Shady scams and other silly business ideas to take advantage of earnest new vinyl collectors

Has anyone heard of http://vnyl.org/?

I think it was mentioned in a "terrible ideas" thread but it turns out that it is actually a great idea if you want to find a way to trick people into buying $1.50 worth of records for $25.00 (which I believe is the subscription cost).

http://www.stereogum.com/1801049/vnyl-sliding-why-the-netflix-for-vinyl-service-is-such-a-mess/franchises/essay/

Apparently no matter who you indicate as your favorite artists, they'll just send you a random three common 70s thrift shop records and then play dumb if that upsets you.
They don't accept returns.

http://www.recordstoreday.com/

https://twitter.com/themattbates/status/594284588257579008/photo/1

good lord

http://www.shugarecords.com/

http://www.better-records.com/dept.asp?dept_id=14-015-034

http://www.artvinyl.com/

the second hand rack in the one Urban Outfitters store I've browsed was 98% dogshit and sold everything for £6 but I was happy enough with the Heavy Metal Kids LP I got for that price

http://www.artvinyl.com/

― anthony braxton diamond geezer (anagram), Thursday, May 14, 2015 2:56 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

the branch of (UK odds'n'ends austerity store) Home Bargains near my house sells 12" frames for £1.99 if anyone fancies displaying some LPs on their wall but isn't a profligate moron who thinks that £39 is good value for such a thing

Seriously, how is this a thing?

Which one?

On my twittefeed I keep getting a "Get xx number of indie singles from new acts each month, pre-chosen for youx" subscription service.

I mean, why would I?

(I'd post the link, but it's not there at the mo)

I dare-say a bunch of you music writers would pay a monthly fee to not receive etc, but.

the second hand rack in the one Urban Outfitters store I've browsed was 98% dogshit and sold everything for £6 but I was happy enough with the Heavy Metal Kids LP I got for that price

― pull blart, maul cops (DJ Mencap), Thursday, May 14, 2015 2:57 PM (32 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

If that's the one at Marble Arch, all the second-hand stuff has gone, leaving only the 180g represses..

nah it was in Cardiff and yeah it's just moderately overpriced new stuff now so presumably such is the case with all their stores

This is more silly than scam, I guess, but ...

http://vinylmeplease.com/how-it-works/

"Custom cocktail pairing recipes"

It's...pretty exclusive. Request your invite today.

Wow. This is so depressing.

need that custom youth lagoon record for $27

lol these are all pretty great

the VNYL scam is amazing, the robotic 500 days of summer tone of their con artistry is brilliant

http://www.homebargains.co.uk/products/10407-rock-it-records-12-album-sleeve-frame-case-of-12.aspx

"Our price: £23.88"

(for 12!)

we have those expensive frames in the office, filled with U2 and Bob Marley sleeves.

That girl on the front page of VNYL. So excited! So naive! Such a perfectly sad thing! Ugh

Not to mention the really poorly executed record-face meme thing with the fka twigs. Just.. no.

https://twitter.com/ajakober/status/598701455080431616

wasn't there a thread on ILM started by someone looking into setting up something like this a few months ago ?

had a revival a little after, but to little avail.

yes, there was

What are your thoughts on a new project I'm working on: Wax & Stamp - a vinyl subscription club (UK)

WTF

https://twitter.com/gotvnyl/status/598911277952557057

That is NOT Doug Martsch...

Am I crazy here? Are they trying to trick people into thinking that's Doug Martsch, or did this dude trick them?

maybe that guy's name is also doug martsch

Parody account.

Real one's GETvinyl not got. Still sux.

any evidence that VNYL is actually a successful rip-off, or just a would-be rip-off?

it seems sort of tone-deaf to me.

Maybe it will inadvertently lead to a lounge/easy listening revival in a couple years.

Is there any evidence that anyone's gotten something besides thrift store garbage from VYNL?

Nope. Even with the happy customers.

