Vinyl sales have grown consistently for well over a decade, from a base near zero. In several markets records now outsell CDs, which would have seemed absurd in 2005.

What hasn't recovered is the industrial base. The result is a bottleneck that shapes the whole market in ways buyers mostly experience as long waits and high prices without knowing why.

What was dismantled

When CDs displaced vinyl through the late 1980s and 1990s, pressing plants closed. Not mothballed — closed, with the machinery scrapped or sold for parts.

Record presses were manufactured largely in the mid-twentieth century. When the industry collapsed, nobody was making new ones, and the companies that had built them moved on or went out of business.

So the surviving global capacity consists substantially of machines that are decades old, maintained by a small number of specialists, many of whom are near retirement.

Some new presses are being manufactured again, by a handful of companies, and they're expensive and produced in small numbers. Capacity has grown but nowhere near proportionally with demand.

The lacquer problem

A vivid illustration of how thin the supply chain is. Vinyl production traditionally starts with a lacquer disc, cut with the audio signal, from which the metal stampers are made.

The global supply of these lacquer blanks depended on a very small number of manufacturers. When one suffered a catastrophic fire a few years ago, a substantial share of world supply disappeared essentially overnight, and the industry scrambled.

Alternative processes exist — direct metal mastering cuts into a metal disc instead — and adoption increased sharply as a result. But the episode demonstrated that a global consumer trend was resting on a supply chain with single points of failure.

What the bottleneck does to release schedules

Lead times of six months or more have been common, and at peak periods considerably longer.

The practical effects are significant. An artist releasing an album has to commit to a vinyl order many months before release, which means guessing demand before anyone has heard the record.

Guess low and the record sells out and the reorder arrives half a year later, well after the moment has passed. Guess high and you've paid for inventory nobody wants.

Independent artists and small labels feel this hardest. Major labels book capacity in advance at scale, and reissues of catalogue titles — reliable sellers with predictable demand — occupy a large share of plant time.

That's a genuine equity problem: the format most associated with independent music is one where the majors have structural priority access.

Why records cost what they do

Several factors stack.

Manufacturing is expensive per unit compared with digital or CD, and the fixed costs of setup are high, so short runs are disproportionately costly.

Materials are petroleum-derived and subject to price movements.

Shipping is heavy and increasingly expensive, and records are fragile enough that packaging matters.

And there's the elephant: much of the current market is buying records as objects. Coloured variants, gatefold sleeves, inserts, limited editions. Those add cost and they're a large part of why people are buying, so nobody's incentivised to strip them out.

The turntable question

An awkward fact for the format's mythology. Surveys have repeatedly suggested a substantial share of vinyl buyers don't own a working turntable, or rarely use one.

The record functions as a physical token of support for an artist, an object, and a display item. That's a completely legitimate reason to buy something, and it's not what the "warmth of analogue" discourse describes.

It also means the audio quality argument, which generates enormous debate, is somewhat beside the point for a large part of the market.

For what it's worth: a well-cut record played on decent equipment sounds excellent, and whether it sounds better than a good digital master is a question that depends far more on the mastering than on the format. A record cut from a compressed digital source will not outperform the file.

Where it goes

Capacity continues to expand slowly, and lead times have improved from their worst. Whether the demand curve holds is the open question — a format sustained substantially by collectors is more vulnerable to fashion than one sustained by listening.

What seems durable is the underlying impulse. After two decades of music becoming entirely intangible, a meaningful number of people want an object that represents a relationship with an artist. Vinyl happens to be the object available. If it weren't, something else would be.

What it means for new artists

The practical upshot for a musician starting out is worth stating plainly, because the romance of the format obscures it. A short pressing run has a high unit cost, a long lead time, and requires capital committed months before any revenue arrives.

For an artist without label support that is a genuine barrier, and it means the format most associated with independent music is in practice one of the harder things for an independent artist to do.

Several workarounds have emerged — pressing collectives, pre-order funding, shorter formats — and none of them removes the underlying constraint. The bottleneck is physical and it does not care who is queuing.