ike many fans of music on vinyl, I’ve grown accustomed to waiting for preordered records. For several years, record-pressing plants have been oversubscribed; there just aren’t enough presses to keep up with demand. When vinyl declined in the 1980s—replaced first by cassette tape and then by CD—old presses were abandoned, falling to rust and disrepair before the vinyl revival, leaving the industry with limited capacity. Then a February 2020 fire destroyed the Apollo/Transco factory, one of just two major suppliers of the lacquers used to make most new records. The impact of the lacquer shortage may have been overstated, but it was another factor that companies
