Vinyl shortage

Zod said:

I've seen it everywhere over the last few weeks.

The positives I got when reading about this, was that people are now building new vinyl pressing plants.  I thought everything was being pressed on refurbished old equipment.   If vinyl demand is big enough that companies will now build new pressing equipment, maybe they'll build a new laceur factor for making the masters.   Could end up being a positive.. even if it's hard to press new vinyl over the next year.

I see it as the record companies cashing in and taking advantage of a situation.

Records used to be cheap as shit.  No way you should be paying $35 for a record...

So it is less a vinyl shortage, it is a shortage of the preferred base material to make masters, lacquers.  

No matter what, in the near term there is going to be some squeeze in terms of new titles that get to market and a decrease in re-issues that have not already been placed in schedule and have a time table of likely 2020 to early 2021.  That back end time frame may be more elastic, depending on how many blank lacquers are in stock for most companies etc.

Ideally, this type of major shakeup will generate new opportunity, but the most disturbing thing about this is how much was riding on this one producer of the blanks, including that they produce the styli that is the preferred means of cutting lacquers.  Also on both the material and the styli it seems that Apollo Masters somewhat inconceivably had no record keeping or backup data on their process.

Nevertheless, short term there will definitely be a squeeze for a couple of years.  Long term, perhaps alternate tech to cutting masters will be established or multiple groups will figure out how to replicate what Apollo did, which along with new pressing facilities could at least temper the price of format.