Kickstart: Calling for a Seven Nation Army of vinyl presses

Jack White, the musician behind the White Stripes, multiple collaborations with other artists and Third Man Records, is calling for the music industry to significantly invest in presses to make vinyl records.

While music fans have rediscovered vinyl records, the manufacturing capabilities behind those records has been struggling. First there weren't many viable manufacturers of record presses. Then in early 2020, Apollo Masters Corp., the California supplier of lacquer to make discs, sustained a massive fire. That was followed by vinyl shortages from materials firms after storms on the Gulf Coast.

As a result, White says in a statement from Third Man, it takes nearly nine months to go from producing the music in a studio to having it available for buyers.

Third Man opened its own vinyl pressing operations in 2017.

"And in the last year, I've doubled down and invested in even more record presses, more employees to run them and more shifts to try and accommodate the insane growing demand for vinyl product," White said.

But while that may mean good business for White and Third Man, the industry is suffering. It is time, he said, for major music labels such as Sony, Universal and Warner to invest in their own presses.

"To be clear, the issue is not big labels vs. small labels, it's not independent vs. mainstream, it's not even punk vs. pop," White said. "The issue is, simply, we have all created an environment where the unprecedented demand for vinyl records cannot keep up with the rudimentary supply of them."

If there's one thing we've learned over the past two years, it's that supply chains are very, very tight and it takes very, very little to throw everything out of whack.

So what will happen when a region that makes 7 percent of the wiring harnesses for the European auto market is suddenly in the middle of a war? That region, of course, is Ukraine.

As Larry P. Vellequette from our sister paper Automotive News writes, wire harnesses are the central nervous system of every car, truck and SUV made. And it's added early in the auto assembly plant, so it's not something you can simply add later.

"A modern automobile doesn't just have wires going to obvious components, such as the engine and transmission, lighting and instrumentation," he writes. "That same wire harness also has to feed electricity to seating and window controls, sensor clusters and cameras, electric power-steering modules, fuel and brake pumps. In fact, there are only a few fully mechanical systems left on the automobile that aren't electrified or sensored in some way."

The barriers are coming down.

You may have noticed your local stores are removing barriers between cashiers and customers. Now the 1,300 stores within the Publix grocery store chain based in Florida are removing them at registers, customer service desks and pharmacies, writes Austin Fuller of the Orlando Sentinel.

The barriers went up in late March 2020.

Plastics News' Catherine Kavanaugh is currently speaking with film and sheet suppliers to update the story from a plastics perspective, including what is happening to those barriers now. Feel free to reach out to her at [email protected] if you have information to share.