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

Nah. If audio freaks are gonna mess with tape, they’ll go reel to reel.

there's always been a market for 8-tracks among classic car collectors, but i can't see it ever getting any bigger than that

Can't remember the album, but I stumbled upon an 8-track release while trawling the Sacred Bones website catalogue the other day. Needless to say I didn't bite, but it does make me fear for a misguided hipster 8-track revival.

This coming from someone who just bought a '90s Walkman so I can listen to Moon Glyph cassette releases...

Ok so I just looked it up, the album is Mort Garson's Mother Earth's Plantasia. Hipster revival music for houseplant lovers. Yours for a cool $30...

We recorded different tracks playing from the same set of speakers twice, once as a vinyl record and the other as a digital file.1 Listen below and see if you can tell which is which while listening through your laptop speakers or earbuds that came with your phone.

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Great album and soundtrack for the ‘car wash scene’ in High Maintenance s3e2 (so impeccable hipster credentials)

There’s a guy who makes custom 8-tracks of 80s/90s albums - https://instagram.com/deadmediatapes?igshid=Y2ZmNzg0YzQ=

St. Vincent released her recent ’70s-homage album as an 8-track: https://bodega.lomavistarecordings.com/products/st-vincent-daddys-home-limited-edition-8-track

Makes sense. That album was an awful pastiche of disparate '70s sounds. Truly the worst thing she's done.

That makes sense - while there's definitely a small-but-dedicated group of collectors, the market for 8-tracks (and shady scammers) is limited by the limitations of the format - lack of liner notes or exterior viewing material of any substance to gaze upon during the listening process; low supply of working players (good luck taking tapes to parties like you do with vinyl); sound quality is a crapshoot; songs stop and start in weird spots to meet the time constraints of the 'program' function; tapes are occasionally consumed by the player at random times; etc.

Their biggest virtue: if you like to listen to entire albums, they become enjoyably convenient - no need to get up to flip sides. And if you are OK with repeating the album, 8-tracks just start all over again when they are done - hell, you have to physically remove the tape from the player if you want it to stop.

yeah but because the four programs have to be similar lengths there is endless messing around with tracklistings, removing tracks entirely, repeating songs, fading out and starting up on the next program and so on. I have carefully curated collection of a couple of dozen classics - Bowie, Hawkwind, Zappa etc, and it's just really frustrating listening to well-known albums because they are so screwed up.

Thee Oh Sees released a big box set of 8 tracks a few years back:

https://5sevenrecords.bigcartel.com/product/thee-oh-sees-the-8-track-collection

http://www.chortle.co.uk/news/2022/10/19/51933/blackadder_to_be_released_on_vinyl?rss

Read this and thought "wait, was Blackadder a radio thing first?".

But no: "On the discs are the soundtracks to all 24 TV episodes"

What, just the broadcast audio? Including the studio audience laugh tracks, dialogue-free pauses and all?

The current generation Blackadder would totally be a hipster vinyl grifter.

I have to assume that is it Matt, because I can't imagine the actual music used in the show to amount to 12 records!

Apparently it's on Audible and CDs already. Half hour per side of mostly spoken word is nothing new I guess. I wonder if colour vinyl could make that a bit trickier.

A bunch of BBC tv comedies, ie Yes Minister etc, were repurposed (and sometimes rerecorded) as radio comedies, and I think Blackadder was one of those.

I used to go to a pub that played Blackadder Goes Forth audio in the bloke's toilets. Made going for a slash more interesting I suppose.

"you mean you crap out the window?"

Lol

"I smell something fishy, and I'm not talking about the contents of Baldrick's apple crumble."

i checked in with VYNL to see how they were doing. they might as well be hyping fictional records. i scrolled down awhile and didn't find anyone i'd heard about and i'm guessing there aren't modern era private press classic jams in there. maybe i'm just being harsh.

https://www.instagram.com/getvnyl/

separately, the used record market is shit today (as a buyer, in brick and mortar joints) -- i hate going into a promising-appearing new shop and then it quickly dawning on me that it's just another experience in price-gouging. in the area of L.A. i now live, there isn't a really great store within 45 minutes.

yeah whenever i check out a new-to-me store I'm either browsing at great length, or finding out immediately it's one of THOSE places.

tbf, not so different from the days when what I'd be quickly ruling out was some dusty old warehouse packed high with shredded old unwanted 70s junk, laid flat and piled high in no order whatsoever, with no prices in anything so even if you found something cool, it would be a ripoff once you brought it up for a quote.

I don't vinyl shop, but a new boutique-y shop just opened down the street (in my corner of the L.A. area), and I could tell just by glancing in the window what it was likely all about...

it must be a great time to buy CDs tho

Finding shops with an even half-way decent selection of CDs is getting really tricky IME. The vinyl caves never went away but the CD versions mostly have.

Yeah, any store with a decent CD selection seems to be anticipating the CD revival by a few years. The bargains are all on Craigslist or at flea markets.

TBF, why would you give over a lot of shelf space to something you’re selling for a buck or 2?

A lot of the fun has gone out of vinyl shopping for me bcuz the chance of me finding something I still need at a price I’m willing to pay is increasingly slim.

Well lots of record stores used to have quite interesting £1 / $1 bins, as the existence of the “I’d buy that for a dollar” thread shows. You’d think a stack of three quid CDs might do the same kind of job.

