OMG, People Buy Records? Vinyl In The News Thread

I once had a moderately heartbreaking conversation w my mom about the value of her old blues project LPs.

sucky village voice actually bringing half a LOL:

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/music/2013/04/vinyl_is_back.php

Do Kids Even Know What Records Are?
Pressed vinyl as a musical format is old. Children, on the other hand, are not old. What happens when these two things meet? Who cares, but write about it anyway

What's nuts is that I encounter people once a week it seems that are surprised people are buying vinyl records still. And that new bands are producing vinyl. So I guess these articles will be rewritten until that stops.

it will never stop

there's a great little record shop in knoxville, wild honey. the guy who runs the store is amazingly good at letting people down who bring in their crap vinyl to sell. he's mastered the art. it helps that he can point them toward the 2nd hand store down the road.

Just witnessed the dick manager at Academy annex do that today. Though doing that particular thing is not dickish.

the guy who runs the store is amazingly good at letting people down who bring in their crap vinyl to sell.

This is a difficult skill to master. I try to gently talk people down a little if they're hype up on $$$ INTERNET PRICES $$$, but thankfully I don't have to do the final heartbreaking bit.

part of his zen is that he says (in a much nicer and calming way), "wow, this is really cool.... i love this record.... looks like your (father/grandfather/mother/cousin/whatever) really liked it too. it looks like he played it a lot. that's the problem--everybody wants something really clean and unplayed, but most people played their good records a bunch. so it's kind of ironic."

usually at that point he gets knowing nods from the people who 5 minutes ago were hoping to get like $30 per record or something.

the folks at the amoeba buy counter use the same line every time across the board, "well you could have a yard sale..." which is about as zen as they get. generally speaking the amoeba buyers are not particularly zen and sometimes are a bit aggro.

I use the yard sale line. also tell people they can go around the corner to the salvation army and that their donation would be tax deductible.

I get to the point pretty quickly now. If its stuff I don't want I tell people point blank that I just can't sell it in my store. or I lie and say that I already have too much of whatever they have. which isn't always a lie. but I stress the MY STORE part. and tell them that other stores might want it or that they could try craigslist.

This one's not horrible. I like Kozinn when he writes about the Beatles.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/10/arts/music/vinyl-records-are-making-a-comeback.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

this one is actually worth reading! and is on the money.

http://thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/collateral-damage_numero-group-on-the-vinyl-bubble

the baseball card analogy is interesting, but as I think the article implies, the value of a record is more than just as a "collectible." So as long as you have reasonably priced, nicely packaged vinyl and an audience of people who believe the sound and tactile experience are preferable, you have a vinyl market. If the market is relying on people who think they're investing, then obviously that's not sustainable.

right and the bigger labels (and not so big) have been acting like big baseball card and big comic book. trying to gouge every last dime out of people while they can instead of just delivering affordable quality products. labels aren't making ANY money on compact discs so why not try and get the most money possible out of this new vinyl craze.

they're assholes basically.

but then we knew that already.

But the limited reissues of those super common Taj Mahal records are only $32.99!

I'm sure these companies believe if they knock the gimmickry incentives down even a notch than a huge portion of potential buyers will settle with digital downloads over the vinyl/download combo.

$12 jazz reissues are cool

baseball cards just really started to suck, i think a lot of people were turned off by the extreme rise and even more extreme falls in value post-upper deck/leaf. i remember when dave justice (lol) leaf rookies were worth $100 or something.

Actually putting the needle on the record instead of simply playing the download from from itunes is still novelty to a lot of buyers. And there is empty satisfaction in saying "I have the blue vinyl version!" but there is nagging guilt when you get the common black vinyl/non-numbered copy if you're that person that just shelves it anyway.

I have like 4 different Sammy Sosa rookie cards...

i remember thinking those steve avery and gregg jeffries cards were going to make me a wealthy man

I think the phenomenon is: Lots of fans want to buy music but buying digital files doesn't validate that satisfaction at all. So people buy all this vinyl because it feels good to own something and even CDs only exist to mine digital files. Then when it starts to feel silly to have all this shelved vinyl (too busy and otherwise not stimulating enough an activity to put the effort in playing) you need stronger incentives in the collectibility of the object as the focus.

I guess my input was a healthy mix of obvious/pathetic or something. For the record (ha) I wasn't necessarily describing myself.

that Wire piece is good, but isn't there a whiff of pot-calling-the-kettle-black? or have i missed something about Numero Group?

i raised that point on facebook and scott got mad at me.
they are good at keeping their catalog in print and in general their records are affordable, but they definitely do the "deluxe boxed set" thing and the "1000 copies on white vinyl" thing and i thought it was a bit in poor taste to call out other labels (major labels?) for doing the same thing. like that syl johnson boxed set came out and there was no way to get the records individually, which was a drag. they finally pressed a few of them up as single LPs a couple years later.

another minor point, though, is that its ok to call people out for doing something you yourself do. it doesnt nullify the criticism just because you too are guilty.

