The vinyl resurgence is here and it’s real. Far from being a freak trend in the market, in the UK, sales of vinyl records recently surpassed one million units for the first time in almost two decades, while in the US, almost 8 million vinyl records were sold this year, up 49 percent from the same time period last year.
But while this is a good reason for pressing plant owners to celebrate, a new report by the Wall Street Journal claims the return of vinyl is causing a lot of problems. As they report, the resurgence of vinyl has left the 15-or-so pressing plants still operating in the US struggling to keep up with demand.
One of the main issues plaguing the vinyl industry is the fact that, being a largely forgotten format, no one is making new equipment to manufacture vinyl records, and the equipment that still exists is outdated, constantly in need of maintenance, and features parts that are hard to come by.
Compounding this critical issue is a scarcity of the raw material needed to manufacture the records in the first place – raw polyvinyl chloride. While alternative supply chains have sprung up, the majority of the material (90 percent) still comes from Thailand and is filtered through to a single three-person company in the US.
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This one company is responsible for suppling “the vast majority” of polyvinyl chloride to record factories in the US. Taking these twin issues into account, it’s hardly surprising that labels are being consistently dogged by delays. Normally, this isn’t a problem, except vinyl sales are booming.
“Record labels are waiting months for orders that used to get filled in weeks. That is because pressing machines spit out only around 125 records an hour. To boost production, record factories are running their machines so hard—sometimes around the clock—they have to shell out increasing sums for maintenance and repairs,” writes WSJ‘s Neil Shah.
At the moment, only about 15 vinyl-pressing factories remain in the United States, with just that one company providing all the raw vinyl for those records, and despite the resurgence, vinyl still represents just two percent of music sales, meaning investors aren’t lining up to bankroll new factories.
The central paradox currently plaguing the vinyl industry is this: sales are booming, so much so that outlets can’t keep up with the demand from the market, but no one is willing to help the industry keep up with the demand, as the chances for growth are minor, which will, in turn, detrimentally affect market growth.
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As A Journal of Musical Things reports, it’s this Catch 22 that has forced the owners of Canada’s RIP-V to sell their factory. While RIP-V are currently capable of pressing 2,000 pieces a week, with a theoretical potential to increase capacity to 3,000, people are buying more vinyl than RIP-V is able to make.
Meanwhile, an increase in capacity would require extra maintenance on the ancient machinery, including new parts that are often impossible to find and aren’t being manufactured as new. RIP-V is therefore at a road block, as an increase in unit production would also reach the limit of their scalability.
RIP-V’s six operational presses have now been purchased by a group who plan to dismantle everything and set up shop in New Jersey — an increasingly common occurrence — and the nine presses that they had in storage have already been sold to companies in New York and Oregon.
As A Journal of Musical Things notes, RIP-V, like many in the industry, are too small to get bigger and too big to stay small, and according to Ryan Raffaelli, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School who studies what he calls “technology re-emergence”, it’s “too soon to tell” if vinyl is a passing fad or here to stay.
