Does anyone know how companies like Nuclear Blast distribute copies of numbered vinyl? I casually found myself on the German page for this and saw that there was only one left in stock! I bought it right away and got it yesterday hoping it'd be 333/333 or maybe even 1/333 but it was 105/333. Are they shuffled into a random order and then shipped off? Does the band have first pick of the more "valuable" numbers or who gets those?

Yeah i got 245/333.It is randomized and doug.jobling is quite right, the first x amount of records goes to the company itself. The rest flies around. What an album though. But ALIVE is where it is at for me.

Ahhh, I see I see. Thank you very much guys!

NB isn't the only distributor. NOTVD licenses the release from NB, and they (NOTVD) have their own distribution network including NB, High Roller Records and a couple of others. The label owner/s always get the earliest numbers in the sequence (their prerogative).

I preordered it couple of weeks before release date and got no.193 copy. I think it's random.