OMG, People Buy Records? Vinyl In The News Thread

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.

and a couple of xmases ago i did get a bunch of stuff from scorpio for the holiday season. VU, os mutantes, black sabbath, etc. just stuff that i thought would sell. did fine with that. though i still have, like, 30 sun ra reissues in my jazz section.

i might do another scorpio order. and just get stuff like that. the stuff people always want. cuz i agree with that article about being able to just buy a normal copy of a classic album. should be easier.

yeah format can definitely matter if you care about things like sound. its a case by case thing. someone brought in a bunch of those trojan reggae cd boxes. those little ones that sell pretty cheaply. does anyone here own any of those? they sound horrible. they sound really bad. in comparison to the 45s or albums the stuff was originally on. there are lots of cases like that.

Wait the little Trojan CD boxsets?

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WTx6UCJb2EA/TdHhJjmd-gI/AAAAAAAABVs/gCLZUT4IVAM/s1600/ska%2Bbox%2Bset.jpg

I love those things :(

I didn't notice them sounding so bad. I also don't own any original 45s to compare against. All I have of reggae vinyl is a Trojan boxset from the 80s I think and a King Tubby compilation (also 80s).

But I like those Trojan CD sets so much- I'm always seeking new ones out. I think they're a lot of fun.

what you don't know won't hurt you! and yeah they are a good cheap way to check stuff out.

There are a good chunk of them that aren't so cheap, too.

Do you charge a blanket price for them?

well sure any individual LP can sound better than a poorly mastered CD, and there are a lot of those

and a poorly mastered/warped/low QC vinyl can sound much shittier than a CD

i guess i just don't have a lot of respect for people who rep for vinyl on principle, it's just wankery to me

and yeah those trojan boxes sound like total shit

OTOH jamaican vinyl pressings are notorious... I always look for UK pressings of trojan and other stuff

original trojan vinyl is nice. pre-1975 or whenever. the 45s are great. again, case by case basis. later trojan vinyl comps lose some attention to detail and were kinda churned out hastily. even the original trojan dudes remixed/rerecorded old stuff for comps in the 70's. its sad that so many people think that about jamaican pressings. but what are you gonna do. you have to hear a lot of music on a lot of labels to know how amazing it can be.

i take the merits of every record and every cd i listen to one at a time. having said that, i listen to a lot of records and they blow my mind in lots of ways almost every day. this doesn't happen as much with compact discs. their sound is often predictable. less surprises. its a red letter day when i hear a great one.

"you have to hear a lot of music on a lot of labels to know how amazing it can be."

which is why i still respect people who talk about stuff that they don't know about or have just heard anecdotal comments about. but it is a shame that one of the poorest countries on earth with one of the richest musical legacies on earth put out some of the greatest sounding records i've ever heard (production, engineering, sound of actual vinyl pressing) and this kinda dismissive comment gets passed around as truth.

lee perry box set is terrible too. sound-wise. i couldn't even listen to it when i got a copy in here. arkology. such a shame. again, if you don't know the difference you probably aren't gonna care. but the differences between original recordings of those songs and what's on that box are VAST. just no comparison in many cases. you are only getting half their power on those discs. which is still plenty powerful for most mortals.

imo, the thing about 'jamaican pressings' is not always true, but it is HARD to find clean copies of jamaican records. which i think feeds into people thinking its the pressing. when it could just be grooveworn or scratchy or w/e.