The Rockist

Vinyl Dependent: The Needle and the Damage Done

[20 August 2009]

The independent record store lives another day. But how long can the vinyl lifeline continue to keep them afloat?

By Michael Brett

While the music industry keeps up its litigious battles in a war it has already lost, the press follows the efforts of the independent record store. Written off only a few years ago, independents now earn the sincere attention of artists, labels, and press.

The void left by the fall of the majors opened an opportunity for the little guy. Each day a budding entrepreneur promotes a new band, founds a new label, and seeks out new venues and partnerships. For the first time since the mid-‘60s, the independent operators lead the industry.

I couldn’t be happier. Obi-Wan’s description of Tatooine as a ‘wretched hive of scum and villainy’ proves most apt for the creaking corporate behemoths that bought rock ‘n’ roll in the late ‘60s. Now in the Jacob Marley stage of their demise, the majors remind us that absolute greed and progress make poor bedfellows. Faced with an infant technology with limitless possibilities, they huffed and puffed and blew their own house down.

Boo f-ing hoo.

Amidst all this back-slapping for avoiding the history books, the independent stores might want to pick one up. The up-tick in their revenues stems from but one thing: the current vinyl craze. For the first time in 20 years, vinyl is a viable format. Unfortunately for the shops, all crazes, whether it be tulip bulbs, baseball cards, Beanie Babies, or bundles of over-leveraged assets, must come to an end. And when they do, they usually take the markets with them.

Most of us pop lovers over 25-years-old have a special record store in our hearts. Mine was Wind Records on 95th Street in Oak Lawn just outside of Chicago. This tiny store in a quaint old walk-up was where I built my musical tastes (not counting the perennial fleecing of Columbia House). The first album I bought there was Def Leppard’s Hysteria. I could spend an hour or two easily at Wind and not get bored. Knowing this, my mom would always say,”Only five minutes, Michael.” Only five minutes, Mom? I overspent my welcome by about 20-odd years. Just ask the Rockista.

CDs dominated Wind’s bins with their long cardboard boxes. The vinyl hid in a distant corner, dusty and unloved. The vinyl addicts fell into two distinct stereotypes. One was the blindly dressed Boomer desperately seeking the rare bootleg of Dylan making a ham sandwich. The other was the elitist aesthete who shopped at Vintage Vinyl in Evanston, Illinois, and paid more for his stereo cables than I’d ever earned in a week. I disliked both. There was too much fixation on the material, not on the music.

Gradually, I too began to pick up the odd vinyl. Chipmunk Punk was one of the first. It reminded me of my childhood. The only orderly parts of my brother’s room were his vinyl LP crates. In a house without MTV, I first glimpsed most of the artists I grew to love the old-fashioned way—from the LP covers. For Christmas three years ago, the Rockista bought me a Sony turntable. I reciprocated two years later when I moved in with the ever-growing stack of vinyl I’d purchased. I think I appreciate my gift more.

Childhood nostalgia does not account for the hipster embrace of vinyl. According to the popular press, the hipsters love vinyl because it is tangible, unlike the MP3s with which they were raised. I never pay much mind to such pop psychology hokum. The hipsters buy vinyl for the same reason they wear Blu-Blockers, starve themselves, and ride fixed gear bikes. Because it’s cool.

Record stores love vinyl because it makes them a big boy finally in a format. For years, the majors screwed the tiny store by selling CDs to the Best Buys and Wal-Marts at cut-rate prices while charging the little guys’ base. With no way to compete, the independents fell off one by one. Hell, the labels even managed to kill Tower Records! Vinyl gives the independents the edge. Best Buy will not stock vinyl anytime soon.

Bands love vinyl because it’s a way out of the major’s distribution monopoly and actually makes them more money than they would off a CD. Vinyl also gives them another product to sell at shows.

So what’s not to love, right? Embrace the vinyl revolution!

