Why Vinyl Can't Survive

man, you guys, you should have seen this jazz record store i went to in tokyo, it was way below street level, this little maybe 15x15 foot room, two old dudes just sitting their spinning jazz records all day...but the selection and quality was UNREAL....like everything in the store was basically NM, and all polybagged with new inner sleeves...i bought an eric dolphy record, and the guy actually took it out of the polybag, and replaced it with a NEW polybag when i bought it, because i guess the old one was maybe "worn" or something? i could have spent $5000 in there easy...it's like if you went to, say the Coltrane section, they wouldn't just have a few it would be like near perfect copies of like EVERY coltrane record...could not believe it, so may records jammed in a tiny space

i forgot that Dolphy record on the shuttle bus to the airport. :(

the other factor that hasn't been mentioned re: CD singles is shelf space. If the retailer made 50 cents or a dollar on a CD single but $3 on an album, then why would they want to take up valuable shelf space with singles? but I guess the death of CD singles came before places like best buy sold cds as a loss leader to get people in the store to buy washing machines.

― wk, Thursday, February 7, 2013 9:32 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is why all comic stores are now basically toy stores

xpost what dolphy was it?

lol m@tt

Lately I've been thinking of buying a metal box from ebay. worth it?

xpost what dolphy was it?

― try a little crowleymass (Jon Lewis), Friday, February 8, 2013 11:50 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Iron Man but with a way cooler cover than i've seen before ;_;

Well, anyway, that Dylan thing was £99

wk - i think so - the 2006 4 Men With Beards reissue is great, was manufactured and overseen by lydon and it's pretty indistinguishable, might be cheaper and in better condition

cool thx. didn't know about that. the originals seem to all be rusty which is kind of a drag for something so expensive.

Only the tin, the records are fine

i think the reissue made the metal box out of a different metal so it wouldn't corrode...everything else is pretty exacting to the original specs, including making the records a pain to get out of the tin lol lydon

Originally, the t'ing was £7.99 whereas most LPs were £5 or less

records? But I'm just buying it for the tin

It was meant to resemble a film canister. The rust is part of the design.

I remember the RS Record Guide (1983) saying "import copies of Metal Box go for as much as $20.00!"

haha if only

i should have spent the mid to late 90s dumping money into prog, folk, and jazz records, i would have beat the market considerably :(

you know what sounds really great? post-war 78rpm records.

you get a rare glimpse at my classical closet in this video i just put up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdxXf8x2WfE

http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/07/world/vinyl-records-future-lifestyle/index.html

A quarter of young adults buy records they never listen to, a survey of British music fans discovered last year.

Some might take this as baffling or pretentious behavior, but the future of vinyl may rest on its ability to find selling points beyond its basic function as a music format.

didi not know this:

Just two companies worldwide produce lacquer needed in mastering, one of which is a one-man operation in Japan. When his business was affected by the 2011 tsunami, so was the global industry.

If they dont listen to it then it will be just a fad that will fade away, but for those who have been buying it 10 or 20 years they will continue. It's never gonna be *back* but i see no reason why it or CD will go away, it just wont be the biggest format.
And there will be endless reports of demise/revival for the next half century, just like rock/pop/rap or whatever

It'd be funny if all these records these kids never listen to had the wrong music on them. Like, you think you just bought that RSD copy of Deja Entendu, but it's actually some Liza Minelli album. Joke's on you, millennials!

Of course, this raises issues about quality control and accountability. If plants know that a quarter of the listening audience won't even ever hear the damn thing, well, what's the motivation to make it sound awesome, especially with plants as overworked as they are already? If I worked at a record plant, making twelve bucks an hour or something, and was working overtime to make sure the 180 gram reissue of The Return Of Bruno or something made its street date, I'd probably not be giving too many fucks.

some optimistic soul on amazon is asking $29.99 (plus $3.99 shipping) for a vinyl copy of The Return Of Bruno

THIS IS THE ORIGINAL FACTORY SEALED RELEASE THAT IS ALMOST 20 YEARS OUT OF PRINT. This title is still factory sealed but has a small cutout slash in the cover but probably has all of the original LP sleeve graphics.This title has been discontinued by the manufacture over the last few decades. The nicest thing you can do for your stylus and your ears. The ultimate record -- the way music was meant to be heard. If you really understood that less then a 1000 titles have been pressed on vinyl over the last few years and that these pressings disappear so qiuckly from the market it will make your head spin. Do not second guess yourself on this masterpiece because once gone it's gone forever and will skyrocket in price on the collectors market

A quarter of young adults buy records they never listen to, a survey of British music fans discovered last year.

Seems like there's waste built into most things we consume, Americans throw out nearly half of the food they buy.

i see no reason why...CD will go away

Optical drives are already no longer common on new desktop and laptop computers. CDs, DVDs and Blu-Rays will probably last for a while longer, but not into the next decade imo.

https://www.nme.com/news/music/vinyl-set-outsell-cds-first-time-since-1986-2545781

A retreating tide exposes all shipwrecks

vinyl records earned $224.1 million (from 8.6 million units) in the first half of 2019. This figure is impressively close to the CD numbers ($247.9 million, 18.6 million units).

revenue vs units.
still a massive difference.
basically, this proves that vinyl is insanely priced.

