The Vinyl Record Mirage – Part 1
Misconceptions for clapping seals.
This is part 1 of 6 with a new post from this being put up every Sunday for the next six weeks as the final product came out to some nearly 20,000 words. Ideally, I’ll also be looking into a cheap self-publishing option so the full version of this can be sold or redistributed in the event somebody needs to have a physical copy of this. This is designed to be an educational resource and if one doesn’t want to learn anything they shouldn’t be reading. I’d request any feedback be kept until the final installment is posted as additional questions might be answered.
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I filmed a video for my Youtube channel called “The Magical Industry of Physical Media Deadstock” that covers some of what is discussed in here (certain other subjects might tie in with other videos I’ve done) however as I find that many of the people who could use this information are in places where English is a second language, a written post that can be translated will likely be better to allow for the information to be consumed. Before I start the article, I must explain that while this article is specifically focused on black metal, the same things could be said about other music genres however the overall volume of product those genres move in physical goods is much bigger, so the numbers would likely need to be inflated to a higher degree.
Beginning in 2007 and supposedly peaking (likely due to economic factors related to the pandemic) in 2022, sales of vinyl records have grown consecutively throughout numerous music genres, in what is being called a “vinyl record revival” by pseudo-experts, journalists, music commentators or other people who probably are high on their own supply. Japan (where there is only one pressing plant) being the major exception to this, where CDs are still commonly circulated in place of vinyl records. Other countries and other music genres are also, I guess, exempt depending on various circumstances, however the point of this article is not to provide a bunch of stats on record consumption (if you want those please read the CIA’s report on the subject) but to rather explain how UGBM’s hard-on for black metal records is a complete waste of resources, money and time. My work in black metal through Winter Solace Productions is primarily with newer/less established bands and just about every single one of them wants a vinyl record for their release, when the product they have at that moment is nowhere near to a standard of feasibility. The origin of this demand is just FOMO (Fear of Missing Out which I’m working on a longer Substack article for) and life within the fractured internet reality/split off digital self I refer to as the Mayasabha (also, a much longer Substack is in the works) and I want to use some of my own experiences or stories I’ve heard to illustrate that this is basically a giant mirage. We are going to start with the perception side of this and then transition into the reality of what it takes to get a record to materialize in a positive manner. I want to state explicitly at the start of this that I will continue to press records for artists I have dealings with and will also continue to buy records. While I think record consumers would benefit some by reading this, they are not the primary target audience and I am not attempting to say they shouldn’t buy records.
The perceptions you have about underground black metal vinyl records.
The perception is that the vinyl record has become the status symbol of success for any band, that it is a “must have” to be one of the cool kids and that the music is better on vinyl. There are several points to this which need to be unpacked and the best way to do that is follow many of these things backward to their logical path to what is basically the norms of black metal.
M. I. The first point is that vinyl records are a “status symbol” of success, when the reality is that if your music is good enough for success, the exact format it is on should be irrelevant. Many players of instruments that produce black metal sounds can’t work within boundaries (notice I did not use the words: musician, artist or music as you can’t have make music or art without them) yet people will consider their output a success. A prime example of this would be the raw black metal band Granatus from Brazil which did make an impact/develop a following by releasing a very large discography (I’ve so far found only one album which should’ve been released as it originally was and another release that functions as a great noise album, yet was originally intended to be a war metal album) in a short amount of time. So basically, you can record something that people think is garbage, yet it still be deemed a success (please note that there are other parameters for success and that the definition of success changes from person to person) as it extends past the artist.
M. II. Vinyl records being for the “cool kids” is, to be put bluntly, a complete lie. Currently as I write this, I am listening to a dark ambient CD that is 80 minutes in length and the immersion feeling of the recording would be ruined by changing sides on a turntable and election music is better on a digital/optical medium anyway. If one wants to have an album pressed onto a vinyl record, they must write an album with the end goal of a vinyl record in mind and many of these people who want to be one of the “cool kids” have never actually focused on what they must do to get what they want. This means the following: 1. The music must be between 25-45 minutes in length for 12”. 10-20 minutes for the economic black hole that is 10” and 5-10 minutes for the underrated 7” format, 2. The songs must be able to be evenly distributed at around 22 minutes per side (so thus you are constrained for time) or the final output is musically compressed, 3. The songs can’t sample copywritten material or be extremely explicit in their political or other subject matters, and 4. Your band must conduct itself in a manner that would create a demand for the records to be sold and consumed. The minute one comes up against many of these parameters in black metal, they can’t function because they are not artists or musicians.
