Harsh reality or what is behind the return of vinyl

Note Transl .: Today we decided to publish a translation of a curious article on the contemporary realities of the industry of vinyl audio recordings. This is a material about what is being listened to on vinyl, who buys it and why, what modern records look like, and who is starting up a business today. By the way, some of the records listed in the article (and many others ) can be bought in our store.

In the yard in 2014, and since we are talking about vinyl records, then we must talk about Jack White . In April of this year, the self-proclaimed “rock and roll” and supporter of analog sound celebrated the Day of the music store in the company with United Record Pressing in Nashville and in this regard released the “fastest” disc in the world. At 10 am, White and his band recorded in their own studio, Third Man, a live version of their title song from the new Lazaretto album, then the original recording went to United, where it was immediately replicated on a 7-inch press. Created copies entered the store Third Man, to finish their way in the hands of fans. From start to finish, the work took 3 hours 55 minutes and 21 seconds.
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It was only the beginning of all the whims of vinyl on the topic. In June, he released the album Lazaretto on a record with various bonuses and additions, which included additional “hidden” tracks, a specially designed side A, which can be played backwards, side B with a matte finish, a hand-made hologram and much more. Fans were delighted with such bonuses, which led to record sales: the album not only took first place in the charts, but also, according to Nielsen SoundScan, set a new record for plate sales in the first week, beating the previous achievement recorded in 1991. White sold over 40,000 copies of a Lazaretto record in the very first week.

This is great news for the vinyl industry. But not everyone shares this point of view.

“Every time I see a headline about Jack White’s latest novelty, it pisses me off,” said a recording studio employee who wished to remain anonymous. “While he is recording albums in one day, ordinary customers can wait for weeks and not know what stage their order is at.”

People are increasingly buying vinyl records. Last year, sales in the United States broke the bar of 6.1 million copies. But while the demand for vinyl is growing, the number of factories for its production in America remains unchanged. Nobody is doing this, because everyone believes that the cost of building such a factory is prohibitive. Therefore, the industry is satisfied with just over a dozen factories operating in the States. The largest is Nashville's United, which has 22 pressing machines at its disposal, which produce from 30,000 to 40,000 plates per day. You can compare with Nashville's United Rainbo Records and Erika Records , located in California, which are also large enterprises. There are several medium-sized factories, such as California Record Technology, Inc. with nine presses, and Gotta Groove Records with six presses, located in Cleveland. They release about 4,000-5,000 records per day. Manufacturers with their own stores, such as Musicol in Columbus, Archer in Detroit and Palomino in Kentucky, have a number of presses ranging from one to five.

“You could have recorded an album in 4 weeks,” says John Beeler, project manager at Asthmatic Kitty , a label created by Sufjan Stevens. “Now I tell my performers that after the transfer of the record to the factory, we need at least three months to get the finished record.” What was previously a rarity and something anomalous, is now becoming the norm everywhere. "The process of recording a record takes much longer than it took nine months ago," said Nick Blandford, managing director of Secretly Label Group. It includes such well-known labels as Secretly Canadian , Jagjaguwar , and Dead Oceans , as well as the band performing artists Bon Iver and War on Drugs. Nick continues: “We crossed our fingers and hoped that the situation would improve in April, after the Day of the record store, but everything remained the same. And we had to accept. "

Now that the vinyl industry has come back to life, which was highly unlikely, everyone is happy. And they are in complete confusion.



Vinyl began to return to life in 2008, when its sales almost doubled compared with the previous year: from 1 million to 1.9 million. The number of copies continued to grow from year to year and as a result amounted to 6.1 million copies by 2013, which is 33% more than 4.6 million copies in 2012 (these figures will be much more if we take into account those works Do not fall into the statistics SoundScan). The resurgent format still has a much smaller market share than CD, digital recordings and streaming audio - it was only 2% of all album sales last year. The share of sales of digital recordings was 41%, while the share of CDs was 57%: no one expected vinyl to take the lead. But a return to vinyl is more than just a temporary trend of fashion, and this trend will continue in the near future. “Four years ago, only half of our records were released on records,” says James Cartwright, production manager at Merge Records , “but now every work we do is released on vinyl.”

