There’s a lot of people who can’t afford a treated room with a big budget sound system and expensive records, but still love the sonics of good music. They might live in a small flat or a share house and be living paycheck to paycheck. I think it’s great that there’s venues now where they can experience beautiful sounds and also connect with other people in a social environment.
Done right I love a good listening bar and for many people it’s an experience that they would otherwise not be able to have. I’m a speaker nerd though, so I might be biased.
My local listening bar has live jazz gigs one night a week thrown in the mix.
Its an unspoken rule, VG+ varies by region and genre. Same with NM. There should also be a disclaimer *Visual grading only. I been burnt so many times😢
Sorry. But vinyl only releases do my nut in. You don’t have to put it up for streaming. I’m right on board with that but I buy loads of music digitally and It just feels like ‘making an artistic statement’ or cutting your nose off to spite your face. If it is purely as an artistic statement then that’s mental. The fork you eat with doesn’t make the Michelin starred meal taste any better.
Surely, you must want people to appreciate your art? Isn’t that part of the point of it? It’s no less exclusive if it’s available on digital. I don’t understand the short sightedness of it all, what’s the worst that can happen if something is available on a format other than one side heavyweight 10” vinyl!!! I just want to buy the music, enjoy listening to it and support the artists financially.
Like the UR stuff. Some of it is weirdly available digitally on the Submerge site but most of the classic stuff isn’t. I know they reissue vinyl releases all the time but not digitally. For music that’s so forward facing it just feels like a reductive choice at times.
This isn’t an anti-vinyl rant by the way. It’s just born out of genuine frustration. I’d love to have another record player again but Abi would leave me and that would make me sad and too skint to spend money on records anyway.
That’s my old man rant of the week over and done with
Ha ha… and i would say digital only releases. To me it says I acknowledge that my music is so bad and worthless that not even 2/300 people worldwide would buy it on vinyl. But then i’m still hooked on the expensive plastic.
Understand your point. Vinyl release’s obviously come from a place of love.
Whatever the format is anyway. I still spend far too much on music. I’m a lifer at this point. I just want to buy the music, it wasn’t a format wars comment I was making. I hope it didn’t come across like that.
Back in the early 90s I was a (music) artist manager - almost everything we did was about trying to find a way just to get the music heard.
There was next to no chance of getting on the radio and even getting releases distributed to shops could be a problem.
You hoped that the music would stand up for itself and that those who liked it might buy it, but this was a non-starter if you couldn’t get it in people’s ears in the first place which at times seemed impossible.
So to me the idea of restricting people access to even hearing your music, just so you can squeeze some extra $ out of your ‘fans’ by only releasing on an expensive legacy format is a disgrace.
Vinyl only is understandable for bootlegs & edits etc, but respectable artists** should want their original art to at least be available for people to judge.
** I love Payfone’s Volt To Volt, but totally object that I had no choice but to pay over the odds for the pleasure of recording my own mp3 of it while someone like @Tanner is completely excluded
I love the SoundCloud clips. Want to buy it. But can’t? Dunno why, Lion Charge sell some digital material amongst the vinyl only releases. It’s frustrating
I’m ok with the scarcity/limited/vinyl only thing. It’s annoying sure (I like a digital file to play on air, I don’t mix vinyl in the radio studio) but if it allows a small artist/label the chance to scratch out a few hundred here and there to fund the art then I’m on board. It’s just the way the industry went, there was that famous rant about people downloading digital promos in the hundreds but nobody buying the digital releases to support. We did it to ourselves, got greedy and lazy and started to expect that music would always be free.
Put the digital out in 12-24 months, try and scratch out a few more pennies down the line, that’s fine.
Labels and PR can still distribute personalised digital to select DJs/presenters if they are set up like that. Best thing you can do as a hungry DJ is connect with people you respect, let people know you’re playing the stuff.
