The State of Vinyl 2019


#1

Looking to start a conversation on vinyl, dunno if we have any folks here who press or cut it, but i’m sure we’ve got plenty who purchase it or have released on wax in the past.

2015-2017 saw a big boom in vinyl plants and sales in general, but was it all hype? Did labels, distro and plants overvalue their markets?

saw this link today in RA

@Yung_Dave posted this thread of BokehVersions dude sayin’ he was over it

I buy vinyl mostly in dollar bins cus im broke, i’d say about 8 to 1 of the records i purchase are used to new, but I will be most definitely be purchasing vinyl for the rest of my life. Who wants to throw their opinion into the ring and share a story about the current state of vinyl, their relationship to it, forecast some trends or toss out some predictions?

also here’s a great example of why I’ll miss RA’s comments

Top Rated Comment:

DVNT
Tue, 9 Feb 2016
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The problem is the majors getting back into pressing vinyl, after having destroying all their equipment back in the 80/90s and now using the few plants that are left. Record Store Day is coming and we need 5,000 copies of some One Direction LP, a bunch of 70s rock album represses and novelty picture discs no-one is going to play.

This is positive news and be interesting to see how many of these are sold, and to where.


#2

can almost with 100% certainty attribute my two slipped discs to schlepping my needlessly massive vinyl hoard to and from over the countless moves during my adult life. have been collecting since Entroducing came out in '96 (how could you not) and the one-off finds here and there will always be important in my ongoing sampling odyssey but, for the most part, I’ve been anti-physical/pro-digital for the last 10+ years.


#3

I used to be a vinyl-only DJ for at least 15 years, and collected CD’s for even longer, so I have tons of records on both CD and vinyl in the basement… and the’ll stay there for the memories, but I don’t see myself adding to the collection any time soon.

I really do miss record store shopping though, and checking out the best record stores in every new city I went to, but I’m all digital now and quite happy with it. I would never go back, although nostalgia have been overwhelming at times. The format is lovely and will always have piece of my heart, but the convenience of digital outweighs it for me. I run a computer/server with ROON at home with Tidal streaming in FLAC/MQA, and whatever I can’t find on streaming I buy in FLAC and add to the same server so it blends with the rest.

I think the vinyl-boom will have a few more years to it as it’s spreading through the masses, but I have also seen some of my friends that jumped back on the hype a few years ago dropping vinyl again already, so the decline will eventually hit again.


#4

I still buy used records in small amounts usually every week or so. Usually reflects my current listening habits for the most part which are lately mostly non-electronic. Occasionally a good find pops up here, but electronic vinyl is hard to come by here without paying ridiculous markups in the shops. If it’s just so damn good I can’t resist, I’ll get it, but for the most part I stick to 10-15$ jazz fusion and the occasional weird score (a 2XLP Material compilation is weird where I am.) I have a friend who invites a core bunch of people over in the summertime to get drunk and go round-robin on records. Some very interesting picks come out of the woodwork and I have to keep my clout up :ok_hand:


#5

tis all i own. no record player yet.


#6

Last new record I bought was DJ Healer Nothing to Loose and a bunch stuff in Hard Wax as a techno tourist in like April 2018. Other than that its been sub $8 wax but I’ll shell out $20 for a used gem lots. Stuff like Radiohead, Bjork, Kendrick, and Dilla that I won’t regret owning 20+ years down the line.

I’ve never bought wax to play out at functions but am thinking one day I’ll actually have money and do this for fun. Went to Berlin / HardWax for the first time last Spring, copped like 100€ in wax for the 2018 memories (Pom Pom, Koze, SleepArchive, Lowtec) and my mind was blown by the concept that a record store would have a copy for customers to listen to and then 10+ new copies of it in the back stock. I was so stoked at the time, but also shows just how little new record purchasing and how much dusty used record store digging in the Bay Area and Portland I had been doing in the 6 years prior to that.

I bought my first record, a noise remixed one off Record Store Day Akron/Family album, in 2009 before I owned a record player. I had inherited a friends records and tables at 16 but was way too irresponsible to keep them around, I think I sold them for a skateboard and a quarter of ganja…But I kept that Akron with me for 3-4 house moves until finally moving in with roomates that had tables, and then really got into it in 2011. Now I’ve got the bug and have been exploring music backwards through vinyl.

I want new labels to be able to continue to release vinyl in sustainable ways. There’s a label in Portland called Mississippi Records, also the name of their store, which is where I pretty much learned to dig. They do a CSR, short for Community Supported Records, model. Subscriptions go for as long as u wanna pay and you get X amount of records for your deposit on the first press along with some other goodies. I think it’s a cool model but only if you have a devoted following, not sure it can work in forward thinking and more trendy nebulous genre worlds like what we all nerd out on here.

https://sites.google.com/site/mississippicsr/

From the website above ^

Here’s how it works: You send us any amount of money, between $68 & $300 (sorry not paypal – you actually mail us a check or cash). In exchange, we will send every Mississippi/Change Record that comes out until that amount of money is tapped out. By printing & filling out the questionnaire below, you can customize what types of records you get (basically punk, international and Americana). An average Mississippi/Change title will set you back between $10 and $12. If you sign up for this service, some specialty limited press items (usually 300 copies printed with fancy sleeves!) will be sent that could cost as much as $13. 7" records will cost $5. Shipping per unit will vary between $3.50 and $5, depending on how many records ship at once. If money is left over in your account that does not add up to the cost of a single LP, we will simply send a check for your remaining balance along with the last record you receive.

Maybe someone else knows labels that are doing similar things / innovating models of distro??

These guys are a very special record store / label to me. Keeping it real amid Portland’s gentrifuckery…