If you place all the records that are released today, next to each other on a giant wall, you will see a kaleidoscope in front of you, since a significant part of all sold records are available in color. While some purists claim that limited releases and exclusives for the Day of the music store are a parody of classical records, after talking with the workers of pressing factories, recording studios and music stores, it becomes clear that musicians like Jack White give people what they want. Along with the growth in sales of vinyl, the demand for exclusives is also growing. The Musicol store in Columbus, Ohio, has been making vinyl on its two presses since 1960, and previously black vinyl production took 90% of the time, and now half of all orders are color vinyl. And the Gotta Groove Records factory, which opened 4 years ago in Cleveland, produces about 40% of its color vinyl records.


A freshly compressed 7-inch sequin plate from Gotta Grove Records. Here and hereafter photo of Mara Robinson

And White is not the only one who invests in fancy adornments of records. On a recent work shift in Gotta Groove, shiny particles covered the floor around the machine, on which 100 plates with a rotation speed of 45 rpm were made, made of transparent plastic with pressed-in sparkles. The walls of the listening room there are covered with various customer orders, among which you can find impressive and even stunning specimens. One group pressed ground coffee into its plate. In the other, there are bits of ash from a burnt 19th century bible. In one of the upcoming orders will need to be pressed into the plate shredded money. The factory had to take drastic measures and deny customers when they began to receive orders for use in the process of manufacturing plates of bodily fluids. “Not more than a month ago, one group asked to create a plate with their blood,” said Matt Earley, vice president of sales and marketing for Gotta Groove, who always says no.

Now you can decide that adding blood and coffee to vinyl is a sign that the format has officially gone beyond the cultural goods and has become some kind of tzatskoy - and there are several groups in the world who will agree with this. Asthmatic Kitty's dealer says some of the artists from their label resist color vinyl and various exclusives. But Asthmatic Kitty still does it, because demand demands, and such limited releases drive sales. (Such exclusives often do not come to wholesalers and music stores, but are sold directly in the online store of the recording studio).

“We're making more colorful records than ever,” says Matt Lunsford, co-founder of Polyvinyl Records , who also owns Japandroids and Montreal. At the moment, Polyvinyl is engaged in the release of a limited edition of the early versions of finished albums. They are also engaged in the release of records with the application of images on them and 7-inch plates for those who have issued a pre-order - all records planned for release this year were reserved in just one month.


The floor in the lobby of Gotta Groove, covered with covers of records

And who is buying? Interestingly, but the contingent is very different. During my recent visit to Lost Weekend Records , its owner, Kyle Siegrist, helped three customers choose vinyl records for themselves and their fathers as a gift for Father's Day. Probably, it all started about twenty years ago, when loyal fans of vinyl were still buying records and saying: "The children will not understand this." Then, about five years ago, the younger generation began to buy vinyl, which greatly surprised their parents, and now they all go to the same music stores.

Marc Weinstein, a 57-year-old co-founder of California-based Amoeba Music , saw many of his friends blow dust from their players when they learned that vinyl sales had doubled in the second half of the decade. And the younger generation buys both records of modern performers and “classics”. (“Children in schools still listen to Bob Marley and Pink Floyd, and most likely will always listen,” Blandford told me in secret.) Demographic indicators suggest that teenagers buy vinyl. “I’m coaching a wrestling team in high school,” said Leo DeLuca, manager of Misra Records , based in Dayton, and when newcomers come to buy players, they ask if we are going to release vinyl.

Vinyl lovers are unique in their shopping habits. In the first week of June, just before Jack White broke the charts and lured many fans to his side, Sharon Van Etten, with his latest work, Are We There and Jagjaguwar, took second place in the vinyl charts, selling 2,115 records from all 8,930 sold that week. This means that more than 20% of the records are sold in the first week after the release of the singer or composer’s work - this number is true for most of the works published in the Secretly Label Group studios.



The top 50 albums of the year, released before June 1, were a variety of rock variations: indie rock, alternative rock, folk rock, classic rock, so yes, vinyl is still the format of rock music. Several works of hip-hop performers diluted the charts, for example Kendrick Lamar with a good kid: mAAd city in 18th place, The College Dropout Kanye West in 45th and Wu-Tang Clan with Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) in exactly 59th place but even in these rap albums there is a touch of indie. Also stand out are Daft Punk with their album Random Access Memories , Miles Davis with the work of Kind of Blue , and popular on radio Justin Timberlake and Lorde. The rest of the favorites are indie and alternative rock (Vampire Weekend, Mumford & Sons, Arctic Monkeys, Bon Iver, Beck, Neutral Milk Hotel), classic rock flagships (the Beatles, Pink Floyd, Bob Marley) and all the last three Black Keys albums, which attracted fans of both indie and classic rock. The chart can be used as a summary of the indie-rock rate of the recent past and the classics of the 40s and 50s of the 20th century.