Which one?

I was replying quickly on my phone earlier, so my initial response was to the first one, but it truly is disheartening to see so many.

What happened to vinyl fans being diggers? I remember when I first got into vinyl, it was just instinctual to hit second hand stores. Has common sense gone out the window in order to make room for this renewed interest in vinyl?

lol crut

Hey, jefferson airplane is not garbage u dummies

What happened to vinyl fans being diggers? I remember when I first got into vinyl, it was just instinctual to hit second hand stores. Has common sense gone out the window in order to make room for this renewed interest in vinyl?

as a new vinyl buyer i will say that i have been to many second-hand shops over the last 5 years and the selections - esp re what i'm looking for - tend to be really really bad. otoh if yr in the market for a jefferson airplane album this is a golden time to be alive.

most of the good vinyl i've gotten have been donations from relatives, finding stuff on ebay, and -- eek - paying full price for some new reissue

Airplane may not suck, but it is an easy, 25¢ thrift store find.

And yeah, genuinely *GREAT* stuff is not going to be found in thrift stores. But when everything's a quarter, you have to expect Cat Stevens, not Velvet Underground.

I guess burning n00bs will never get old.

dying at the stereogum VNYL story, had not heard of this amazing scam. i'm imagining someone having some kind of account difficulty, they can't turn it off, lost password, and every month three more England Dan & John Ford Coley LPs show up, with "#LazySunday" stickers on the front, because of their interest in Sleater-Kinney, Meat Beat Manifesto and Sun Ra. they run out of places to put them, local stores have them on the blacklist, city sanitation crews rip them out of the trash and hurl them back under their doors. and yet they keep coming. endless England Dan & John Ford Coley. eventually a fire starts and they die of poisonous vinyl fumes. all for only $25 a month --- thanks, kickstarter and #VYNL!

i've always wanted to buy a dog eared copies of Sesame Street's The Muppet Musicians of Bremen and a Perry Como compilation for 25 bucks

the best part of the kickstarter economy part of the story is that nobody bothered to see if pay-for-records is legal, so it's now technically pay-for-whatever

the fact that they have no actual curation and it's just backstock and secondhand garbage is icing

Quoting the owner:

“It fucking sucks when we disappoint our members. We honestly feel incredibly sad when a member doesn’t like what we sent. That sucks for them and also for us. It’s like you just spent all this time planning out what you think is an awesome surprise gift idea for someone and then they can’t mask the look of disappointment when they open it up right in front of you. It’s completely deflating. Unfortunately, this comes with the territory of being a human curated service."

I imagine in the back of his mind he's thinking: "Nailed it! Just got to stay in character, then nobody can call us out! It's all subjective, I'll say. As long as enough r/vinyl or Urban Outfitters type kids keep subscribing we should be just fine."

If this was mine I'd just buy the contents of a record store that is going out of business with the kickstarter money and pay someone to put four random records that aren't too beat up in an envelope monthly

that'd be like a half-dozen kids working minimum wage for a couple days per month maximum right?

https://media.wnyc.org/media/photologue/images/a7/yourfavoritexmas3_firestone722.jpg

My #XmasVibes arrived! Nice clean copy. No flood damage!

^
Might be U.S.-centric

sounds like they're just really slow. i'm guessing I'll last one delivery on this thing cos I'm impatient as fuck, lol

Be prepared to receive the careful selections your blind grandma might pick out if you asked her to grab an LP for you while she happened to be at Goodwill shopping for nightstand doilies.

I just got rid of a bunch of crap that came with some curbside records. If you like throwing money away, you could have sent it to me and I could mail you a Mantovani or Ray Conniff record every month for a very long time.

VYNL is hoping to take advantage of the popular trend of getting cool points to be among the first to reevaluate some bland popular hit artist of the past and/or novelty record as "actually really good" via thinkpiece or tweet.