It’s definitely true that a pile of slightly beaten up CDs in jewel cases is a less exciting prospect than a stack of scuffed LPs, even when I’ve stopped buying vinyl completely.

I'm nostalgic for those days too but the truth is I rarely found anything exciting in those bins. I always think some random collection is gonna have something real exciting in it like, I dunno, Van der Graaf Generator or OMD, when the truth is it's usually just endless amounts of religious records and Bob Seger. even in the days when you could get great bargains the records themselves would wind up being so wrecked that they weren't even worth the $2 you paid

Yeah, I never bother with bargain bins for that reason. There's one at a place near where I live, and luckily it takes like ten seconds to glance at all the spines. Always the most random and worthless assortment of discs. With a lot of the I think "who even bought these titles to begin with?"

I used to find interesting records in those bins all the time, though they definitely got worse with the coming of the internet and (I would guess) business conditions getting more difficult for record store owners over the 90s and 00s, meaning they couldn't afford to chuck gems from outside their wheelhouse into the quid bins. The "I'd buy that for a dollar" thread really does have a ton of great stuff in it that people have found!

My interest in 70s country music definitely grew through the 00s as it became basically the only genre I liked where you could find really good stuff on the very cheap.

I'm sure it's possible, just not in my neck of the woods. Though we did have a guy who is slowly selling off a collection which includes a bunch of records by Pere Ubu, The Residents, Univers Zero, and all other sorts of weird art prog stuff. bit more expensive than a dollar though.

I was visiting Akron the other day and found a James Ferraro record - not one I particularly liked but I had to buy it anyway, cuz when else you gonna come across something like that???

I'm not sure it is possible any more FWIW. That is to say, I don't see the good stuff any longer, it's probably a decade since I had good luck in your neck of the woods.

Still a stack of misted or dirty jewel cases is even less attractive!

Honestly it’s sort of an experience sometimes I dread, going into some of these new stores. A lot of them tend to traffick in not-great copies of obscurities they’re desperately trying to make happen, or well-known albums that are exorbitantly priced.

The stores that seem to be the most fair and also have high QC are run by the older dudes, who might be more actively annoying sometimes but they take a little more pride in their ability to find good copies and filter out the beaters, places where they’re definitely not letting much slip by into the bargain pile but you’re also not going to only find late ‘70s Rod Stewart or Linda Ronstadt if your budget is under $20. Price gouging spots seem to be run by younger folks. At least that’s my experience in Los Angeles.

I have never thought about the economics of a used vinyl shop but they can't be very good. Anyone know what the COGS on a typical ~$20 record on Amazon are? I'd imagine these shops have to put a pretty significant amount of capital upfront and rely on ~20% of the store to turn regularly, while ~80% just sits there for ages. Not to say price gouging is justified but the older dudes are probably sitting on mountains of records at home and decide it's finally time to cut bait, and maybe the younger folks are more so trying to start from square 1?

scott seward to thread!

the biggest record store within twenty minutes of where i live started as a used CD/DVD shop, and then they switched to an equal amount of space devoted to vinyl. and their new prices are very good, but their used prices are pretty appalling. peeped a copy of last date by emmylou harris, $18. i use emmylou as my baseline, her records are classics but should be just a few bucks a pop. and last date should probably be less than that...

great CD and DVD prices though!

I don't see anything in stores for under $20 these days except 1) Errol Garner's Under the Sea; 2) as was pointed out by Tim, classic country, but even that is creeping up; and 3) records that are near unplayable.

Jesus. Glad I still live in a town where Emmylou records are $5.

I mean great copies of say Fleetwood Mac S/T that I used to see for under $10 even 3-4 years ago are now $20.

well Fleetwood Mack kinda has its own reason for jumping way up in price

I sold one for $12 last Sunday, I swear if I had an entire bin of those they would all sell

kept my Mofi version even though it's only VG

there's definitely an art to stocking a compelling bargain bin. there are definitely some proprietors who seem unaware that tons of records are not good enough even for the dollar section.

There used to be a used bookstore around here that sold books "by the pound" for awhile, with the intention that you could get paperbacks really cheap. I went in one time and they had a bunch of very cool looking architecture books, all hardcover, but they still tried to sell them by weight and it was going to end up extremely expensive! Luckily they canned that approach as they expanded their wares, though not enough since they aren't in business anymore.

Anyway, they did have a section with used CDs and I have never in my life seen a more dregs of the dregs bargain bin. I mean, just absolutely awful stuff. They clearly took anything to fill up these shelves. Without exaggeration, maybe less than 10% were actually music CDs and those that were were the worst freebie giveaways you could imagine. The rest of the discs were like 10-15 year old CD-ROMs of the worst software imaginable. It was just the most depressing shelf I've ever seen.

The record store that is two blocks from me is run by a 16 yo kid and he has just insane prices. Brand new sealed Fela Kuti reissues for $50 like he found some OG copy when you can order them online for $25.

lotta rich people need hobbies

One can still regularly find certain artists for cheap. Most Sinatra, Willie Nelson, and—despite that one store—Ronstadt and Emmylou. And there are still entire genres or subgenres which are overlooked, mid-century pop instrumental type shit like George Shearing or that late 70s-late 80s unhip jazz stuff. For example one can definitely stock up on the entire George Benson or earl Klugh discographies for pretty cheap. But I assume those days are coming to a close at some point.