t get it.” Then, about five years ago, the younger generation started buying vinyl, and their parents were flummoxed. Now, millennials and boomers are all together in the same stores buying LPs.

young buyers are purchasing new releases alongside a handful of classics. (“College kids still listen to Bob Marley and Pink Floyd, and they probably will forever,” Secretly’s Blandford says.)

Recently, London-based ICM Research found that “15 percent of those who buy physical music formats such as CDs, vinyl records, and cassettes never listen to them—they buy them purely to own.”

In the old days, when vinyl was the dominant format, Amoeba’s Weinstein recalls that everyone had an altar to their music in their homes—a stereo, speakers, and LP rack readily visible—and that altar has now come full circle for younger vinyl buyers. “It’s a topic of conversation,” Weinstein says. “You’re showing off what your tastes are as a way of defining what’s important to you.”

Sales and marketing man Matt Earley says he gets calls weekly from bands who think vinyl manufacturing involves pressing the music onto a blank vinyl disc like a CD. Or they don’t realize that the music should be mastered specifically for vinyl. Eventually, Earley came up with a special record jacket for test presses that explains the purpose and procedure of test pressings.

Making vinyl is a labor- and time-intensive endeavor, but much of a record’s lead time is spent waiting in the queue. And though label reps I spoke with are frustrated, they also sympathize with pressing plants. “They’re doing the best they can” is the prevailing mentality.

The other targets of criticism are the major labels. As the majors repress more and more releases from their back catalogs—not to mention newer releases from top-selling vinyl artists like Beck, Lana Del Rey, and the Black Keys—they’re taking up more and more space on the presses. But while it’s tempting to derisively point to the deluxe, triple-LP edition of the Frozen soundtrack or a 180-gram reissue of Hotel California, blaming it all on the majors is an oversimplification. Everyone is competing with everyone to get their records made and, at this rate, there won’t be enough presses to meet demand for some time, if ever.

“Listening to an LP involves a lot more than remastering and sound sources. There’s the act of putting a record on, there is the comforting surface noise, there is the fact that LPs are beautiful objects and CDs have always looked like plastic office supplies. So enjoying what an LP has to offer is in no way contingent on convincing yourself that they necessarily sound better than CDs.”

So if it’s less about sound, then vinyl is a badge as much as a format—a way listeners can self-identify as true music fans. And when assessing the current state of vinyl, perhaps the harbinger of its eventual decline or plateau is the durability of that badge status: If enough music fans decide vinyl’s perceived authenticity has been compromised, will it become a hollow gimmick? And if vinyl fatigue sets in, will consumers be satisfied to stream or download? If they still crave something physical, will they revert to CDs? Or cassettes?

“There’s clearly a ceiling on this market,” Secretly’s Blandford says. “But we haven’t found it yet.”

Something interesting for your Sunday (the rest of the article is quite informative on the actual production and sales charts). I love my record collection, it's nearing 350+ currently (a few albums are sitting in pre-order and I've got an ever growing list of records I'm hunting down or are waiting to just go to the store to pick-up when I feel like). So it can be frustrating to see how manufacturing is getting it's butt kicked from so many directions, but also incredibly happy with the success and resurgence it's had over the years. I think it will always have a spot in peoples hearts and mind share for a long time from now.

Bonus Article: Does Vinyl Really Sound Better? - Mark Richardson