44 million records, and the standards slipping

44 million vinyl records were sold in the United States alone last year, the 18th consecutive year of growth, in a $2 billion global market. Everyone celebrates that number. I read it as a warning.

People want vinyl. I want vinyl. The question is whether the industry respects that demand with the quality we pay for, and on too many of my sealed premium records the answer has been no.

Here's what growth does to a factory. More orders arrive than the experienced operators can handle, those operators are retiring, and new staff learn on machines that take years to master. The world's largest pressing operation, GZ Media, has made vinyl since 1951 and owns majority stakes in plants in the US, Canada and France, so a label reading pressed in the USA or pressed in the EU tells you very little.

The complaints about quality have been consistent, documented and loud for over a decade, forum after forum, collector after collector. Volume rewards speed, and nobody on that line is paid for the silence between tracks. The boom did not create the defects on its own, but it made them profitable to ignore.

A market that grows for 18 years in a row stops listening to its customers. Returning the bad records is how we make it listen again.