Be prepared to receive the careful selections your blind grandma might pick out if you asked her to grab an LP for you while she happened to be at Goodwill shopping for nightstand doilies.

― Evan, Monday, July 20, 2020 11:14 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

To expand on this, I wonder if VNYL ever shipped anyone an old calendar by accident. Understandable mistake when you're just mindlessly pulling things out of bins without looking, then packing and shipping.

I thought they (sadly) dropped the (endlessly clownable) thrift-store records bit early on, and inked deals with unknown labels, in order to act as a distribution channel for unsold product by unsuccessful contemporary artists.

Oh, maybe! I must have forgotten, because that sounds familiar now.

great, I'm gonna get the Heene Boyz debut album on vinyl

on colored vinyl

Lol they shipped my package.

Problem is i wrote some traditional metal and hip hop that i liked but i also hooked up my Spotify that has mostly 80s power ballads on recently played tracks.

Can't wait for my dogeared Ugly Kid Joe record

it got (gently) teased upthread, but if you end up being unhappy with VNYL it seems like this might be worth looking at:

https://www.vinylmeplease.com/pages/join-the-club

https://store.rhino.com/music/box-sets-1/1970-the-complete-fun-house-sessions.html

Does a $400 Stooges box set count?

VMP are fine and put good records back into print (I wouldn't own Buhloone Mindstate if it wasn't for them) (though its the short version of the album), tho their shipping is expensive if you're foreign and their copywriting is icky

They reissue that Fun House thing every 10 years and it keeps getting more expensive. I love Fun House but I’m not buying that.

the $20,000 Fun House boxed set which comes with an actual fun house with an affordable mortgage attached, fresh with Stooges posters and artwork adorned on all of the walls, and a squatter in your living room

...and the exclusive VMP version adds a cocktail recipe.

Has the Funhouse box ever been on vinyl before? I got the CD box when Rhino Handmade put it out and I hardly ever play it, even though Fun House is one of my favourite ever records - it's just that the finished article is so perfect I don't want to hear alt-takes, alt mixes or even live versions.

I would buy a standalone CD with just the 17-minute version of "L.A. Blues" on it, but I don't have much interest in hearing the rest

i have the "declaration of war: best of the funhouse sessions" rhino LP from the '90s and can't remember the last time i played it. it has, i think, the only two full takes of what AFAIK are the only two tracks that didn't make the record ("slide" and "lost in the future") plus the 11-minute version of "fun house"

along with the 17m "LA blues" (which i've only ever heard on youtube) i think that's all i probably need — i just can't imagine wanting to listen to 30 sides worth of outtakes, false starts, studio dialogue, and alt. takes. or in other words:

it's just that the finished article is so perfect

which is another way of saying that sometimes there's a line between deep appreciation and fandom, and with the stooges (and this record in particular) i just don't think this kind of hyper-archivist, completist approach enhances my understanding of the art, there's just not a lot for me to learn from putting a microscope to this recoding project. sometimes there are things you just don't need to know about and that's okay.

It’s a very particular kind of fandom. I can see appreciating the complete sessions of a Miles Davis album or something, but I don’t really get it for “Fun House” (great as that album is).

it reminds me of this quote from foucault, which i've roughly translated here because i'm having a hard time finding an english translation online:

But suppose we are dealing with an author: is everything they wrote or said, everything they left behind, part of their work? This is both a theoretical and technical problem. When you set out to publish, for example, the works of Nietzsche, where should you stop? You have to publish everything, of course, but what does this "everything" mean? Everything that Nietzsche published himself? Of course. Drafts of his works? Obviously. His many unpublished aphorisms? Yes. The erasures also, the jottings at the bottom of his notebooks? Yes. But when, inside a notebook filled with aphorisms, there is a reference, the indication of an appointment or an address, a grocery list: work, or not work? But why not? And so on, indefinitely. Among the millions of traces left by someone after their death, how can we define a work? There is no thoery of the œuvre, and those who ingenuously undertake to publish these œuvres lack such a theory and quickly find that their empirical work is hindered.

