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

i was a vinyl me please member until late 2023. the service itself was fine–with the multiple tracks and ability to swap records, you could get some good stuff. it was expensive, tho.

I have a very good sounding Jorge Ben reissue they did, I think that's all but yeah they were legit

i wouldn't have thought to pick up albums by the silvertones, or gabor szabo, or (like grisso) doug sahm on my own, so i appreciated the curatorial aspect, and if there was some bullshit as the main record of the month, i would swap with one of the genre options

Folks are posting over in the VMP sub that current subscribers are getting their bankruptcy emails and it looks like the store credits were unsecured, so they're basically worthless now.

VNYL Me, Please(?)

https://variety.com/2025/music/news/vinyl-me-please-acquired-owners-restore-record-subscription-1236416655/

hahahahahahahaha!!!

the manatee has become the mento

WOW.
Rare that you see a business run as poorly/unprofessionally as VNYL, so this should be... interesting?

that is fucking hilarious

i always knew that vinyl me, please company was no good (and what a stupid name), sometimes you just have to go with your gut

i didnt even get the chance to say thank you for vinyling me

He comes to VMP having been a fan from the start, even as he was starting up a rival service. Alt remembers a sample title he found highly satisfying, as well as what VMP made more unique about it.

“When I joined the service back in 2014, as just a student of music retail and who’s been obsessed with collecting physical music for my whole life, I was very excited to get the J Dilla ‘Donuts’ and ‘Mad Villainy’ record,” he recalls. “I’m not a huge hip-hop head, but I just loved that, and I just remember that initial experience. And it came with a cocktail recipe, which I thought was just such a weird but nice touch. There was something magical about that, like: I’m gonna sit down this evening and instead of turning on the screen, or instead of going down the dopamine hit of flipping through TikTok, I’m gonna listen to this record with nothing else happening and I’m gonna go fix myself a drink and sit here and listen to this record like that. That vibe was really cool to me, and I thought that was where they had it. Then they broadened it and they had different categories of genres, and I think the tracks (of different genre subscriptions) made sense, but over time it, the cocktail recipes went away and the (extra) content went away and it kind of got a little bit less special.”

NOTE: Tik Tok did not exist in 2014.

The misguided arrogance of some of the quotes in that article... I almost feel bad for them about how this all will end.

Between the article and the VMP sub, it looks like a major problem they had really was trying to be a vinyl Criterion Collection, doubling down on gimmicky pressings of vintage major label warhorses (the Dead, Dolly Parton, Buckingham-Nicks-era Mac etc.), niche cult heroes (Nilsson), and selected new releases when all their subscriber base wanted was albums from the late '80s and 1990s that were barely/never released on vinyl.

A friend of mine gave me a pressing they put out of Emmylou Harris’ debut album, and I thought it sounded fine but at the same time I think those early Emmylou records sound pretty damn good on their most common pressings and you can probably still find them for 2 to 4 bucks.

otm

some of their pressings were legitimately very good though

yes, I have a couple I bought used that are fine, Jorge Ben and a Maytals LP

The once beloved, recently troubled record subscription service Vinyl Me, Please

hahaha thanks Variety

subscriber base wanted was albums from the late '80s and 1990s that were barely/never released on vinyl

Or late 90's/Early 00's!

This is all easier said than done though. For the viable titles of this ilk that you could actually make happen, you'd be releasing a record every quarter. The temptation would certainly be to augment with color variants and titles where your fingers are super duper crossed. Sometimes ppl imagine you can just license things, when this is often absolutely not the case and has gotten infinitely harder to do now that the majors (and their own D2C sites - hello The Sound of Vinyl) have been back in the game for years.

at one point there was definitely a treasure trove of albums between like 1989 and 2002 that never got a vinyl release but I can't imagine there are too many in demand titles left

and half of those reissues are sonic garbage imho (and in my lived experience)

AT LEAST half

looking at you, Geraldine Fibbers

(but really the blame there goes to Universal)

XPs

...and a problem with alot of albums from that era is they don't have analog masters, so either you have to create one or just use the CD master.

re:89-02

Comparatively few records like 'Tracy Chapman' and 'Tidal' out there these days. And, again, the labels are not waiting for somebody who already ran a failed subscription service to ask for them. They've already been asked for them 100x. They're either tied up in nonsense or there are other plans for them.

Best quote I've found about that press release of an article (from the Needles and Grooves forum):

That article reads like two people who’ve never been let out of their bedrooms suddenly being thrown out in the world and told to go make friends.

one thing I do find interesting about a lot of late 90s vinyl is it was intended mostly for DJs so often the albums would be different than the CD version.
particularly in how they'd be unmixed and would remove the minor tracks. sometimes the tracklisting would be jumbled up too.

