Record Store Day has helped spawn a vinyl revival, but the technologies and sales techniques that underlie the market haven’t changed much since Elvis stepped into Sun Records. Photograph by Thomas Rabsch / laif / Redux

This Saturday, thousands of retailers around the world will participate in Record Store Day. From Toronto’s June Records to Vienna’s Supersense to Ulaanbaatar’s Dund Gol, music fans will line up, in some cases for many hours, to buy records, meet musicians, and otherwise express their love for melted-plastic disks. There will be free concerts and free beer, and millions of dollars worth of vinyl will be sold.

Since the event began eight years ago, annual U.S. sales of new vinyl records have grown from 1.88 million to twelve million. But, as the day has evolved from a small publicity stunt into a modest economic force, it has begun to attract criticism from some in the music industry, who fear that its success is distorting, even endangering, the vinyl revival that it helped spawn. These concerns have included standard consumer gripes about lines and crowds, and more particular ones like the propensity for aggressive record dealers to buy up limited-edition Record Store Day releases, then scalp them online at several times their face value. But, for the past two years, the most pointed critiques have come from musicians and labels, who say that Record Store Day has led to a production logjam.

The fundamental issue is common to resurgent analog industries: vinyl records are subject to hard limits on supply. The production capacity of the business is fixed, based on the number of pressing plants and the quantity and efficiency of the machines that melt and stamp pellets of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) into records. Many of the limited releases that come out on Record Store Day are profitable reissues of tried-and-true hits by major labels, meaning that an up-and-coming band’s new album could, in theory, be delayed because BMG wants to release twenty-one hundred copies of Carl Douglas’s “Kung Fu Fighting” (as it will this year). New customers often have a hard time lining up a pressing plant at all. “Fuck you to all the pressing plants out there who have made major labels their priority,” one Manchester-based independent label tweeted, memorably, in 2014. “Looking forward to seeing that bubble burst in a couple of years.”

The bottleneck persists even though plants work around the clock for months to accommodate the surge in orders leading up to Record Store Day. And it remains an issue year-round. Last year, according to The Economist, delays were as long as six months. Many suspect that the supply crunch has also had the effect of inflating the prices of new records, which now cost between twenty and thirty dollars, on average.

Part of the problem is that the technologies and sales techniques that underlie the vinyl market haven’t changed much since Elvis stepped into Sun Records. But, faced with new pressures, some record businesses are starting to innovate in their own, throwback way: by making clever, incremental tweaks—some digitally influenced, some not—that allow their market to operate more efficiently. Independent labels, such as Mississippi’s Fat Possum Records, have been opening new pressing plants, to insure their own supply. Online, there are new record-of-the-month clubs and new, crowd-funded, affordable turntables. The trading marketplace Discogs recently released a mobile app that gives crate diggers up-to-date pricing information.

The most significant innovations, though, and the ones with the most promise to resolve the industry’s supply problems and spark further growth, seek to improve the output of pressing plants. For years, as vinyl hurtled toward obsolescence, no one bothered to try and improve the record-pressing process, or even to build new machines, and so the presses in operation today are the same ones that were being used half a century ago. Parts are scarce, breakdowns frequent, and shipping delays routine. So are defects. A representative from one large record-plant company told me that up to twenty per cent of the records it presses each day have to be scrapped because of flaws.

But, in the past four months, two companies, Germany’s Newbilt and Toronto-based Viryl Technologies, have introduced the first new record-pressing machines to hit the market in decades. Viryl’s is the more advanced of the two: a fully automated, computer-controlled press called the Warm Tone. (Newbilt’s is based on an older design that requires more manual operation.) The Warm Tone is outfitted with dozens of computerized sensors, which monitor everything from heat and humidity to the specific blend of PVC being used, and allow the pressing process to be calibrated in response to conditions. The best vintage presses can produce a record every thirty to forty seconds; the Warm Tone promises to do so in twenty-five seconds, a significant advantage for a plant that presses tens of thousands of records a day. Viryl also says that the machine’s defect rate is only one per cent.

“This is a modern record press,” Chad Brown, the company’s founder and C.E.O., said when we spoke at the company’s warehouse, in the Toronto suburb of Etobicoke. “It wastes less PVC, is more environmentally friendly and energy efficient.” Brown ran his own pressing plant and dance-record label from 2001 to 2007, an era when vinyl sales were hitting all-time lows. Fewer than a million LPs were pressed in the United States in 2006, versus more than three hundred million thirty years earlier, at the format’s peak. Most plants were sending their presses to the scrap yard. Brown sold two of his three presses for around five thousand dollars, and traded the third for boxes of records. “Today, each would cost eighty thousand dollars, plus another thirty thousand dollars in maintenance,” he said.

The Warm Tone will cost a hundred and ninety thousand dollars, more than double the cost of a restored record press, or one of Newbilt’s. But Viryl believes that there is enough demand to justify the price. “There are a hundred and thirty-five working record presses in the U.S.,” Alex DesRoches, the company’s head of marketing, said. The plants that have opened in recent years are only shifting capacity around, relocating existing pressing machines to new factories without actually increasing the industry’s ability to press more records. “If we continue to see thirty-per-cent annual growth in record sales [the figure for 2015], something has to give,” DesRoches said.

None of the Warm Tones were operational the week I visited, but test pressings began this week, just in time for a Record Store Day event at Viryl’s warehouse. The first eight commercial machines are under construction at the company’s factory in the nearby city of Burlington. (Viryl is partly owned by a machine-routing company based there.) By fall, the company expects to be manufacturing ten presses a month. Brown wouldn’t disclose how many deposits Viryl had received for new machines, but he said that the demand from both established and newer plants was high enough to carry them well into the middle of next year. He told me that Viryl had sped up its product release after Third Man Records, the label owned by Jack White, set up a pressing plant in Detroit with Newbilt machines.

The players in today’s vinyl-record business, Brown included, have no illusions that vinyl will regain the primacy it enjoyed in the nineteen-seventies. They expect the current boom to level off at some point. “You won’t see growth of forty to fifty per cent a year”—as the industry has seen the past several years—“because you can’t roll over the customer base like that. But vinyl records aren’t going away,” Brown said.

The new presses are incremental innovations, which stand to slowly build the industry’s capacity and help labels, artists, and pressing plants to open up the market to additional niches, in turn making it more sustainable. After hearing about the Newbilt presses late last year, Alec Boyd, a twenty-one-year-old musician and record collector in Austin, created Being There Records and ordered a pair of the new machines. His business model involves targeting smaller bands who have been unable to press a record, by recording their concerts in Austin, quickly pressing them to vinyl, and delivering records to the band in just three weeks. “The growth [of vinyl] could certainly stop,” Boyd told me. “But if we can own a corner of the market, there’s money to be made.”