On November 7, Tegan and Sara announced the closure of their official webstore—a curious move for a band promoting a new album. At that point, many pre-orders for Hey, I’m Just Like You, released in September, still had not made it to fans. “We’ve asked Warner Records to shut down the Tegan and Sara online merchandise store,” the band wrote in a message on their website. “Their warehouse is experiencing a huge backlog that is affecting all Warner artist stores and there is no definitive answer about when remaining pre-orders will ship and this is just unacceptable to us. We have requested Warner not take any new orders for Tegan and Sara merchandise as we have lost faith in their warehouse’s ability to fulfill those orders in a timely manner.”

When asked about the Tegan & Sara fiasco, a spokesperson for Warner Music Group gave Pitchfork the following comment: “We are taking these customer service issues very seriously and working with our pick, pack and ship provider Direct Shot, as well as other vendors, to resolve this situation.” (Pitchfork reached out to Direct Shot several times for comment on the claims made in this story to no response. This story will be updated should they reply.)

Direct Shot is Warner Music Group’s distributor. Distributors are the essential but largely unseen part of the pipeline that gets physical music to listeners: After vinyl records and CDs leave a pressing plant, they go to a distribution center, which fulfills orders from labels and record stores.

On April 1, Warner Music Group announced that it was changing distributors from Technicolor in Nashville to Direct Shot, marking the consolidation of the stock of all three major labels—Sony, Warner, and Universal—into one location. This switch also extended to the indie labels that work with Warner’s Alternative Distribution Alliance (ADA), which has Sub Pop, 4AD, Matador, Rough Trade, XL, Domino, and Saddle Creek listed as partners on its website. (Update: 4AD, Matador, Rough Trade, Young Turks, XL, Domino, and Saddle Creek announced their departure from the ADA on January 6 and moved their business to the North Carolina-based company Redeye.)

Warner’s April move to Direct Shot concerned some independent shop owners, who were less than two weeks out from Record Store Day, one of their biggest sales days of the year. “We were assured that there would be no issues, but approximately 50 independent stores and some big [record chains] didn’t receive their Warner Music Group Record Store Day releases,” says Record Store Day co-founder Michael Kurtz. “That was when we first knew—this was not going to go smoothly.” Kurtz estimates that between 20,000 and 30,000 copies of Warner-distributed titles didn’t make it to stores in time for Record Store Day. Another 10,000 records from Universal reportedly missed Record Store Day’s recent Black Friday promotion as well, according to Kurtz.

“We got a lot of promises [from Warner reps] that things were going to get better by July, then by September,” says Michael Bunnell, who leads the Coalition for Independent Music Stores. “These issues remain exactly the same as they were in April. Through no fault of our own, we’re losing the loyalty of our best customers. That’s very frightening.”

In addition to running the Record Exchange in Boise, Idaho, Bunnell collects and distributes sales information among the 40 U.S. shops that take part in the coalition. He says his colleagues have reported that orders previously taking between seven and 10 days to arrive now take between six and eight weeks. New releases barely make it to stores by release date and in many cases, simply don’t; it takes even longer to restock back catalog titles, he says.