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

― SCHLITZ MIXED BAG (Sparkle Motion)

Alt tells Variety, “They went into a bankruptcy situation in which they found different parties to come in and bid on taking over the business, and so we had a bidding war with a couple other parties. The other parties were not as interested in the continuity of the service, but we were the ones that were basically saying, ‘Hey, this brand still has a lot of goodwill and a lot of great, engaged customers.’

https://www.iwastesomuchtime.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/68/cdn.iwastesomuchtime.com/852012024443iwsmt.jpeg

we have so many other delights to share with you

next month: A Firestone Christmas Special (three albums)

i definitely got a really mediocre record the one month I was a member. some 90s pop hip hop sampler thing

never played it, stepped on it and broke it one day

some more recent reviews

Absolutely terrible
Absolutely terrible. After filling out the artists and genres I like in detail and including access to my Spotify I was sent 3 albums that weren’t remotely related to anything I said I enjoyed or listened to. After receiving my shipment I tried to cancel my subscription by calling. Nobody answered so they sent me an email to address my concerns. I emailed back to say I wanted to cancel my subscription and after sending multiple emails they still have not replied. Since then I have been charged for two more months and have yet to receive my shipment from the first charge. Their entire service feels like one big scam. You are much better off shopping your local record stores or using discogs to get something you actually want.

that's nit picking, innit?

If it sounds too good to be true
If it sounds too good to be true, it is. This is easily the worst vinyl subscription service. The whole premise is a straight lie. No integrity, no creativity, no worry. They send what they want and make up some half ass rain for what they sent. You can't return or exchange, either. It's like the reverse of city trash services. They bring you the trash instead of taking it and it's yours forever instead of forgotten about

opinions are like vinyl - everyone has more than they need and most of them suck

TL;DR: 2/10 This service is not worth the money, they are unreliable, and it seems the collection of records they have access to are mostly very obscure. Perhaps worth it if you have a massive collection, and just like watching it grow.

Hello all, just wanted to make a post to share my experience with the company VNYL and their record curation service. Long story short, it was a bad time, and I don't want other people to deal with the same thing. These screenshots of an email I sent to them should summarize my experience pretty well: Screenshot 1 Screenshot 2 Admittedly I got a little rude there, but it had been literal months, so. I should note they literally do not have a cancel account option, you're supposed to call them to do that, kinda scummy if you ask me.

Shortly after that email both packages were immediately shipped, but no one ever replied to the email, no apology or any acknowledgment. Shipping was pretty quick (USPS), and everything arrived in good shape, at least. So obviously 1/10 for the experience. Let's move on to the records themselves.

I had filled out the survey with my taste in music (mostly classic rock, some modern rock and electronic). I wasn't expecting to actually get a record of a favorite band of mine like Led Zeppelin or The White Stripes. I'm fairly new to this, and was looking to expand my horizons, but I was hoping to at least have heard of some of the 6 bands I was delivered.

Here's what I got (Spotify links for those curious):

Altitudes + Attitude - Get It Out - 7/10, reminds me of Metallica and other metal bands of the era a little bit. Not too surprising, since I later learned that the bassist is the same guy from Megadeth, so there's some pedigree there. Cool marbled white/brown colored vinyl too.

Annie Taylor - Sweet Mortality - 7/10, solid female-vocal punk rock, can't really complain. Also cool vinyl, a dark green with black splatter.

Adam's House Cat - Town Burned Down - 5/10, American rock, not bad, but nothing super great either. Has a song called Buttholeville, and is printed on piss-yellow translucent vinyl, so it loses points for presentation haha.

Various - The Lookouting! - 3/10, I don't mind a compilation album, but this is some obscure stuff. Personally not a huge fan of live recordings over studio, but that's just me. Plain black vinyl.

Negative Approach - Tied down - 3.5/10, not bad, objectively, but a bit too intense for my taste, and I don't think it made sense from a curation perspective to recommend me this based on what I filled out, so I won't be spinning it again. Plain black vinyl.

Ocobaya - Messix - 3/10, the one techno album I was given. Not a terrible pick, based on how I described my taste in electronic, but also deeply obscure (3 monthly listeners on Spotify as of this writing). Much to my shame, I was gifted one of those cheap Victrola suitcase players. I do plan on upgrading when I move out of the small apartment I currently live in, but for now this record's bass is way too intense and shakes the needle too much, causing some bad skipping, so it'll gather dust until I move. I take points off for this because they specifically asked what kind of turntable I have, and if they're such connoisseurs they ought to have known I wouldn't be able to handle this. Plain black vinyl, and barley even a real case, just a plain white carboard sleeve over the paper one.

