But what I find equly offensive is the way people purposely do such small runs to help justify the price hike. Historically people have struggled to get their (often brilliant) music heard at all, which is why we can still unearth gold, so the current practise of inflating the price by restricting the number of people who can buy/hear it is a complete pisstake imo.
Stopped buying 12’s a few years ago and have started selling off most of my house / techno records. Will probably keep a few hundred of my favourite ones so I can have the occasional mix.
Will continue to buy albums but will have to be something I already love or think i will love in years to come. Think I’ve got about 500 albums as space is limited so it’ll never go much higher than this. And I generally only buy something if I sell something in my discogs store.
Plan this year is to buy a new dac and music server thing and build up a digital libary. Can’t really ustify spending £40 on an lp when I can get the cd or go on bandcamp and get it for a fraction of that price.
Saying that I think I will always be a collector as I love going into record shops but it’s slowly moving to a one record a month.
I agree that purposefully manipulating the price by producing small runs isn’t great. But I think it’s also a reaction against the digital world where copies of files can be infinite. The idea of a physical product that you can’t just stream if you want must be crazy for digital natives. But of course it’s the way we grew up, when even if you could actually see a record behind a counter they might just refuse to sell it to you!
just for parity i thought about starting a thread called “seriously, fuck digital!” but i don’t have any quarrel with digital at all.
kind of a boring format, but if that’s the worst i can say about it, it’s doing something right. scarcity isn’t an issue and the cost is shockingly consistent.
In my chaotic period of my life and I moved home 4-5 times in about 7 years - I just got sick of lugging all those records around. I have pretty much digitised every record I’ve owned over the past decade. Each move I just got a bit more brutal with what I got rid of. I went from around the 3k mark to about 500 LP’s & 12’''s along with my 7" collection of just under 1000.
Over the past 2 years, I’ve given away about 80% of the 12’s and LP’s, mainly to my two sons - they will get much more enjoyment from them than I would these days. I can now fit everything I own in a pretty small van, which weirdly gives me a strange kind of pleasure. My 7" collection is going nowhere - it fits into 4 small wooden boxes and I have a real love of the 45 single. I still buy the odd 7" and a lot of the time they cost next to nothing.
I have no problem with others love of vinyl - it was an obsession of mine for most of my adult life. I just care about it a lot less these days. And when it comes to DJ’ing, I really couldn’t give the slightest fuck what format is used, as long as the music is good and it’s not shitty mp3’s.
Yeah, it’s a question I keep asking myself too. I swing from thinking Fuck it, I’m going to digitise everything and sell the lot to FEED ME MORE VINYL and back again. My head says the former. But my heart is still the heart of the fifteen year-old who spent his lunch money on George Clinton and Oliver Cheatham 12"s in Ramsgate Our Price. There’s just something about records that I struggle to shake.
When it comes the cost, both new and (some) used, it’s really hard to justify.
But as people have pointed out, there are still bargains to be had. So to end on a note of positivity (to myself as much as anyone lol) here are a couple of things I’ve just picked up, cheap as chips:
New records and a lot of used ones are so expensive now they really do feel like a luxury purchase these days, I really have to think twice before I press the “buy” button.
I still treat myself to a record or two a month, and that’s all I can justify usually.
Its not too many years ago, that Id have three or four 12’s turning up every week, and I know some of you lot would have been buying more than that, its just the prices have gone crazy, the prices of everything has gone crazy, but records seem to have increased disproportionately.
I’d be amazed if there’s a CD revival, but 20 years ago almost nobody outside hardcore collectors and people into dance music cared about vinyl and look where we are now with £3 former charity shop albums on sale for £20 and worse.
The protagonist of The-novel-I-will-one-day-maybe-eventually-finally-publish ™ is a CD obsessive, but that’s because as a 15 year old he spent his lunch money on Ministry of Sound compilation CDs. It may or may not be informed by my own experiences. I couldn’t possibly comment
Like Jolyon said, sometimes I do wonder why I continue to buy records, when I struggle to find the time to listen to those I already have.
I definitely have cut back on buying as many as I used to, partly due to how much they cost these days, and having less disposable cash than in the past, but also because I’m now more discerning with my purchases, finding it easier these days to pass on things which previously I would have seen as an “essential” record to buy. Sometimes I treat myself to a record which costs more than I probably should be spending, but usually only when I’m Discogs / Paypal rich.
On the other hand though, like others have said, I see it as my hobby, and if it was something else I was in to, I’d be spending money on that instead. And unlike with a lot of other things, you end up with something you can go back to whenever you want, to enjoy over again, maybe discovering something new each time. I suppose you could do that with digital, but I love pulling records off the shelf at random, often rediscovering a forgotten b side, or realising I now love something which I’d previously dismissed. That just wouldn’t happen with digital, and I could never imagine sitting down late at night scrolling through a list of MP3’s, choosing something to play.
Having a dig in a record shop is one of life’s pleasures as well, one of the best afternoons I had last year was digging through the bargain racks at Out On The Floor in Camden, whilst listening to some old reggae heads at the counter gossiping about various sound systems and singing along to the tunes which were being played.
In another era of djing he’d be experiencing some sort of, maybe not fame, but he’d be globally touring, eh? The only people i know who know who he is are djs, which is probably the absolute worst group of people to be famous amongst.
I read somewhere that around 50% of vinyl sold in the 1970s was also not played by the original purchaser at the time either. I’ll try to find where i read that.
