How the Coronavirus Is Affecting America’s Vinyl Record Industry
U.S. sales of vinyl albums have risen for 14 consecutive years, to $504 million in 2019. But extending that streak could be a tall order—and not just because the coronavirus pandemic has shuttered many record stores for months. The couple of dozen or so vinyl record pressing plants that still exist in the United States have been hit hard too.
Some of the biggest were closed for several weeks due to local health restrictions, squeezing supply, and a handful of plant owners tell me they’ve seen a steep drop in demand. “I’d hate to find out that some record labels are thinking about giving up on vinyl,” says Don MacInnis, owner of Record Tech Inc., a mid-size vinyl pressing plant in Camarillo, California that just reopened after a two-month shutdown. “I hope that’s not the case. But it wouldn’t surprise me.”
Nashville’s United Record Pressing is the largest pressing facility in North America, churning out up to 60,000 records a day. On March 30, URP temporarily laid off 120 employees because of COVID-19, according to a filing with the Tennessee Department of Workforce and Labor. How long the cuts lasted, and how many workers remained, is unclear, but the plant appears to have closed for several weeks before recently reopening. (A company representative declined to comment for this story.)
Another Tennessee company, Memphis Record Pressing—which boasts a capacity of almost 20,000 records a day—was closed for about five weeks before reopening on May 4. The plant avoided layoffs by securing nearly $1 million in federal relief loans. “We’re going to see the industry change, for sure,” co-founder and CEO Brandon Seavers says. “Lead times are going to be very challenging as we work through the backlog of what was on the floor and in the queue when we closed.”
Shutdowns were widespread. In Detroit, Jack White’s Third Man Pressing, which can produce as many as 15,000 records a day, was shuttered for seven weeks, reopening on May 11 into a different world. “The climate in the music business is all over the place now,” Third Man co-owner Ben Blackwell says. “There’s no fucking stock answer for what to do or what not to do. No one knows.” Another major plant, Quality Record Pressings in Salina, Kansas, stopped production for the month of April. “Just to get back to where we were, we’re going to be balls-to-the-wall busy for a long time,” owner Chad Kassem says.
Adding to the vinyl industry’s shaky predicament are two damaging events that occurred in the months before the pandemic, muddling its supply chain. The full effect of a fire earlier this year at California’s Apollo Masters, which produces the lacquer discs used in vinyl manufacturing, remains to be felt. And once records are pressed, getting them into stores has become another headache following problems with music distributor Direct Shot.
Throw in pandemic-related shipping interruptions, Record Store Day’s rescheduling across three separate dates, postponements of various album releases, and a total shutdown of touring—and thus, no merch tables to sell vinyl—and the forecast is cloudier yet.
All of this will result in vinyl manufacturing delays of at least a month for many plants. But after years of increasing supply, a bigger concern for vinyl could be a sharp drop in demand. Austin, Texas-based Gold Rush Vinyl, which opened in 2018, suffered from this year’s coronavirus-related cancellation of SXSW. Though the plant has been allowed to keep running through the pandemic, founder and president Caren Kelleher says sales dropped about 75 percent in April. With the recent launch of a monthly vinyl club, Gold Rush has also begun supplementing its revenues by selling direct to consumers. Kelleher adds, “Navigating the government relief program has been a more than full-time job for me.”
Near Dallas, Hand Drawn Pressing saw its sales tumble almost 90 percent over the first eight weeks of the coronavirus slowdown, despite remaining open, says its chief marketing officer, Dustin Blocker. Meanwhile, the president and CEO of Northern Virginia’s Furnace Record Pressing, Eric Astor, tells me, “It seems like all orders stopped sometime in late February.”
Then again, the close-knit vinyl community takes well-deserved pride in its resilience. Cleveland pressing plant Gotta Groove Records was closed for more than six weeks, but Matt Earley, its vice president of sales and marketing, says business has been returning toward, if not normal, then around 80 percent of normal. “In late March it was anybody’s guess where this was going to go,” he tells me. “Was retail just going to completely collapse? It doesn’t seem like that’s happening.”
Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