Not quite. I smell smoke in this enchanted forest. You see, I didn’t start collecting with vinyl. No, you could say I’m a bit of a degenerate collector. As a young kid, I participated in the baseball card boom. A male childhood rite of passage went mad as Boomers sought out the 1952 Topps Mickey Mantles their mothers threw away. Card producers knew a good thing when they saw it, so they began to issue more and more card lines with limited production lines. Card shops popped up in mini-malls all over the country. Soon enough, you’d hear tales of Ken Griffey Jr. rookie cards going for $100 a pop. Huh?

The sports card industry consumed itself quickly. At the end all you had were vacant stores and angry middle-aged men who couldn’t believe their 100 Gregg Jefferies rookie cards were more valuable as coasters than investments. The card industry never recovered.

I also collect comic books. When Marvel and DC’s monopoly evaporated in the mid-‘90s, the imprints who joined them issued smaller print runs because that is all they could afford. The small print runs sent the industry into fits. Soon, Marvel released The Amazing Spider-Man with seven alternate covers each month, each one rarer than the next. Again, angry middle-aged men lost their boat money. That industry only recently returned to profit, thanks to Hollywood not having any original ideas.

The vinyl fixation so far follows the script of the above examples quite closely. New record stores open monthly in major urban markets. A cursory scan of eBay will provide you with more than enough examples of boom-indicative prices. $100 for a boxed set by a band no one’s heard of outside of Brooklyn? Mr. Magic Eight Ball, will this price hold in ten years? Shake, shake, shake. ‘My reply is no’.

I don’t think the Moderat boxed set will inspire the hipster who bought it when the band no longer exists in two years. The baseball card and comic boom mostly busted middle-aged men. The hipsters are young. The record stores could potentially lose an entire generation of consumers that won’t ever return.

The other shoe which the record stores must eye warily is the hipsters themselves. They’ve made trend-hopping their number-one participatory activity. Remember, these are the same kids who broke the majors because they grew up with free music. How long can they sustain an expensive habit when they can get the same product for free?

Photo by Jordan Melnick / MEDILL found at Northwestern.edu

Photo by Jordan Melnick / MEDILL found at Northwestern.edu

The store owners don’t seem so concerned. Permanent Records co-owner Lance Barresi said during a chat, “Vinyl never stopped being cool, and never will.”

But it doesn’t all add up to me. I know some very smart young people in the record industry right now, and I think they are doing fantastic work. Despite this, I have yet to see any strong evidence that the return of vinyl is real.

I hope I’m wrong. Record stores provide a valuable public service. They act as curators for their customers. They support fringe artists who may otherwise be punching clocks. They offer refuge to dorks like me.

But bubbles always burst.

 
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Michael Brett, the Leper Messiah, resides with his wife in Evanston, Illinois. He enjoys pina coladas, getting caught in the rain, and going to bullfights on acid. You can read more of his work at http://Shambollocks.com.
 
 
 

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Comments

What the F is “the Rockista”?  Are we supposed to born knowing what this is, or do you presume we can glean its meaning?  Context, people, context…

Comment by KJH — August 21, 2009 @ 12:45 pm

Enjoyed the article, but you made one egregious error (unless it was supposed to be sarcastic) - Best Buy does stock vinyl.  Maybe not in all their stores, but the LA stores have had it for at least six months or so.

Of course, the selection is crappy, and the bins aren’t meant to hold LPs, which means the records will eventually be warped as hell…but if you’re right, they won’t be selling it for long anyways

Comment by Josh B from Los Angeles — August 21, 2009 @ 2:33 pm

The Rockista is my wife. My bad if that caused consternation and confusion.

And to Josh, I had no idea Best Buy was selling vinyl. The one in Evanston doesn’t. I don’t see that making a dent for them, though, as they need real volume to make a profit.

Comment by Michael Brett from Evanston, IL — August 21, 2009 @ 6:15 pm

‘Rockista’ is obviously the feminine noun version of ‘Rockist’. Hence, it is clearly contextual.

Read people, read.

Comment by Angela R. from Vancouver — August 22, 2009 @ 6:58 am

Nice column! I was totally surprised to see vinyl reprints in the Best Buy in West Hollywood, hanging from wire racks where you can’t really flip through them like you would down the street in the fabled bins at Amoeba. Let’s hope at least a few indie record shops can survive even after the hipsters abandon them for whatever newfangled oldfangled accessory strikes their collective fancy. There’s nothing that compares to flicking through records at the local shop and chatting with the person flicking through the bin next to you!