On time constraints (M. II. Points 1 & 2): Years ago, when I asked one of the kids I used to work with to write a 4-minute song for a split 7”, he came back months later with 2 songs each under 2:30 that were a fraction of his musical abilities (for the record the person with the two short songs while very popular online with other Zoomers is not an artist but a monkey imitating riffs from binge listening to one specific band every day for a multitude of years) and needless to say said 7” did not materialize with the other band’s music still unreleased to this day. Certain experimental or atmospheric songs are completely ruined with either time constraints or having to get up to turn the record over, examples being Boris’s “Flood”, Fanisk’s “Insularum” & just about anything related to drone music. I also personally find listening to vinyl records to be an activity more suited for sitting down with headphones so any lively music designed to get people moving around, also for me, doesn’t work on vinyl. For 12” records, the songs must be evenly distributed over the sides of a record with the audio having enough headroom to avoid compression, which is a problem for albums written originally for either other formats or people not having any concern for how the finish product would be compiled into a consumable form. This is why you get LPs where one side is some kind of etching (manufactures usually discourage single sided records in any capacity as they are prone to warping) or 33 RPM DLP demo represses that should’ve been 3 records cut at 45 RPM. When vinyl records were common place, home recording technology didn’t exist in the same quality that it does now so musicians back then were forced to pay for studio time, which generally resorted in a need to condense everything down and took care of this problem, now however you can record a 3 hour jam session in your garage in good quality with the right equipment/setup.
On not being able to get your manifesto on why you can’t get laid (M. II. Point 3) pressed onto vinyl: Unlike with CDs and certain professionally replicated audio cassettes (it depends on the engineer/replication equipment) somebody has to actually listen to whatever you want to press onto a record before they can do the manufacturing, for CDs you just upload files and for cassettes, only certain audio engineers (usually people who I find to be pompous holier than thou audio nerds) listen to the cassettes during the manufacturing. The reason pressing plants require their staff (some places will bill you for the press tech to sit in one of their “listening rooms” to listen to a copy after pressing it) to listen to the product is usually for quality control (I’ll discuss the expenses involved below) and to verify copyright protections. While it differs from country to country, in the United States a pressing plant can be sued/shut down (with potential for a raid by a S.W.A.T team) if they press something with copyrighted material on it thanks to the mainstream cooperate music industry wanting to suck every single cent out of a sound. This is also why certain pressing plants will reject cover tracks outright or content based on political/moral grounds and a common problem (the main pressing plant in the USA people used to use for boutique record pressings is staffed and likely owned by people who are actively involved in ANTIFA) is plants being staffed by people with left leaning political beliefs. Black metal specifically can’t produce enough monetary volume to fund a pressing plant, so all pressing plants usually must make deals with larger companies to stay afloat and thus they are not monetarily incentivized to press your sketch record. While this transitions somewhat into point 4, you should suspect that any pressing plant is going to look you up by name, look your label up (including going to your website to look at the products in your shop) and look up in great detail what you are pressing (record projects have actually been rejected midway through because somebody looked up the band on Metal-Archives) multiple times during production. While you can lie to the plant, which sometimes works, if you’re caught, they could decline to return the money or require resolutions to go through lawyers (which is expensive) depending on the country they are based out of. While some pressing plants don’t care about this (so you can press illegal music all you want) there are usually other difficulties that go into pressing at these places which outweigh any upsides so the best solution is to just submit a legal product where they press the records (+ print the jackets) and transparent about but not advertise who you are. Should some plant down the job, your only goal at that point is to just get the money returned, not to keep bullshitting the plant or threaten the sales guy.
Your band having a vinyl ready viable product (M. II. Point 4): This one I’m going to circle back to after I explain several realities of record pressing and will likely discuss at the end of this article.
