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was doing the Purple Rain tour 
At $1 billion in vinyl record sales, 2021 was the biggest year for vinyl since 1986, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. At just 11% of all revenues, physical sales are still exploding — with vinyl revenue growing 61% year over year.
Vinyl record sales have grown rapidly for more than a decade. That’s one of few bright spots for musicians and an industry that’s been battered by shrinking physical sales the past two decades, and more recently the pandemic.
But vinyl record production has again struggled to keep up, and small artists are bearing the brunt of the production pain.
The story of demand outstripping the capacity of record pressing plants is not new. Once considered a fad, the resurgence of vinyl became a serious source of revenue a decade ago. The bottlenecks of production were highlighted in the middle of the last decade.
A number of people entered the market — refurbishing of old pressing plants — to the relief and fanfare of a vinyl hungry marketplace. But as sales surged, so did the business case for legacy labels to reproduce their catalogs — re-releasing everything from Nirvana’s 1991 smash hit “Nevermind” to Art Blakey’s 1959 hard-bop masterpiece, “Moanin’.”
And as the majors lean on independently owned record pressing companies, relief was never realized in the record production pipeline.
"The major labels are gobbling up all of the production space. And it's causing the independents to really, really suffer," said Chris Cline, an audio engineer who does mixing and mastering for vinyl production.
In 2020, Rainbo Records Pressing plant — one of the biggest in the country — closed. Last year, production requests surged, and now the backlog may be the worst it's ever bee
it's summertime and we all need a great new Chaka jam