How a Vulfmon album got stuck for three years between a crashed webshop and a silent pressing plant — and who eventually pulled it out of the mire.
There's a particular kind of silence that record lovers learn to recognize. Not the silence of the groove just before the needle hits the music, but the other one: that of an order confirmation that is never followed up. No track-and-trace. No email. Just a deduction from your account and a promise that slowly fades away.
For those who pre-ordered Vulfmon - Vulfnik in 2023, that silence lasted almost three years.
An album that had been alive for a long time
Vulfnik is not an obscure side project. It is the work of Vulfmon, the alias of Jack Stratton — the man who is also the driving force behind funk collective Vulfpeck. Digitally, the album was released on June 2, 2023: ten tracks, somewhat more experimental than his first Vulfmon record, with gospel excursions, a newly learned instrument (the harpejji), and a remix that turns your living room into a small rave.
So the music was there. The listeners were there. The only thing missing was the very thing fans want most: the black vinyl in their hands.
Where it went wrong
The vinyl of Vulfnik was offered as a pre-order via crowdfunding on Qrates from the spring of 2023 — a platform where artists had their pressings funded by fans, and which promised to handle the rest: production, storage, shipping, customer service. For an artist, that sounds like a dream. You make the music, they arrange the record.
Until it went wrong.
Around July 2023, Qrates reported a cybersecurity incident at their shipping partner. The company stopped shipping — while at the same time insisting that this would not affect deliveries. These two things didn't quite line up. And they also turned out to be untrue.
Anyone who delves into the accumulated complaints sees a pattern larger than one record. Orders going back to 2022 remained undelivered. Customer service was unresponsive. The explanation for the delay kept changing — first the warehouse, then a hack. Artists described how they had to keep fans on a string for months about orders they themselves couldn't even trace. Eventually, Qrates announced that the service was temporarily suspended due to financial problems.
Important detail, because it is often misremembered: it was not so much "the pressing plant" that went under. It was the platform around it — the company that collected the money, coordinated production, and was supposed to ship the records. The factory where the physical pressing took place was a separate link. But for the customer, that nuance makes little difference. The end result is the same: paid, and nothing in the mail. So the record balanced on the brink of vaporware for years — announced, pre-sold, but physically unobtainable.
The band that walked away
Vulfpeck and Vulfmon were not the only victims, but they were among the most visible. When it became clear that customers simply weren't getting their records, the camp did the only sensible thing: it broke with Qrates and found a new partner.
That partner was Diggers Factory — a French platform focused on limited edition vinyl, with the idea that artists, fans, and the industry can together build a fairer production model.
This is where the circulating myth arises: that Diggers Factory "bought all the LPs" through an auction. A nice story, but that's not how it happened. There was no secret stash of undelivered records that changed hands for a steal. Diggers took over the catalog and re-released the records — Vulfnik included, along with other titles that had been stuck in the Qrates quagmire. Not a reissue of existing boxes, but a complete restart of production.
A telling detail lies in the labeling: Diggers releases this record as a first pressing (in separate US, UK, and Japan editions, as a numbered edition). A first pressing that is years too late — because the first, promised pressing had never existed for many fans.
Three years later
And then, on March 30, 2026, what buyers almost no longer dared to believe happened: the email arrived announcing that the Vulfnik vinyl was finally shipping. Via Diggers. Shipped.
Read the fan reactions and you'll find a peculiar mix. Relief, primarily. But also a hint of disbelief, as if someone is getting back a package they had long written off. One buyer painfully summarized it: a great pity about the entire vinyl release — not because of the music, but because of the years-long drama surrounding it.
What the story really tells
The easy ending is: record ordered, record (finally) delivered, happy end. But beneath the surface lies a more uncomfortable story about how vulnerable the contemporary vinyl craze actually is.
The vinyl market has been growing for years, but the infrastructure beneath it is thin. Pressing, storing, shipping, processing payments — that entire fulfillment depends on a handful of parties, and if one falters, thousands of orders stall. Crowdfunding platforms promise small artists that they can make vinyl risk-free: you provide the music, we do the rest. Until "the rest" itself becomes the problem.
That a band with Vulfpeck's reach experienced this is telling. They had the visibility to exert pressure, find an alternative, and still serve their fans. A solo artist with two hundred undelivered pre-orders did not have that luck. For them, the story often simply ends in that silence — without Diggers, without a reissue, without a package.
Vulfnik is finally playing on turntables around the world. The groove sounds as a groove should sound. But the real B-side of this story is a reminder: between "ordering" and "playing" there is an entire industry that you, as a listener, barely see — and that sometimes just stutters.
*Did you have a Qrates order back then that never arrived? Or have you finally received your copy of Vulfnik? Let us know in the comments.
Luister