Vinyl's Vitals
The record is proving more resilient than expected.
Ask a hundred music industry pros
about the vitals of vinyl and you’re likely to get a hundred
different answers, ranging from “dead for ten years” to “wave of the future.”
Naysayers point to the disappearance of records from retail outlets as evidence of its
downfall. But vinyl enthusiasts are a resilient bunch, and they’ve found other ways to get
their wax fix, mainly through alternative distribution methods like mail order, the Internet
and small mom and pop retailers.
Some in the industry claim that records are even on the upswing. Radio panelists
at the Loud Music Festival in Cambridge said that vinyl is on a major
rise. “Everyone thought that the two formats would be CD and cassette,” J.J.
Gonson of the California-based record manufacturer, Erika Records
, says. “But now it’s looking like it will be CD and vinyl.” Craig
Arnatt of Canadian CD manufacturer CD-MAN echoes this opinion.
“Cassettes are useless,” he says. “[Some people] love [records] and have a
real philosophy of ‘we want to keep the vinyl’. So I think it will stick around.”
The disappearance of vinyl in mainstream retail
outlets has done wonders for its street cred,
making it the format of choice for both collectors and many in the “indie elite.” But its
collectability and hipness factor comes with a cost. Namely, the cost of manufacturing. The
majority of record pressing plants have either switched to CD or shut down altogether in the
past decade. Even the largest of manufacturing plants usually only press CD, outsourcing
vinyl orders to one of the handful of small plants still around. The shortage of
manufacturing facilities has driven up the cost of pressing.
Although the actual pressing cost of a 7” single is very low -- usually between $.30 - $.50 a
piece even in small quantities -- plants also charge hefty set up fees, usually in the ballpark
of three hundred dollars. This is ideal for large pressings, as the set up fee is spread across
so many units. But for smaller bands and labels that are only pressing a few hundred
pieces (who account for the great majority of 7” releases), the set up charge greatly
increases the per unit cost, making it much less economical.
CDs, on the other hand, cost more per unit, but have much lower (or even free)
set up fees. Therefore, for small presses, CDs can actually be cheaper to make
than records.
And once labels spend all that money to press a record, they may have an even tougher
time actually selling it. While your average East Village hipster gobbles up records by the
plateful, these folks make up a very small percentage of the music buying population. After
releasing six vinyl singles, Sid Sowder
decided to go the all-CD route with his Indianapolis-based label, Urinine Records
. “I got really tired of selling 7”s at shows and having folks say,
‘Don’t you have any CDs?’” he says. “It seemed that over 60% of the audience wouldn’t
have a turntable. I’m sure it gets worse the more you get out of the ‘punk rock’ community.”
And even when a label does sell their records, they’re not exactly looking at a windfall. The
music industry introduced the compact disc format at a premium price, and it has remained
significantly more expensive than vinyl even as CD production costs have plummeted.
Consequently, labels can sell their CDs for indie-correct prices and still walk away with a
tidy profit. But when the release is on vinyl, profit margins nose-dive. In fact, sometimes
there is no profit margin, as it’s not unheard of for a small label to sell vinyl below cost!
Sowder argues that besides making it tough to run a business, vinyl’s tiny margins can also
limit artistic freedom. “The profit margin on CDs is much higher so you have to sell less to
break even,” he says. “That means you [can] do more experimental and interesting releases
that may not appeal to a wide audience.”
So why would anyone possibly want to make a record?
Many argue that the record truly is a
superior format from both an artistic and sound quality perspective.
“Vinyl aficionados in Asia buy two copies of the record -- one copy to play and one to keep,”
Surfer Brad
of Los Angeles’ Bong Load Records
says. “It happens [in the U.S.] too. . . The
vinyl connoisseur appreciates the format in a way that has nothing to do with a CD.”
Surfer Brad goes on to explain that vinyl’s analog sound is a closer representation of what
was actually recorded. “An analog wave, when it comes out of the speaker, is a different
sound wave,” he says. “When a CD plays, [the wave] is more staircase-shaped, but with
vinyl its more jagged.” A record’s jagged shape provides much more of a “live in the room”
sound than its digital counterpart. All of this may sound like irrelevant technical gibberish
for all but the highest end of audio buffs, but Surfer Brad insists that the appreciation is
instinctive. “Your body knows the difference,” he says.
Rob Christiansen, an engineer at
Let’s Rain Studios in Arlington, Va., explains that getting
this superior sound requires true talent in the manufacturing stage. “It’s really amazing to
watch one of these vinyl mastering engineers work,” he says. “They listen to a recording
that is 22 minutes long, then fix their settings so that at the end of the recording, [the
grooves are] cut right to the edge of the label. It takes years and years to learn to do this.”
But the fact that making good vinyl is so difficult is one of its downfalls, as many feel that
there are few engineers left who know how to make a high quality record.
“In the early 70’s, all these records that studio engineers were making were made to sound
good on vinyl,” Christiansen explains. “Then the mastering engineer was mastering
specifically for vinyl. So you had a truly analog process. Now you’ve got all these people
with ADATs and all the other digital equipment, and they don’t really know how to make
something that is truly analog in the way that vinyl is.”
Sloppy manufacturing also contributes to the problem, Christiansen notes. “Cheaper
pressing plants aren’t that interested in the music,” he says. “If they get a four track
recording from an indie band, they say, ‘This sounds like crap. It doesn’t matter what we do
with it.’ They don’t see that there could be artistic value to something that was recorded on a
four track, so they don’t take the time to do a good job with it.”
The sound quality of a compact disc, on the other hand, is not damaged nearly as much
when it is mastered and manufactured poorly. “Because of the extended dynamic range on
CD, you don’t have to compress it as hard,” Christiansen says. “The CD format is much
more forgiving.”
Luckily for collectors, there are still a handful of folks in the vinyl industry who take their
work seriously. J.J. Gonson says that record manufacturing is Erika Records’ pride and joy.
“There are some smaller companies that are really dedicated to the vinyl craft.”
And when done correctly, a record truly can be a work of art beyond the music it holds.
After securing a “modern day gentleman’s agreement” with Geffen, Bong Load Records
pressed Beck’s
Odelay on 180 gram vinyl and included a 3 panel color poster in the
packaging. The elaborate product ran the price tag up to twice the usual cost of
manufacturing, but the extra money paid off. Absolute Sound, a high end audio
publication, wrote that the vinyl Odelay “makes the Geffen CD sound like a demo.”
Problems with art work delayed Odelay’s vinyl release until four months after the CD came
out, but Surfer Brad says that vinyl sales have been brisk anyway, and the record is
currently in its fourth pressing.
So how big is the vinyl audience?
As with anything in the music industry, that all depends
on the name of the band on the cover. Surfer Brad says that platinum sellers like Pearl Jam
and Soundgarden can move over 50,000 records if they release the vinyl version before the
CD.
And how about for bands that aren’t headlining Lollapalooza? Well, that depends on a lot of
things. Surfer Brad says that Bong Load decided to press 1,000 copies of vinyl for the
recent Lutefisk release because “They’re an L.A. band, and L.A. is still a vinyl market.”
And despite his decision to move Urinine to all-CD, Sowder says, “A pop punk band . . . can
hit a lot of their target audience with vinyl.” Records can be “a way of life for small [bands]
that want to stay that way,” he notes. “If you’re rooted in DIY and don’t want to sell to
anyone who isn’t a part of the punkrock community then viva la vinyl!”
Jon Carson
carson@i-cities.com
