Raw material scarcity meant that the consumers paid higher prices. “We bought plastic ahead of time, but we couldn’t buy the covers,” said López. According to López, everyone uses the same suppliers of raw materials, which is why larger factories like G2 Media and Record Industry soaked up almost all the resources. Production delays, supply shortages and high prices linger today, says Eugenio López, partner and co-founder of Mad Vinyl Music, a Spanish vinyl album pressing factory. Still, hundreds of thousands of unsold copies gathered dust on store shelves because of exorbitant prices – $40 (€37) – when it was first released. Despite the industry chaos it caused, 30 sold 318,000 copies according to Forbes, making it the most successful vinyl release of 2021 by far. Ed Sheeran told an Australian radio station that the backup caused by Adele’s 30 forced him to speed up work on his Equals album by two months to ensure a timely release of the vinyl version. Current and former stars like Elton John, Coldplay and ABBA were put on hold, prompting complaints from distributors and artists. Newcomers and unknowns were not the only ones affected. With the factories at maximum capacity, other recording artists had to wait up to nine months for a vinyl album release, according to Variety. All of Adele’s previous albums were released on vinyl about a year after the digital release, according to Mark Kitcatt, director of Popstock! España, the Spanish distributor for Adele’s albums.
This happened not only because of the quantity ordered by Sony but also because the label pushed for a simultaneous vinyl and digital release on November 19, 2021. The vinyl record pressing factories were swamped and had to stop producing other albums scheduled for release in the coming months. In 2020, Sony Music ordered the production of 500,000 vinyl records of 30, Adele’s new release. The impacts are still being felt two years later, and it was all because of one of the world’s biggest stars – Adele. In the era of streaming music from the likes of Apple Music and Spotify, vinyl record sales peaked in 2021, soaking up global production capacity. Vinyl record sales have been growing for over a decade and labels were quick to jump on the bandwagon.
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