Bulletin (24/05/21)
A small but transparent window into what’s going on with me, be it my DJing at parties or online, my label activities and radio show, or whatever else might have been on my mind recently.
Welt Discos
The trials of making and releasing vinyl records are Herculean in scale. Similar to those much-touted (and much-doubted) statistics wheeled out by the pharmaceutical industry regarding how difficult and expensive it is to bring new medicines to market, you can imagine record labels talking about the amount of up-front investment required for a new 12”, and the vanishingly small likelihood of it actually being available on the scheduled release date.
The crunch that pressing plants are experiencing right now was already in full swing before the pandemic and of course has only been exacerbated since, not only by lockdown and restrictions, but also it seems by increased demand from all those people (like me) who finally had some time to start a label. The backlog has taken on gargantuan proportions and no longer seems limited to the big plants, but also the smaller plants that have been popping up in the past few years to meet demand.
For the second release on Welt Discos, our order that was placed in late-January is still at TP approval stage 4 months later, delays in the production process only compounded by poor quality control at the plant. It’s unlikely we’ll have the final run until a full two months after the original release date, which was already a cautious estimate based on the plant’s original schedule. Meanwhile we are kept in the dark about what is going on, emails routinely ignored.
Just this past week I’ve had conversations with two other label owners also frustrated by delays. Wider reading on the issue does not paint a pretty picture:
Even once American pressing plants are fully operational again, SDE heard from some sources that labels have realised it’s cheaper to export vinyl back to the US from Europe than to use the States’ expensive pressing plants. In other words, this over-running of European plants might – and we emphasise might – be here to stay. Given that plants were mostly at capacity before that influx, it doesn’t paint the rosiest future. Even if pressing plants return to normal post-COVID, the delays will take a year to 18 months to catch up on.
One of my friends even told me that their pressing plant is refusing any small independent orders until 2022. It makes you wonder why bother!
Is there any good news? Although the article quoted above sounds a pessimistic note about the appearance of more pressing plants to meet demand, there do seem to be some popping up, for example in Middlesborough (UK), Helsinki (Finland) and Melbourne (Australia). Though as the latter article makes clear it is not an easy or cheap business to set up - just $200,000 per press and a factory-sized space in which to house them. The need to make money, quickly, to recoup the investment puts pressure on these operations to take on as many orders as they can, leading (in my experience at least) to failures in quality control and customer service.
I’m sure there’s a loopy psychodynamic analysis to be done of the vinyl manufacturing industry and business model - working title: ‘Pressing Concerns’. If anyone has any anecdotes, inside information, sob stories or sympathy to share with me on this subject, shoot!
Streams
This Friday afternoon, a recording of mine will be broadcast as part of EOS Radio’s weekly programme. A project set up by Robert Johnson during the pandemic, EOS already has an impressive archive of sets on their website, some of which I’ve covered here.
It looks like I’ll be after Bézier from Honey Soundsystem and before Ludwig A.F. of Exo Recordings. I’ve contributed one of my periodic sleaze mixes, inspired by the likes of Mark Seven, James Hillard and their DJ forebears. (See also my mixes for Maricas and Extended, as well as the original For Chulazos Only).
Tune in on Friday!