Albums that shouldn't be out of print...

Yeah, gtfo with this "twice as much" bullshit

Psychedelic Pill by Neil Young with Crazy Horse (2012): $55.90 Vinyl

Psychedelic Pill by Neil Young with Crazy Horse (2012): $13.88 Audio CD

Another Self Portrait (1969-1971): The Bootleg Series Vol. 10 by Bob Dylan (2013): $60.38 Vinyl

Another Self Portrait (1969-1971): The Bootleg Series Vol. 10 by Bob Dylan (2013): $18.88 Audio CD

It's actually "thrice as much"

Sorry to be facetious, but the extortionate price of many new vinyl releases puts me off big time.

fwiw, original list price of Psychedelic Pill on its release date was around $90.

I've found that CD's and LP's cost around the same, maybe a couple of dollars more unless it some sort of weird special version which I personally don't like. Just a week ago I bought Linda Perhacs - Parallelograms and it costed me around $30 dollars because it's some sort of reissue with demos and unreleased tracks which I personally don't care for.

I always hated cd's so I don't have many around my house. I only buy vinyl for albums that I love and mp3s for singles or standalone tracks. This isn't really an opinion regarding quality of vinyl vs cds but I really like how my turntable and my vinyl shelf look in my house, they look much better than any stereosystem I had before.

It's perfectly valid to buy things because you think they look cooler than the other options.

Speaking of vinyl prices vs CD, from an observation I made just now at my local record store:

new Jenny Lewis CD: $12.99
new Jenny Lewis LP: $25.99

Neil young is a super extreme gouger, not a relevant example

^^ otm

bob too. All those boomers.

fair enough. but I regularly encounter vinyl releases that are significantly more expensive than the CD - which annoys be as I prefer vinyl. Anyway, i just thought the "bullshit" accusation up-thread was unfair.

annoys *me*

It's totally dependent of label and artist. Pink Floyd vinyl reissues are a joke per example, I think I saw a week ago that they're trying to push a $200 division bell vinyl reissue. It's ridiculous. Here's some examples of my latest purchases and their cd prices comparison:

John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman LP $13.99
John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman CD $18.99

Glass Candy - Beatbox LP+7" $13.98
Glass Candy - Beatbox CD $10.98

Chromatics - Night Drive Deluxe Edition 2xLP $19.98
Chromatics - Night Drive Deluxe Edition CD $11.98

Joanna Newsom - The Milk-Eyed Mender LP $14.98
Joanna Newsom - The Milk-Eyed Mender LP $15.98

Madvillain - Madvillainy LP $18.99
Madvillain - Madvillainy CD $16.99

M.I.A. - Arular LP $13.98
M.I.A. - Arular CD $11.98

It also depends where you buy, of course. I dislike Amazon, but they have your Coltrane / Hartmann CD for $11.88.

Yeah and the vinyl like in $40!? Weird.

gtfo with this "twice as much" bullshit

yea just to echo what others have said, this is not bullshit. at least in my local record shops, i'm priced out of most new vinyl. totally common to see $18, $20, $25, $40, $45 price tags for single LPs. i don't know who the fuck pays $40 or even $25 for a new record. vinyl can be a fucking ripoff.

If there's people willing to pay for it then the prices will remain up. I remember new CD's being $20 or more.

And pressings, particularly of newly-recorded stuff, can be a crapshoot. Last two vinyl records I bought -- Dylan's Tempest and Iris DeMent's Sing the Delta -- have flaws unique to each, flaws not present on any of my other (older) records.

oh yea i know there are people who pay that much. i just don't know who the fuck they are! they don't share my values, ha

I saw the guy that does pay that much. ONCE. He had an indie girl on one arm, and a stack of Audiophile Weezer reissues under the other. He may not have figured out 'the' way to live, but he found 'a way'.

Well I once saw a friend pay for a $35 vinyl copy of RED by Taylor Swift and she doesn't even own a turntable.

Granted she also buys books that she doesn't read and buys them because they have pretty spines to decorate bookshelves.

New albums round my way are pretty much always twice the price for vinyl: £10 for CD, £20 for vinyl.

Still I buy vinyl exclusively, rationale being:

1. I like vinyl.

2. If I want to sell an album three months later, I will get £5 for a CD and £20 for the vinyl.

3. If I want to sell an album five years later, I will get £1-10 for a CD and £20-40 for the vinyl.

I'm not really counting on this continuing (and I don't anticipate selling my records ever, really), but money on vinyl usually feels well spent.

My rational for buying vinyl is

1. If I can't find it on CD, and

2. it's the only format that can be played without electricity, so I better pick up some shit I'm gonna want to listen to forever.

(the recent news of the 2012 solar storm close call reminded me of the latter)

you guys need to give some more specific examples, i still find new lps ~15 but it's indie stuff that's not imported.

yeah all I see in these pricey examples are boomer and legacy artists, everything new and not super high profile is more like "a couple of bucks more than the CD"

if you can't find a used LP copy of Rocks for less than 5 bucks, you deserve to pay for a $29.98 reissue imo

on the other hand, no way in hell am I paying over $100 for an OOP LP copy of Pharoah Sanders' Izipho Zam, I bought that shit on CD, so I agree w/Tuomas there

2. it's the only format that can be played without electricity, so I better pick up some shit I'm gonna want to listen to forever.
apocalypse party at tarfumes' house

Oh and Pink Floyd's Meddle and Piper too! It's weird that such a popular rock band hasn't reissued all of their discography already.