No kidding! I saw the headline but that’s really misleading.

pricing is particular shitty or certain labels who I assume either don't have decent european distributors / any product made in europe.... case in point being the Purple Mountains lp is £31 in fopp.

vinyl is priced according to what people will pay

it's also much more expensive to produce

Vinyl is sorta abstracted from listening now though... media used to have an overriding commodity value because buying it was your gateway to listening to the music. Now you can listen to everything online, so when you're buying a record, it's a different transaction. You're not really buying the music.

2015 CD revenue was artificially inflated by Martin Shkreli $2mm Wu-Tang purchase

i am not asking rhetorical questions here; i would genuinely like to know:

why are vinyl reissues so expensive? a decade ago, i remember buying brand new single disc jazz reissues pressed on 180gram black vinyl at amoeba for $8.98 (seriously — i still have some with the shrink wrap on them and the pricetag intact). it's literally the reason i preferred to buy music on vinyl: it was so much cheaper! i understand inflation, so i know that the same records produced the same way now would inevitably be more expensive. but, looking at most reissues these days, the price range for similar items is $25-$35. why? has the cost to produce the same materials risen that drastically?

preliminary assessment: it's a cash grab by dickheads.

Someone just shared an amazing quote from Walter Becker with me: "if you prefer a medium that can't tell the difference between signal and noise, that's your problem."

it is a cash grab by dickheads.

DIY punk labels are still able to produce small runs of 500/1000 LPs and sell them for £9-12 a pop. if they can do that there is no reason why a mass produced reissue has to be £25, the production costs will be less if anything

I don't mind the price of vinyl so much. Albums when I started buying a lot of them, 1990 or so, were about £8 for vinyl, £11 for CD. £20 for a record now seems about right. £10 for a CD in 2019 feels ridiculous. This is why I'm not rich.

when you're buying a record, it's a different transaction. You're not really buying the music.

Agree with this. Buying vinyl now seems more about fetishizing the object, whereas the music is essentially free. Audiophiles aside, but I assume they're a minority.

a decade ago, i remember buying brand new single disc jazz reissues pressed on 180gram black vinyl at amoeba for $8.98

yeah, i fondly remember this era too. back then, i'd tell non-record-buying friends that a bonus for vinyl collectors is that they were usually cheaper than CDs. that is definitely not the case now

hell, decent originals of rare/oop albums are frequently around the same price as new reissues of the same

Little Axe and the rest of the Mississippi Records diaspora are still putting out new LPs in the $12-15 range.

Vinyl only felt cheap as long as my portable listening medium was cassettes... once mp3 became my portable listening format, I abandoned vinyl almost entirely for CD. The time it takes to rip vinyl and have it sound good makes it too expensive. Right now we're in a golden age of dirt cheap CDs, although the Internet means rare stuff will always be expensive regardless of format.

I buy CD's because:

- They're far cheaper than LPs.
- I still make my own rips to MP3 as I stream my own library. But this is becoming less and less necessary when buying from Bandcamp et al.
- They represent a backup in case Spotify removes an album I love, and more often they're necessary when an album isn't on any streaming service at all.
- I like having the liner notes when they exist, more and more CDs don't come with them.
- They take up less space and weight than LPs, though I'm not planning on moving anytime soon.
- I never, ever cottoned to pops & clicks, having to clean vinyl, flipping them over or shuffling through multi-LP sets and generally worrying about the fragility of LPs. But I do acknowledge the experience of listening to an LP on a great system different (and often superior) than listening to a digital copy. But I don't own a great system.

To each their own, I salute anyone buying physical music at this late date.

I rarely buy vinyl now, mainly because of price. But buy lots of cds for the same reasons Gerald mentions above. I own many more cds than I'd ever have thought when I was a vinyl-only teen/twenty something. Because I've become less used to vinyl I now find it slightly inconvenient when I *do* play a record - changing sides etc.

I also (so far...) refuse to stream. I listen to my own, ripped library.

yeah, sidepost: i recently opted for the new appleseed cast album on cd because of the much more reasonable price in comparison to the vinyl ($12 for the cd as opposed to $34 for the vinyl fucking lol). funny part: they were pushing the cd as "LIMITED TO 1000 COPIES!" which is just weird.

the irony of CDs being the cheap landfill fodder and LPs being the overpriced items for "audiophiles" and collectors, what a difference a couple of decades makes

everybody otm, CDs rule and are cheap, also new vinyl has flaws maybe 30% of the time at least, it's gotten so bad that I need to read Discogs reviews of pressings before I buy anything (another reason to just go for that maybe-slightly-more-expensive OG in many cases)

the Scorpio represses of all those Sun Ra Saturn titles sound just fine and are $12 new in my local store, I was fully addicted to impulse buys there for a while

I'm a little embarrassed at how much more I like listening to jazz on LP than on CD.

og presses ruuuuuule