Comment by Lee from New York NY — August 22, 2009 @ 11:05 am

Well, as someone who grew up with vinyl, I do not miss it at all.  The equipment was prone to failure, since there were so many moving parts and it was easy to get ripped off by electronic store salesmen who touted the most expensive stylus as the only one worth having.  Not to mention that it the vinyl itself was easily damaged, whether from mistreatment by your younger brothers or sisters, or from your stoned friends who wanted to move the needle back to hear “War Pigs” one more time.  Over the years, if you were an avid consumer like myself, it also took up an awful lot of space.  This led to my own Rockista saying in our early married years, “Do you really need to keep all those?  Why don’t you get rid of some of them”.  We have seldom had a more serious disagreement in our 26 years together!
CDs were better, MP3s are even better.  And, I say to my naive Democratic friends, environmentally responsible.  In response to the typical complaints about these new media, I respond -
1. Yes, a flawless vinyl recording on a perfectly calibrated turntable sounds better.  I have never had one of the latter and I am not obsessive enough to maintain the former, so I will take the consistent sound of CDs. or even MP3s .
2. I do miss some album art, but let’s be honest, most of it was unmemorable.  A “Dark Side of the Moon” was a rarity, not the norm.
Good column.

Comment by TroubleBound from Chicago — August 22, 2009 @ 11:20 am

In ignoring the “pop psychology hokum” underlying the tangibility argument, you ignore the possibility that tangibility is a way for the current generation, hipsters or not, to combat the sort of pixelation of the mind discussed in the PopMatters special on new media.

Do you really find it that easy to brush aside the effect of having a tangible artifact like vinyl, tangible not only in the physical sense, but in the audial sense of being forced to listen to an album as an album, rather than AD-DJing? Would there have been an Abbey Road side 2 if there were no sides to the medium?

Buying vinyl allows this generation to feel some sort of physical connection and, yes, ownership over music they give a shit about enough to get off iTunes and off their asses. Yes, there will always be the hipsters who manage to reduce this action, too, to a matter of show-and-tell devoid of meaning, but these are akin to the kids who bought baseball cards for the investment value and thus undermined the whole reason why the f*ing things were worth something in the first place.

Comment by Jeff from Ithaca — August 23, 2009 @ 8:09 pm

Great article which leads to more than a handful of conversations. I run a small, indie label called Suburban Home Records. 3 Years ago, I started Vinyl Collective as a vinyl online store and vinyl imprint and was surprised at how quickly things started taking off. Last year, we had our best year ever (after nearly 13 years as a business) and of course I am concerned that people will lose interest as quickly as they gained it, but I should point out that many of the collectors that support what we do were collecting vinyl long before it was considered cool by the hipsters and I suspect they will be around long after the hipsters start collecting 8 tracks or suspenders or whatever they jump to next. As a one time collector of sports cards (Eric Lindros anyone?), and comic books (I was always partial to Blue Beatle and Green Lantern), I expect many new collectors will find something else when they lost interest, but vinyl has existed in the underground for so long, I don’t expect it to go anywhere. I do see Best Buy losing interest but independent retailers will be smart to embrace vinyl and especially used vinyl.

Great read. (great Gregg Jefferies comment).

Virgil Dickerson
www.vinylcollective.com

Comment by Virgil Dickerson from Denver, CO — August 24, 2009 @ 9:32 am

Lot of good points in both the article and the comment section-
I, myself, have never bought vinyl although I appreciate the medium. My favorite record was Sesame Street Fever when i was a kid, and the album cover still holds up as one of my favorites. I do miss the idea of Album Art, though. I’m a big fan of the Roger Dean covers for YES, and ASIA (yes, I said “YES” and “ASIA”)and it bugs me that CD covers are nothing more than a picture of the band looking up, or some obscure animal.

Oh and Mike, for your McCovey card I’ll give my Marischal, the Tiant, .....and I’ll throw in Don Schwartz.