― Moka, Tuesday, July 29, 2014 9:25 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

THe cds are being promoted at the moment, cut price in the couple of cd places in town and I saw a tv advert last week. Not 100% sure what it ties in with.
Just not expecting there to need to be a Pink Floyd back catalogue tv ad.
& I like those cds that came out a couple of years ago. Would just love to see the psychedelic era Immersion set appear, though I don't know if I could afford it.

The recent Wax and Wayne article about pressing plants sort of explained the increase in vinyl price. Fewer plants, aging machines, longer QA process, quirky vinyl formats (diff. colors, etc), all contribute to the difficulty of pressing an album. I still think it's a bit of record company inflation for no reason but there's probably also a justification for some of the price increase.

All parties should be apocalypse parties.

xp

Jobriath owns this thread.
― Sean (Sean), Monday, February 3, 2003 2:00 PM

There doesn't seem to be a Jobriath thread, so I'll leave this here.

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/jobriath_documentary_on_glam_rock

While he was not a big star, I'm kind of surprised that quite a few of Buddy Miles Mercury LPs never came out in the CD era.

Electric Church ('69)
We Got to Live Together ('70)
A Message to the People ('71)
Buddy Miles Live ('71)

Them Changes with the obvious Hendrix tie seems to have stayed in print and Colombia put out some of his later ones on CD not that many years back. I got it, but Expressway to Your Skull has also come out on CD, but went out pretty quick and now goes for a few bucks.

What I have heard of the above is pretty solid early 70s R&B/rock. I'm guessing it's probably a licensing or masters missing issue perhaps? I dunno, seems like something at least one of the reissue labels would have licensed and done if whatever conglomerate had no interest.

The three full-lengths Karp put out are all out of print and sell for stupid money. I'm not sure what K's situation is now, but it seems like reissuing those would bring in some cash flow.

There are some other 80s-90s punk/indie from other labels doing similar. Laughing Hyena's Cds are going for a few bucks now online when I was looking to find them again.

Saccharine Trust ('80s SST jazzbeatartpunk band) seem to have everything they ever put out in print EXCEPT Surviving You, Always, their first LP (and follow-up to the Paganicons EP, which is probably their best-known thing). It's a completely great album, and I know it's useless to speculate about why Greg Ginn does what he does, but it's very odd that this is the one Sac Trust SST release he doesn't bother with.

For a while my guess was that it had to do with the cover of "Peace Frog" by the Doors not being cleared. But SST still sells a live album with a performance of that song on it. So it's a mystery.

I saw a current incarnation of ST 2-3 years ago (Jack Brewer was with them, but I don't know about other players), so Jack, at least, is still around and in the biz.

Plone - For Beginner Piano

In response to JRN, there's a whole host of stuff from the SST catalogue e.g. I'd love to see the Slovenly back catalogue get the box set treatment.

Looks like all the later Gun Club CDs go for a few bucks these days. I'd imagine the vinyl on those are really sparse on those out in the wild.

So, uh, that really nice Trees 50th Anniversary box set that was just released to get their albums back in print? Out of print already, barely two months after being released. I had a pre-order in back in early December that kept getting pushed back and pushed back before finally being canceled completely last week. Apparently more LP sets are coming in June of this year, but no more CD box sets.

I get that physical media right now is a gamble, but between this and the Richard & Linda Thompson box set that was sold out before it was released, it seems like labels just have no clue at all how to anticipate demand.

On the contrary, I think it's deliberate.

Seems the strategy is to create a panic buy.

yeah FOMO

really nice to see the recent Zoviet France reissues, and the Vanity label catalog

I don't know that I buy that it's 100% deliberate. I mean, obviously, as pointed out in another thread, creating demand and artificial scarcity is business 101, but when a hyped box sells out before the release date even hits, doesn't that also show that the label is leaving money on the table? At that point the only people profiting on it are the flippers and secondhand sales on places like Discogs. Seems like running out that fast would merit at least one more run, if the demand is there, but I don't run a label so...

I'm more specifically talking about the labels that are, "nope, that's it, we're done", not so much the labels that follow up with additional pressings later after they've gauged demand.

Yeah, that mentality that every reissue is a Rhino Handmade.

I read a little chat with George Clanton (who runs his own label) about this sort of thing, he says it's pretty much impossible to figure out demand for vinyl. Some stuff sells out immediately and gets flipped for 4x the price, some get a flurry of orders right away but then will sell just 1-2 copies every week. He's pretty good with doing extra runs every time something gets sold out but idk how feasible that is for bigger labels. There's definitely this culture, especially with boutique labels like Light in the Attic, where if you don't preorder on Day 1 you miss your chance forever, and I'm sure the labels don't mind that exactly

the Richard & Linda Thompson box set that was sold out before it was released

I had no idea that sold out. I think with an elaborate boxed set for an artist like the Thompsons, who were never big sellers, the (reluctant) label has to be convinced to make it happen in the first place. They probably agree to do it along the lines of, "Fine, fine, we'll put it out, but since no one buys this stuff, we'll only press x copies." Then it sells out, but the label has no major incentive to repress. The profits that something like the Thompsons box generate for a major label are probably so minuscule as to be the equivalent of an accounting rounding error.

(Then again, the live Jam box that came out a few years ago also sold out quickly, wasn't repressed, and the Jam were huge in the UK.)

Ha I emailed george Clanton recently about doing another run of the Windows96 reissue they put out. He said they would like to but it’s a matter of getting the rights again or something

that thing sold out in like an hour or two

same with the I'll Try Living Like This repress, which I think really surprised him, since the original run on Orange Milk took a couple years to fully sell out. these were gone within like an hour and I think a lot of people were pissed because he didn't even have time to formally announce it before they were all spoken for. I think FOMO does play a huge role here, much easier to convince yourself to pull the trigger if you think you won't have the choice in a half hour