“If the album has become a musical treasure, it will be listened to again and again,” says Blandford. This can happen not only with the hits of the 60s and 70s, but also with the works of novice musicians. "If you told me that we would sell almost 100,000 copies of Bon Iver For Emma's debut album , Forever Ago in 2007, I would consider it to be utterly insane."


About 40% of all records in Gotta Grove are in color.

Sales outlets pin special hopes not only on the Day of the music store, which is a pass to the world of vinyl for young buyers, but also on music download cards that come in with new vinyl records as a stimulator of demand. This approach does not seem meaningless, if we take into account another habit of young buyers, which shops and recording studios did not foresee. Not so long ago, London-based ICM Research conducted a study and found that 15% of those people who buy music on physical media, such as CDs, vinyl records and cassettes, never listen to them - they buy them only to so that they have them.

“Customers who are not fans of analogue music formats, but simply want to support their favorite artists, have been undervalued,” says Blandford, “they want to put something on their shelf, something that they or their friends can see — to it reflected their hobbies. ”

Amoeba's Weinstein recalls that when vinyl was the most popular format in the past, everyone in the house had an altar of their favorite music — a stereo system, speakers, and a record stand that was on display — now this altar is also among young vinyl connoisseurs. “It allows you to gain new topics for conversation,” says Weinstein, “a demonstration of your tastes is a way to show what is important to you.”

In 2014, the ability to always keep records available becomes a non-trivial task for music stores. One of the “dirty” secrets of retail is that wholesalers allow them to return unsold CDs, but not vinyl. If store owners buy too much of a certain item, they will eventually begin to lower the price on it and will not receive any profit. If you order too little, the store will also lose profits. Independent stores also compete with online stores that have endless stock of goods. If the store has run out of copies of the new War on Drugs album (which happened in many stores this year), then most likely people will purchase it online. As soon as the store again receives a batch of records, potential buyers return. Before the appearance of records in the store can take weeks and even months, due to the fact that their creation at the factory takes a long time.


A bunch of PVC granules that melt and press to create plates in Gotta Groove

Making vinyl records is more art than science. CDs are simply replicated, and records are made from scratch from PVC granules and paper stickers, which are part of a multi-step process that does not tolerate errors. When 57-year-old Vince Slusarz, owner of Gotta Groove Records in Cleveland, started the factory in 2009, he created his first record for two weeks. “We had no idea what we were doing,” he noted.

Slushartz did not hesitate, he wanted to start producing records. As a former production manager and part-time attorney, he knew that he wanted to open his own business in Cleveland, but he had no idea what kind of business he was. “I have always loved music, and at the end of 2008 I saw my eldest daughter buy vinyl records,” says Slusharts, “this influenced my decision.”

Slusharz started looking for equipment, but could not find anything suitable. He was ready to give up and, in despair, wrote a letter to four record factories asking whether they had anything to sell. Two did not answer. One did not sell. But the fourth, Sun Plastics in Newark, New Jersey, was going to sell its business, and planned to free its area in two months. Slusharz flew to Jersey, made a deal, and in March 2009, the equipment was loaded onto four truck trailers to make a perilous journey to Ohio (one press fell and was damaged along the way).

Even in five years, the production of vinyl can give Gotta Groove some surprises. The company operates 6 machines, and is now recovering another, which came from the well-known Boddie Recording Company, based in Cleveland. Although the factory produces somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 records per day, there is no secret formula or process that guarantees the excellent quality of each record. The same settings on the same machines do not give the same results the next day, but what can I say, even after an hour. Simple things like paper stickers can cause various problems: the paper must be dried within 24 hours to remove all moisture that may damage the process.

The need to learn not only affects vinyl producers. Some groups and studios also release vinyl records for the first time. Sales and marketing specialist Matt Airlie says that he receives calls every week from groups who believe that vinyl production is similar to CD production, and that is just pressing music on a clean vinyl disc. They do not understand that music should be specially made for vinyl. In the end, Earley came up with a special package for test prints of plates with inscriptions explaining the methods and process of creating such prints.


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