^^ i don't buy that. imo, "if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything" is a good rule. especially when discussing people who work in the same industry you do.

(p.s. one of my favorite pastimes is talking shit but i try to reserve it for relatively private conversations, i don't write an article in a popular music magazine.)

SHRUUUUG good luck fighting internal contradiction and hypocrisy dude

both good points. it would have made the piece more genuine if they acknowledged the black-pot-calling, even just a little.

did you ever think that maybe they had NO idea the syl box would generate as much interest as it did? given the fact that 99% of what they put out is ignored by almost everyone on the planet?

and i never see the numero limited stuff you mention. is it just RSD stuff? easy to avoid. the majority of their catalog is easy to come by and VERY reasonable price-wise given how much effort they put into it all.

they set up a shop on RSD, right? and sell their stuff and other stuff. throwing rocks at gift horses if you ask me, ian.

at least they're fucking trying. WHAT THE FUCK HAVE YOU DONE? - Bob Marley

hahaha, luv ya...

:(

oh stop...

still think you're hatin' on santa claus though.

i'm a jew!!!!!!!!!!

of COURSE i hate santa claus!!!

Andddd scene

my jewish wife thinks santa is mad creepy but not quite as creepy as a dead guy hanging off a wall.

numero have never been shy about expressing their opinions online (and in person) which is simultaneously part of their charm and totally aggravating, but i think they have a solid point here. i don't think they were saying NEVER DO LIMITED EDITIONS. i think the point was don't take 2 bruce springsteen songs from a regular old LP, throw them in a hastily designed picture sleeve, press up 3000 of them and call it a collectible, just because you KNOW that you can move all of them on RSD, not allow returns, and then have the customers and stores left holding the instantaneously worthless bag. or, you know, whatever the indie equivalent of that is...

the point, to me, is not that limited editions are bad. the point is that the creation of endless limited editions that have literally no value added content may ultimately result in the customer base for vinyl becoming disenchanted in the format as a whole. the major labels and many indies have been doing the vinyl equivalent of ambulance chasing, and flooding the market with shoddy product at premier prices because, for now, they can get away with it. the question is "for how long?" and "will they take the quality labels down with them?"

I gather that the labels are worried a huge chunk of the market barely has any intention of playing the record (except for novelty), and are mostly accessorizing with the vinyl as hip furniture but making their selections ultimately based on which download cards they can extract to actually listen to the music in practical for modern times settings like on the train/in the car/at work etc.

So they compensate by creating as much incentives for that chunk of the market that really is satisfied by merely owning the record much less playing it.

fremer didn't like that article at all. in the comments he says he regularly paid five bucks per record in 1968. i wonder what records he was buying. i remember the first time i had to pay more than 2.99 for a record was 1973. (in the interest of full disclosure it was jethro tull "passion play," for 3.33 at s. klein's, 'cause i wanted to hear it before the concert, which my buddies and i were seeing to celebrate my 15th birthday.)

http://www.analogplanet.com/content/stupidest-article-ever-written-about-vinyl

i just assume the vinyl bubble will burst soon enough (for all the reasons enumerated above) and i'm not sure i care. scott et al, if the bubble for new vinyl burst, could you still get by selling used stuff?

format fetishism--some version or another of which drives this phenomenon--has always struck me as silly. people who go on and on about the "warmer" sound of vinyl can take a walk as far as i'm concerned. i started buying vinyl in college because you could get a lot of stuff really cheap and a lot of stuff wasn't on CD. those are still good reasons to buy used vinyl. i've stopped spending money on music lately b/c i'm broke but before that i'd buy a lot of african stuff on LP because it just isn't on CD--or the CD versions have shitty transfers and are as hard to find as the vinyl anyway. buying new vinyl at a premium when there are other ways to buy music (as FLAC files, as CDs) seems silly to me. again, unless you find a copy for cheap. i'm probably going to purge my record collection by about 30–40% this summer. i need space more than i need records at this point.

which is to say that only care about the sustainability of the "vinyl revival" (spits) if it's the main reason the record shops i like to visit are staying open.

and as for speculation i freely admit to showing up on RSD early, buying some stupid deluxe box set edition of whatever, and flipping it on eBay almost immediately at a profit. most of these folks could have these very same products for list price if they just wait a few days. or they could go to a record store themselves. a fool and his money are soon parted. i spend a gazillion dollars (well, relative to my income) on records and CDs every year, almost all at local stores, and amortizing that by making a (usually fairly small) profit once a year doesn't seem egregious to me.

the hatred of "vinyl speculators" just seems like a displaced sense of anxiety about the pointlessness of all this RSD product in the first place.

i only sell old stuff. fuck a new vinyl. i did recently order some stuff from fat possum though. just for fun. townes van zandt, t rex reissues, black keys, jay reatard. their stuff is cheap wholesale. got a bunch of their burnside, t model ford, etc, though and that hasn't sold at all.