Why Vinyl Collectors Are So Bent Out of Shape About Packaging Flaws

“Bent corner” is one of the most terrifying phrases in the LP shipping business for Alliance Entertainment, the record distributor that works with Walmart, Amazon and other top retailers and earned $1.1 billion in revenue last year. “When we ship a piece of vinyl, and it gets a bent corner, we immediately get calls from customers: ‘Why did I get this like this?’” says Ken Glaser, the company’s vp of sales.

In an earlier era of vinyl collecting, customers’ complaints about the condition of the cardboard sleeve may have seemed petty. If the music sounds good, who cares? But while turntable ownership among vinyl buyers grew from 23% in 2022 to 72% last year, and record-player listeners increased from 17% to 61% during the same period, according to a recent Luminate study, many in the vinyl business say LP collecting is as much about merch as it is about listening. As Michael Tolle, operations director for Mello Music Group, a Tucson indie label, puts it, vinyl collecting is  “like the shoe market, where people are buying it not just to wear them, but to resell them, or to have value, like baseball cards.”

Not to mention that as LP prices have grown, from an average of about $25 in 2017 to more than $31 in 2023, a 25.5% increase — slightly higher than the inflation rate — buyers are paying more attention than ever to every detail of the product. For customers in today’s vinyl market, “a bent corner is a big deal,” says Steven Parelman, owner and operator of 33 & 1/3 Record Distributors in Bucks County, Pa.

“What you have is just a completely different customer buying it and a completely different set of expectations surrounding the product,” adds Carl Mello, brand engagement director for the Newbury Comics music chain. “People want it to look good and use it on social media — ‘vinyl TikTok’ or whatever. You don’t want to do that with stuff that’s all banged up, especially when your friend has a nice one.”

Over the past few years, the vinyl-as-merch shift in consumer behavior has led to an evolution in the record-packaging industry, which includes distributors, retailers, e-commerce giants, box manufacturers, artists’ webstores and even postal carriers. All these links in the record-shipping chain must contend with the reality that LPs — which are flat, fragile and round — are encased in flimsy square containers. In 2022, a task force convened by the Music Business Association set guidelines on how to best ship vinyl, from box weight to tape width. One recommendation: “Identifying damaged goods and not shipping them out.”

“It’s been a fantastic challenge for us,” says Warwick Goldby, COO for Alliance Entertainment. “The design of the vinyl itself is not great for large-scale distribution, and the format has not changed since it was initially designed.”

Many in the record-distribution business say the pandemic was a tipping point when consumers became accustomed to ordering albums online; with more vinyl customers ordering packages to their homes, more people noticed damage to the cardboard sleeves. Music purchases have been non-refundable for years, but customers were demanding replacement copies for bent corners more than ever. “Everybody started stocking up and vinyl became ubiquitous,” Tolle says. “If they order 15 vinyl, you want to make sure it’s a box inside a box inside a box, so you don’t risk ruining a $300 or $400 order.”

In the earlier vinyl-selling era, record labels and distributors shipped pallets of hundreds of units at a time to record stores, and it was hard to damage individual LP sleeves packed so tightly together. Today’s record market is more decentralized. Many top labels still use the pallet system, and according to Glaser, “Our team is trained to look for those kinds of things and make sure we don’t ship anything that is visibly damaged.”

By contrast, artist webstores, indie retailers and individual sellers frequently ship DIY, wrapping smaller numbers of records in postal mailers. This can lead to more damage, particularly to the exposed cardboard sleeves. Top retailers such as Amazon, Walmart, Target and Urban Outfitters, none of whom responded to requests for comment, frequently use UPS, FedEx or their own shipping networks, introducing different distribution procedures to the process. “That adds to the problem,” says Kevin Hopper, physical distribution lead for Symphonic, a record distributor. “Things are getting shipped directly to the consumers. Records get thrown around trucks or [are] left out in the lane.” 

Over the last year or two, Alliance has updated its shipping package designs. For one thing, its single-unit box now has oblong “wings” on the sides so it can “take hits without damaging the product,” according to Goldby, while its box for 10 or fewer LPs folds cardboard tabs over the records to hold them in place and include openings on the side flaps that act as “air cells” for cushioning. Meanwhile, its bulk unit, which holds more than 10 LPs, basically consists of a thin, long box on each side of the package, reinforcing the records inside with more insulation. “We’ve had all sorts of interesting designs,” Goldby says. 

Other distributors, as well as indie labels and stores, often use “mighty mailers” — cardboard shipping boxes with built-in flaps designed to hold records in place — to avoid even minor damage to the LP sleeves. Parelman pays $5.50 apiece for custom boxes that hold 30 records, “a fortune” for bulk sellers. But, he says, “what makes it not a fortune is that I get virtually no complaints.” At Twist & Shout, a Denver record store, “We’re one of the places that’s very, very thorough about our packaging in mail-order,” says owner Patrick Brown. “As long as you take care on the front end, it’s way less likely to be an issue. That’s a vanishing, small part of our problems.”

“As recently as maybe 10 years ago, it seemed like there was one size of record mailer,” adds Jay Millar, general manager of Sundazed Records, an indie label specializing in Sun Ra and surf-rock reissues. “Nowadays, you’ve got your choice of at least six different types.”

Millar tries to keep empty record sleeves on hand in case customers complain of damage, which doesn’t cost much, because printers often ship 10% extra sleeves with every order. “It kind of happens on its own,” he says. Parelman takes a different approach: His home dining-room storage area is filled with so many unsold LPs due to bent sleeve corners that he just takes 300 or 400 of them to Record Store Day’s annual summer camp and gives them away.

How can the record-shipping industry resolve this problem? Alliance’s Goldby has one idea: Labels could print up empty sleeves in bulk, and send spares to customers as needed. But this isn’t a popular idea, as labels would have to boost warehouse and storage space to accommodate multiple physical items that consumers may never need. “It became a daunting prospect,” he says, “and the majors were not that excited about it.”

“Bent corners — do they happen? Yes,” Goldby continues. “The more you touch it, obviously, the more susceptible it is to damage. We put in a system to reduce the amount of touches and handling in the warehouse. We try to get it to the customer as pristinely as possible.”