Comment by bell from chicago — August 24, 2009 @ 12:26 pm

Thank you, thank you readsters. Again, you provide a depth of field that I can only hint at through my own perspective.

Jeff, I don’t want to blow a future column idea out of the water (REALLY not that easy doing a weekly column- how did Royko and Breslin do it every day?!) but I will hesitantly agree with you. The vinyl craze can be seen as a reaction against how mp3s ‘devalued’ recorded music to a non-product, i.e. inherently worthless.

But the album, as a conceit and art form we grew up with, is on life support. Side two of Abbey Road would not exist today, because artists as big as the Beatles today (hypothetically) wouldn’t care about albums. They would care about their brand and their music’s presence in the broader ‘popscape’. A very, very (true, vocal) narrow slice of the music listening public still cares about albums. And that number grows smaller each day.

I myself don’t want to serve pop psychology hokum up, but could it even be that the hipsters embrace of vinyl is an ironic embrace, an appropriation of an art form which is to them wholly alien?

The album itself was a happy accident of commercial product meeting technology. Who knows what will replace it, or if there will even be a similarly linear replacement.

To Virgil, vinyl will always be around. It has a proven track record. The question is, can it again be a format leader? Can it continue to generate revenue? The independent record store needs product which can replace the album format. I don’t believe that product will prove to be the album itself.

To bell, your sad devotion to that ancient LP artwork which always looked better detailed on the side of GMC conversion vans has not helped you conjure up the stolen data tapes, or given you clairvoyance enough to find the rebels’ hidden fortress…

Comment by Michael Brett from Evanston, IL — August 24, 2009 @ 3:06 pm

I don’t think it will ever be a format leader, but I think that it can add enough to the bottom line of a smart retailer for them to continue being successful. The best selling LP of 2008 was Radiohead’s in rainbow which sold 10,000 copies. That isn’t very many copies in relation to the millions blockbusters sell on cd and digitally, but those sales are primarily at indie stores. That and retailers who carry used vinyl can really benefit from the higher markups and the vinyl collector who comes in each week to find new,used arrivals.

Comment by Virgil Dickerson from Denver, CO — August 25, 2009 @ 8:04 am

I think I might qualify as one of those hipsters, maybe. I buy vinyl. And I haven’t ever illegally downloaded free music. I grew up listening to my Dad’s old vinyls and I now I love them. So, I’ll assure you that there is at least one “hipster” out there with different reasoning than that portrayed in your article. I don’t buy vinyl because I think it will be an investment—-I buy it because it is what I like!

Comment by E. Davis — August 25, 2009 @ 12:36 pm

Damn, I wear blu-blockers. 

Jam Master Jay would be proud to see this resurgence.  I wonder what Spinderella thinks.

Comment by sean from Urbana, IL — August 27, 2009 @ 8:45 am

Good to see someone make this point, being a youngin’ collecting comics in the early and mid 90’s, I understand it. Now that I can start buying vinyls cause I’m out of school(no need to lug around my crates every few months, also in response to a few posts up, cds can get skips much easier than vinyls even if you treat them as museum pieces) I have thought to myself that the same thing is happening in vinyl as with comics. I buy vinyl because I want to have these tunes/love this musician, and vinyl sounds inviting, not compressed to fit into its home, but allowed to fill out its home. I will buy the 10,000 pressed 180 gram version over the 50 pressed, lighter, colored version anyday. I agree, I don’t see the vinyl making a comeback to the top format its a bit of a fad(i’ve seen bands putting out 8 tracks now). Also popular music now is killing the long playing format. Remember though before the fifties the music industry pushed the single, then came the LP. Now its reverting back I feel. These new stores will probably bust, but the ones that made it through the first cleansing should keep on truckin(my store didn’t died in 2000). Vinyl won’t succumb for a while because of great online stores and distros like Vinyl Collective(love you guys), and dorks like me who will pay too much for an old vinyl cause I couldn’t get it new. Vinyl started it all and has been around since. For the love of music!

Comment by reggie from greenville, sc — August 29, 2009 @ 7:17 pm

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