Overall, terrible user experience with mixed-bag record selection (2 out of 6, in my case). I say save your money and keep hunting records individually the old fashioned way, instead of this random box approach.

wait Tied Down rules

the rest otm

also amuses me how bad antique stores are at pricing vinyl anymore. I went to an antique store on Saturday and there was a box of beat-up, old boring vinyl, with a sticker advertising that all vinyl in this box was $8! it was their discount bin! and it was full of shit you get for 50 cents at a Goodwill like Mantovani's Greatest Hits. I went on Discogs to see what most of the records were selling for in the condition they were in and...it was like 50 cents to a buck for most of it.

indoors, the vinyl were $10-15, but...the selection wasn't any better. the most egregious example was an old, torn up Blues Project - Projections record. the cover was below-average in terms of wear, and someone had written all over the back of it in pen. the record itself didn't even have a jacket and had damage to it. and it was marked at $15. on Discogs, even in relatively very good condition, this thing was going for maybe 3 bucks. but then I saw where they got their bullshit price from - there was a version going for $17 on Discogs! however, it was the 180 gram re-release from 2018, which was...very much NOT the copy they had up for sale.

yeah I gave a middle finger to the reviewer at the Negative Approach slander

xpost

Adam's House Cat - Town Burned Down - 5/10, American rock, not bad, but nothing super great either. Has a song called Buttholeville, and is printed on piss-yellow translucent vinyl, so it loses points for presentation haha

The band that became The Drive-By Truckers!

Way too many people selling records who have no idea what they are doing encouraged by buyers/suckers who have no idea what they are doing.

lolll omar, a+ on the "goodwill" bit

omg I finally got it, lol....perfect

d'oh! haha, yeah, took me a second. beautiful

they really do seem like a unique company. an army of vinyl warriors committed to salvation through music, you might say

Sexism, TechBros, and Cocktail Recipes: Stereogum's VMP Exposé

https://www.stereogum.com/2310783/vinyl-me-please/columns/sounding-board/

Was Vinyl Me, Please a victim of its own success?

In 2020, the company shipped around 500,000 LPs; in 2021, that number nearly doubled. But executives seemed to take all the wrong lessons from this growth. Instead of recognizing that extraordinary circumstances were inflating the vinyl market, they apparently believed the line would keep going up — that VMP’s success was, in essence, a done deal.

“Instead of figuring out, how do we operate in a world where people can go out again, I think they took those two years as, We are geniuses of vinyl. And we know everything,” says a former staffer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “And they kept spending Vinyl Me, Please’s money like we were never going to have a downturn.”

During VMP’s boom years (roughly 2017–2022), sources say executives were profligate with spending. There were expensive brand activations, company retreats, long-term contracts with industry consultants that employees found mystifying; there were periods when managers were told to hire, hire, hire, then suddenly warned that they might have to do layoffs. “Money was going out the door and that should have been questioned more,” says one former employee. “We spent a ton of money every month to produce an unboxing video of people pulling the record out of the box and playing it.”

At one point, Kylberg, the Chief Strategy Officer, helped his stepson land a salaried position at VMP; multiple ex-employees say the stepson routinely skipped meetings and seemed to do little work yet received a raise and earned more than some long-term employees. “He literally did nothing,” one former staffer says.

Shady, Scam

Now, here’s the confusing wrinkle: Wasn’t the pressing plant supposed to be owned by VMP? That’s the impression Schaefer gave employees when he announced it at that company retreat. And that’s the impression he gave a reporter for the Denver Post, who in 2022 interviewed Schaefer for an article headlined “Vinyl Me, Please to build a 14,000-square-foot ‘audiophile’ record plant, listening room in RiNo.” A sign on the plant’s exterior even bore the VMP logo.

But, according to the lawsuit, the plant was actually an independent entity from the beginning, and Schaefer, Block, and Kylberg “proposed that each of them would have an ownership interest in the Pressing Plant.” Adding to the confusion, they intended to name the plant Vinyl Media Pressing — different name, same acronym. Then, in March 2022, the three executives established a “Customer Agreement” between the plant and VMP, obligating VMP to provide the plant with “a total deposit of $1,500,000.”

“Outwardly, I was given the directive to make it seem like we were the same business,” says a former VMP employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But then internally, [Schaefer] was like, ‘No, it’s not the same thing.’ It felt shady.” Gradually, delays in opening the plant compromised the business of VMP, which could not press the records it had committed to pressing at the plant. “So then we were having to announce delays to our customers and just letting down our customer base,” the ex-employee says. “It was like an avalanche.”

fuck these people

sounds about right for a company named "Vinyl Me Please"

lmao that's a Nathan For You level idea

The deal between the pressing plant and “VMP” somewhat resembles private equity asset stripping— like when a nursing home chain buys a nursing home and its real estate, then spins off the nursing home with a new corporate entity that “operates” the nursing home and now the nursing home has to pay “rent” on land and buildings it used to own.