(original here: http://1libertaire.free.fr/MFoucault319.html)

i just don't think this kind of hyper-archivist, completist approach enhances my understanding of the art, there's just not a lot for me to learn from putting a microscope to this recoding project. sometimes there are things you just don't need to know about and that's okay.

I totally agree. I'm generally a lover of alt-takes, etc, and yesterday was listening to that deluxe Tusk from a couple of years back and thinking, "I could listen to several disks more of this, hearing every permutation Lindsey ran through for each song", because those tracks definitely mutated in the studio. But the Funhouse sessions is just like 27 versions of Dirt that are all roughly the same, just not as good as the album version, and that doesn't do it for me.

my package from VNYL arrived while I was out. on my way home to see what doodoo they gave me.

oh, this oughta be good. . .!

Unboxing vid me please.

^^^

opened it. unboxing vid coming in just a sec

for real !!

bated breath

hoping it's just three pairs of multi-colored socks

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

Def Jef! now there's a name I haven't heard in a loooooong time, think I used to have a 12" by him.

seriously! apparently after 1991 he just moved to production full time.

Wow! Didn't think you'd actually do the vid. Seeing that, I bet Vnyl has got people contacting stores and grabbing up their vintage RSD stuff, which I imagine is better than their thrift store sweeps of yore.

lol - I was bored and wanted to delay my disappointment a little longer. was kinda hoping for something dopier!

you are probably right. i looked up the vinyl online and it's not exactly highly sought after!

awesome video, thanks for sharing. you should do more, you’re most definitely a not terrible youtuber !

gonna cue up some masta ace later today

thanks for sharing!

i have to assume that they buy these things in lots, and everyone with "hip hop" in their spreadsheet has a chance of getting this one at some point. take pity on the VNYL intern who has to handwrite the same note ("INSERT RAP ACT MENTIONED BY CUSTOMER") three hundred times.

Listened to the Kenyatta track

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Isg_KABU9XY

and it's alright, but missing several of the elements that made the original so appealing to others

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8OZux6hp1Q

you are probably right. i looked up the vinyl online and it's not exactly highly sought after!

― XVI Pedicabo eam (Neanderthal), Wednesday, 5 August 2020 02:57 (ten hours ago) link

My experience is that there is a huge gulf between the actually desirable RSD offerings (good luck getting those) and the loads of crap offered on RSD that you continue to see sealed in bargain bins for years afterward.

yeah, when I used to go to our local record store after RSD, there'd be an entire rack for "RSD shit that nobody bought". I mean it didn't say that explicitly but ~we knew~

yup, ime it's often live albums by mid-level bands

lol otm. i usually used to poke around and see if any of them were good byes and....usually no, I could often tell why they didn't sell.

with the Delicious Vinyl one, its p obviously a niche release, so for next month, I've decided i'm going to troll and tell them my new favorite band is something they can't possibly find a pairing for.

so give your suggestions here for what shit band I should pretend to like next month.

Moxy Früvous?

wrong kind of smash hits

I bought some stuff from LITA earlier this year and they were giving away one of their past RSD releases with orders over a certain amount. They must have piles of them laying around.

It's very much "get this shit out my garage"

great video Neanderthal! :D

yes, excellent work!

I always feel in Neanderthal's videos like I am on the floor, lying on my back looking up at him. And maybe that I shouldn't be—like something has gone wrong, I am maybe semiconscious or it is near the end.

haha it's more that I use my phone and am terrible at angling. like how you never actually saw the vinyl's full title in a shot, or how you all got a glimpse of the record before I did :)

I posted a soccer celebration video from a match last year and my girlfriend at the time said EWW ALL I SAW WAS YOUR NOSEHAIRS

Hahaha. I'd watch more of those, Neanderthal! I spent most of the first couple of minutes trying to work out what t-shirt you were wearing. Cool shirt.