M. III. The music sounds better on vinyl because it is all analog. The only people who believe this are lowfi (low fidelity music/aesthetic) nerds (many of whom are also leftist hardcore punks) and while RAC moves a lot of records, this concept primarily lies on the left side of the political spectrum. There is also this myth perpetuated by the large sales of some of these popup records (usually FOMO or outright Goatowarex style fraud with labels purposefully pulling the stock to make it appear sold out so demand increases) that a lot of people buy these records. This audience of trust fund consumers are the same lowfi nerds I mentioned earlier who are primarily leftist and they also have extremely high standards which I will discuss in detail below. Many of the customers who consume right wing black metal are perfectly happy with cheap affordable CDs in jewel cases with 4-page booklets priced at around $10 USD without a bunch of bullshit as it pertains to getting the goods.
Analog is more of a feeling than anything else and most of the infrastructure for it is outdated (hence why the cassette revival is basically dead) and an art that was replaced by digital for a reason. While you can pay extra for somebody to tell you everything is entirely analog and there are studios/plants out there who can do tape transfers/analog work, this entire concept is the equivalent of what the environmentalists call “green washing” where you just say all of that to virtue signal. In the modern recording process, the sound is usually almost always transferred to digital at some point and that analog warmth is not a physical presence but a psychological phenomenon where you believe it is there because you want it to be there. When you press a record, there are 2 ways (other experimental means exist which I will discuss briefly below but they aren’t optimal for what I’m trying to explain here) it can be pressed: 1. Lacquer disc cutting (the preferred method) however this was a big problem after Apollo The Masters burnt down in California (where the state government made it impossible to rebuild) during the pandemic as there was a lack of adequate supplies/production or 2. DMM (Direct Metal Mastering) which thanks to the Church of Scientology hoarding all the machines for it in the USA, is only common in Europe. DMM isn’t ideal for certain genres of music because issues can happen that effect the bass of the sound to the point where the record can sound bad (this happened with a popular black metal repress in 2024 where the band & label responded by just arguing with their customers over the subject) on certain poor quality audio setups. A black metal recording is basically made on the feeling or atmosphere it creates, so how the sound actually sounds is a big deal and thus while most of what is corrected by test presses (you still need to listen to your test presses to make sure they cut the right music) isn’t really a factor for black metal, you still have a higher chance that the black metal record will be ruined by the pressing process.
So what produces the analog high? It’s part of the presentation but a lot of it is a feeling of attachment. To illustrate (because for me what usually determines the format I buy something in is basically random or I go by what format I have the bands other albums in) I must use an example from a different type of media. Steven Seagal is my favorite action movie star and everyone considers Under Siege to be his best film which you can buy on DVD or Blu-Ray very cheaply at Wal-Mart or any thrift store. I paid $30 dollars for the Arrow Blu-Ray (when I don’t have any fancy home theatre equipment) because I was very happy that somebody wanted to give sensei Steven’s best movie the upscale treatment. This is also why RAC music sells better onto LP, because that scene has much more comradery between everyone than underground black metal’s poorly adjusted anti-social drama addicted internet clown show of seals clapping, so RAC consumers are more apt to have an attachment to their records and will play them multiple times. It is not possible for consumers to build the type of genuine attachment to many of these “albums” constantly being released when a band/label can pretty much pop-up with LPs out of nowhere to an audience who’ll listen to them once or twice at most. Much of this supposed underground black metal vinyl industry is about people paying thousands of dollars to post pictures on Instagram or a subreddit to garner attention (the only viable currency left) from onlookers.
So now that the basic perceptions of vinyl records have been deconstructed. Most of the remaining parts of this article are going to be about the realities of pressing records nobody talks about. The purpose of this is to be able to illustrate what a band must do to have their music pressed onto vinyl. The overarching point that will be illustrated by what I will be discussing below is that while people do buy vinyl records, the amount of money being brought in from these customers is simply not enough to justify much of the extra work that goes into making these records a reality. One principle that I have about success is that if something is worth doing it will usually be either difficult or something about the entire process will not be the way it’s supposed to be and I would request that the reader keep this in the back of their minds when reading the rest of this article.
WS/CWoT
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