Last Wednesday, news broke of a fire at Apollo Masters, the California-based business that was one of only two factories in the world that produced the lacquer used in the creation of master discs—one of the first steps in the manufacture of a vinyl album. While all the employees made it out safely, as the company posted on their website, their "manufacturing and storage facility... suffered catastrophic damage."
"We are uncertain of our future at this point," the statement continued, "and are evaluating options as we try to work through this difficult time."
The repercussions of this blaze look to be massive and couldn't come at a worse time. According to a report released via Billboard last month, vinyl records made up 26% of all physical albums sold in 2019. And record labels were already adjusting to the recent closure of Rainbo Records, the 80-year-old pressing plant that had been one of the largest producers of vinyl in the US.
"It's just adding to the chaotic landscape that is pressing records in North America right now," says Mark Rainey, the owner and CEO of Cascade Record Pressing, the Milwaukie, OR-based vinyl record maker that opened five years ago. "We're going to have to spend the next six months to a year reconfiguring. It's been getting shaken up quite a bit for a few years now, and this just seems like another stage of that."
By Rainey's reckoning, Apollo Masters accounted for two-thirds of the lacquers produced for North America. The rest came from MDC, a company based in Japan that mostly works with clients in Europe and Asia. That's good news for Rainey and people like Adam Gonsalves, the senior mastering engineer at Portland's Telegraph Mastering. Both are regular customers of MDC and likely won't be directly impacted by the fire at Apollo. It's the larger mastering houses and labels that are, as Gonsalves puts it, "fucked."
"I had the head mastering engineer at a very big mastering house in Los Angeles call me over the weekend," says Gonsalves. "This is the kind of place that does, like Billboard Top 10 releases. This person asked me if I had enough to sell him $25,000 worth of lacquers, because in six weeks, they're not going to have any. So for places like that, that's where the huge problem is."
Consumers likely won't feel the effects of this for another six months to a year. Many labels already have many of the 2020 releases in production, including the hundreds of special edition LPs and singles planned for Record Store Day this April. Beyond that, no one can speculate on the long term impact of this fire.
"This will hurt us as well as hurting both indie and major labels," Terry Currier, owner of Music Millennium, wrote in an email to the Mercury. "And the artists. I'm sure many have tours set up around new releases... and they will be on the road with no product. It's too early to find out how many releases were at Apollo... but this could be quite disastrous."
Currier also pointed out that record stores like his have already been hurt by issues caused by Direct Shot, the distributor used by all three major labels and many indies. Their bungling caused around 50 independent shops to not receive their Record Store Day product as well as more ludicrous reports of orders being sent to the wrong stores and some shops getting empty boxes in the mail.
Dire as it may seem now, the consensus view is that the record industry will weather this storm. Gonsalves says there are at least three groups around the world that he knows of that were already looking to produce lacquers before the Apollo fire. There's also the option of using Direct Metal Mastering, a process utilizing copper discs instead of lacquers, until one of these new businesses gets rolling or Apollo opens its doors again. Just don't expect MDC to fill the upcoming void, according to Gonsalves.
"It would be surprising to me if that was their response," Gonsalves says. "People have tried lots of different carrots and sticks to get them to make more lacquer and they've always said no. They've always said, 'Look, we're a quality-based product, and if we make a lot more lacquers, they're not going to be as good. That's not the kind of business we're interested in.'"
