WOODS: Shamir has a new album coming out and has no plans to press any vinyl. I think people are upset because Adele is not helping. SHAMIR: Adele is not the culprit, and I that, like, we were struggling with vinyl delay times before Adele. Because even though vinyl has been growing for years, there still just aren't that many places on earth that even make vinyl. Her 500,000 LP mega order descended like a monolith onto the fragile, strained vinyl supply chain. SMITH: And then in the midst of all of this, along came Adele. SEAVERS: Eight, 10, 12 months in the music industry is life and death three times over. WOODS: Brandon's vinyl now takes months to arrive, and the turnaround time for a record went from around eight weeks to now it's about eight months for new clients.
ADELE VINYL PLUS
And, you know, slow machines, plus soaring demand, plus raw material from overseas equaled a major supply chain strain and huge delays on record releases.
ADELE VINYL HOW TO
And they require people who know how to run them and tweak them, depending on the temperature and the humidity. For one thing, record-pressing machines are basically all antiques. SMITH: But he points out vinyl has very real limitations. That meant he was going from producing around a million records a year to 7 million. WOODS: So Brandon went from six pressing machines to 16. SEAVERS: Walmart's got 4,000-plus stores in the U.S., so even if they only ordered 10 for every store, that's 40,000 records. But things really took off when the stores jumped on board, and that was just a game-changer. Vinyl sales, they started rising around 2008. WOODS: Record labels and musicians love this, too, because LPs are a lot more profitable than digital music. It's like it's such a sought after medium now at this point. SMITH: This is like something you're hearing from fans. Shamir has a couple of albums out in vinyl. WOODS: This is Shamir, an artist and musician from Philadelphia. I think there's just that warmth in the crackle and everything.
SHAMIR: I mean, I always love anything that kind of sounds old. SMITH: So Brandon realized that vinyl had this kind of superpower that CDs didn't. And we found some guys that had been in the industry decades ago. So he moved from CDs back to vinyl.īRANDON SEAVERS: We brought in a bunch of rusty, old machines. Before that, the company was making CDs, and CD sales have been declining for years because, music sales, they were all moving towards digital.ĭARIAN WOODS, BYLINE: And Brandon was watching this happen, and he knew he had to make some kind of move. STACEY VANEK SMITH, BYLINE: Brandon Seavers owns Memphis Record Pressing, and his company has been making vinyl since 2014. But as Stacey Vanek Smith and Darian Woods from NPR's podcast The Indicator tell us, we might want to go easy on Adele. The massive order amid a vinyl boom has put a strain on an already precarious relationship between vinyl makers and indie artists. Reportedly more than 500,000 are being pressed. Adele's new album, "30," is out today, so you can go ahead and stream or pick up an album.
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