Last week, c89.5 got a really nice present in the mail! The test pressing of c89.5 on Wax!
After a day of quality checks by the c89.5 staff, we approved the test pressing which now begins the journey to final production by the manufacturer.
When will your copy arrive?
The test pressing is the last step before the production process can begin which, nonetheless, takes many weeks.
The manufacturer in the Czech Republic says our shipping date is July 10th. If you donated during our recent Spring fund drive and requested a copy as your thank-you gift, we expect to receive them the following week and mail yours ASAP.
We’ll email an update when we start shipping them so you’ll know to keep an eye on your mailbox!
Thanks again to our members for your generosity and patience!
Bruce Wirth, c89.5 Membership Director
P.S. Here’s a really comprehensive article about the state of the vinyl record industry, including why production times are so long:
https://camoinassociates.com/resources/vinyl-records-resurrection/
“Manufacturers Struggle to Keep Up with Demand
The revitalization of the vinyl record industry has also ushered in a resurgence in the amount of new music being offered to fans on vinyl by popular artists like Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, Adele, Tyler the Creator, and Kendrick Lamar. On top of that, many established artists have started re-releasing their older albums on vinyl (some for the first time). This has resulted in a significantly higher demand for vinyl record production, one that the vinyl record manufacturing industry was not prepared to meet.
Since the late 1980s, record pressing plants across the country and worldwide had been going out of business as other music formats like CDs gained popularity. By 2015, there were only 21 vinyl pressing plants in operation in the US and only 40 worldwide.
This left very few factories with the equipment or employees needed to meet the sudden growing demand in the early 2000s. Then, in 2020, a fire destroyed the Apollo Masters Corporation in California, which was one of only two remaining plants in the world (and the only one in the US) that made the lacquer discs that are essential to the record-pressing process.
Add to that the supply chain problems and temporary factory shutdowns that defined the COVID-19 pandemic and the result was a massive backlog of orders, lengthy production delays of a year or more in some cases, and a lot of frustrated customers.
In response to the increase in demand over the past decade, a number of record-pressing plant development and expansion projects have been announced across the country and the total number of record-pressing plants operating in the US has almost doubled since 2015.
However, opening new record-pressing plants is not as simple as it sounds. In the wake of the near-death of vinyl records and lingering supply chain issues, manufacturers are still struggling with difficulties purchasing new pressing equipment and long waits to receive necessary record-making supplies.
Although there has been progress made within the industry to respond to rising demand, it will take more time and more investment before all the growing pains are resolved.
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