In November, much-loved local band PUJOL hatched an idea for a special Record Store Day release. A split single featuring live recordings of the band's unreleased track "Junebug" and Meth Dad's "Bones" seemed a perfectly appropriate inaugural project for University of Bartertown Press — a creative co-op launched by PUJOL frontman Daniel Pujol and bassist Zach Prosser — to handle small-scale projects that don't require the services of a record label. Despite not having a staff to iron out the details, much of the process, from getting registered with the Record Store Day organization to getting artwork and lining up a distributor, was free of snags.
Vinyl is far and away the marketplace's fastest-growing medium. While CDs and digital downloads posted declining sales in 2014, U.S. vinyl album sales increased a whopping 51.8 percent over 2013 — 9.2 million units sold, according to Nielsen SoundScan. That's good news: Music fans want to buy records. The bad news is that pressing plants are struggling to keep up with demand, leaving artists and retailers of all stripes out of stock. It's hard to sell records these days, especially hard when you can't get records to sell.
"The only real difference was how backed-up the pressing plants were this year," Pujol tells the Scene. "I wanted to figure out a creative way to deal with that issue as a not-giant artist. If every pressing plant in America is backed-up until infinity with re-presses of Oceania's national anthem, what do you do? That led me to Funky Frankenstein's lathe cutter." In January, Funky Frankenstein chief Ethan Rose began cutting 5-inch PUJOL platters by hand. He produced 500 copies before distributor Think Indie's mid-March deadline. All copies sold at wholesale, and will appear on racks across the country on April 18 — Record Store Day 2015.
The little guys aren't the only ones getting squeezed. Several high-profile releases won't be on shelves by Record Store Day itself, reportedly due to production delays. A quartet of EPs by The 1975, whose releases come through subsidiaries of industry giant Universal Music Group, has been pulled from the slate, though all four are set for a later release. Word on the street is that D'Angelo and the Vanguard's "Charade" 7-inch, a Sony/RCA release, also won't arrive in time, though unlike The 1975's discs, it remains listed on recordstoreday.com. That may mean requests simply outstripped supply, and some stores will actually have "Charade," but if that's true, communication down the line has not been clear.
Mom-and-pop record shops, whose success relies in part on their skill at estimating demand, are feeling the bumps in the supply chain during the push toward RSD and beyond, according to Grimey's co-owner Doyle Davis. Grimey's long-standing strategy has been to order what they expect to sell through the first week, then order additional stock based on response and demand. When the store's entire order of Beck's Morning Phase sold out on release day, Davis was dismayed to learn that it would take six weeks to restock. "With the way everything is backed up at the pressing plants," he says, "if I sell out of a hot title around street date, I don't know when I might get it back in, in some cases. When you go back to restock and you can't, that changes your strategy on your initial order. All of this is real money that's tied up in your cash flow, so you've got to be careful about it."
Though the trend of double-digit percentage increases in vinyl sales dates back to 2008, it's been difficult for manufacturers to respond with an increase in capacity, in large part because vinyl presses have been out of production since the early '80s. Nashville's United Record Pressing is the largest active plant in the U.S., running 22 presses, 24 hours a day, six days a week. Eight to 16 weeks is the standard turnaround time they quote for new orders, and currently they're not accepting orders from anyone who isn't an existing customer. But that's about to change. Last year, URP purchased a second Music City facility, where it has been installing and reconditioning 16 presses acquired over several years. Jay Millar, URP's director of marketing, tells the Scene that they hope to be pressing records at the new site by next month.
With those presses online, URP projects its capacity will jump from 30,000-40,000 units per day to 60,000. And they're not the only plant that's expanding. In March, Salina, Kan., plant Quality Record Pressings purchased 13 presses discovered in a Chicago warehouse. Add to that a projected 7,000 units per day beginning this year from Fat Possum Records and Sony/RED Distribution's nine-press Memphis Record Pressing facility, and some much-needed breathing room finally begins to emerge.
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