Rhythmism.com

Retailers giving vinyl records another spin
Story Highlights
Oregon chain brings back vinyl after employee checked the "LP" code by accident

When the discs showed up, stores put them out, and 20 LPs sold the first day

Best Buy is testing sales at some stores


PORTLAND, Oregon (AP) -- It was a fortuitous typo for the Fred Meyer retail chain.


The best-seller so far at Fred Meyer is The Beatles album "Abbey Road."

This spring, an employee intending to order a special CD-DVD edition of R.E.M.'s latest release "Accelerate" inadvertently entered the "LP" code instead. Soon boxes of the big, vinyl discs showed up at several stores.

Some sent them back. But a handful put them on the shelves, and 20 LPs sold the first day.

The Portland-based company, owned by The Kroger Co., realized the error might not be so bad after all. Fred Meyer is now testing vinyl sales at 60 of its stores in Oregon, Washington and Alaska. The company says, based on the response so far, it plans to roll out vinyl in July in all its stores that sell music.

Other mainstream retailers are giving vinyl a spin too. Best Buy is testing sales at some stores. And online music giant Amazon.com, which has sold vinyl for most of the 13 years it has been in business online, created a special vinyl-only section last fall.

The best-seller so far at Fred Meyer is The Beatles album "Abbey Road." But musicians from the White Stripes and the Foo Fighters to Metallica and Pink Floyd are selling well, the company says.

"It's not just a nostalgia thing," said Melinda Merrill, spokeswoman for Fred Meyer. "The response from customers has just been that they like it, they feel like it has a better sound."

According to the Recording Industry Association of America, manufacturers' shipments of LPs jumped more than 36 percent from 2006 to 2007 to more than 1.3 million. Shipments of CDs dropped more than 17 percent during the same period to 511 million, as they lost some ground to digital formats.

The resurgence of vinyl centers on a long-standing debate over analog versus digital sound. Digital recordings capture samples of sound and place them very close together as a complete package that sounds nearly identical to continuous sound to many people.

Analog recordings on most LPs are continuous, which produces a truer sound -- though, paradoxically, some new LP releases are being recorded and mixed digitally but delivered analog.

Some purists also argue that the compression required to allow loudness in some digital formats weakens the quality as well.

But it's not just about the sound. Audiophiles say they also want the format's overall experience -- the sensory experience of putting the needle on the record, the feeling of side A and side B and the joy of lingering over the liner notes.

"I think music products should be more than just music," said Isaac Hudson, a 28-year-old vinyl fan standing outside one of Portland's larger independent music stores.

The interest seems to be catching on. Turntable sales are picking up, and the few remaining record pressers say business is booming.

But the LP isn't going to muscle out CDs or iPod soon.

Nearly 450 million CDs were sold last year, versus just under 1 million LPs, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Based on the first three months of this year, Nielsen says vinyl album sales could reach 1.6 million in 2008.

"I don't think vinyl is for everyone; it's for the die-hard music consumer," said Jay Millar, director of marketing at United Record Pressing, a Nashville based company that is the nation's largest record pressing plant.

Many major artists -- Elvis Costello, the Raconteurs and others -- are issuing LPs and encouraging fans to check out their albums on vinyl. On Amazon.com, one of the best-selling LPs is Madonna's latest album, "Hard Candy".

Some artists package vinyl and digital versions of their music together, including offers for free digital downloads along with the record.

"We've definitely had some talks with the major retailers about exclusives on the manufacturing end," Millar said of United Record Pressing, which focuses primarily on independent recordings.

An avid music fan himself, Millar says he has moved to vinyl in recent years.

"Once I got my first iPod ... I'm looking at my wall of CDs and trying to justify it," Millar said. "The things I like -- the artwork, the liner notes, the sound quality -- it dawns on me, those are things I like better on vinyl." He welcomed back the pops and clicks, even some of the scratches.

"I like that fact that it's imperfect in a lot of ways, live music is imperfect too," Millar said.

Independent music stores, which have been the primary source of LPs in recent years, say many fans never left the medium.

"People have been buying vinyl all along," said Cathy Hagen, manager at 2nd Avenue Records in Portland. "There was a fairly good supply from independent labels on vinyl all these years. As far as a resurgence, the major labels are just pressing more now."

In this game, big retailers aren't necessarily competing head to head with independent sellers' regular clientele of nostalgic baby boomers, independent label fans and turntable DJs.

"I cannot see that Best Buy or Fred Meyer would order the same things we would," Hagen said. "They aren't going to be ordering the reggae, funk, punk or industrial music."

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/31/fashion/31vinyl.html

August 31, 2008
Another Spin for Vinyl
By ALEX WILLIAMS

DURING his freshman year at Point Park University in Pittsburgh a couple years ago, James Acklin, now 20, felt lost among the social cliques on his new campus until he got to talking with a student who was in some of his classes. She seemed unusual, and it wasn’t just her look: thick-framed eyeglasses, bangs and vintage dresses. Then, one rainy day in February, the two skipped class and went to her apartment. As soon as she opened her door his instincts were confirmed: she had a turntable. So did he. They both spoke the language of vinyl.

Their bond was sealed as soon as she placed the stylus on an LP by the band Broken Social Scene, he said in an e-mail message. “There was this immediate mutual acknowledgment, like we both totally understood what we define ourselves by,” continued Mr. Acklin, who considers his turntable, a Technics model from the 1980s that belonged to an aunt, a prized possession. “It takes a special kind of person to appreciate pops and clicks and imperfections in their music.”

The ranks of vinyl devotees are growing. Lately, the anachronistic LP has experienced an unlikely spike in sales, decades after the mainstream music industry wrote off the format as obsolete. Major labels are expanding their vinyl offerings for the first time since they left records for dead nearly two decades ago, music executives said.

While the niche may still be small measured against overall sales of recorded music, the surge of interest in vinyl — and, particularly, its rising cachet among young listeners — is providing a rare glimmer of hope in a hemorrhaging industry.

“Even if the industry doesn’t do all that well going forward, we could really carve this out to be a nice profitable niche,” said Bill Gagnon, a senior vice president at EMI Catalog Marketing, who is in charge of vinyl releases. He said that people who buy vinyl nowadays are charmed by the format’s earthy authenticity.

“It’s almost a back-to-nature approach,” Mr. Gagnon said. “It’s the difference between growing your own vegetables and purchasing them frozen in the supermarket.”

The category virtually collapsed in the late 1980s with the advent of the compact disc. And despite the efforts of various subcultures of supporters — club D.J.’s, audiophiles, hardcore punks — to engineer a vinyl comeback, sales continued to wither as MP3s joined CDs as competition over the last decade. The industry had shipments of 3.4 million LPs and EPs in 1998 and just over 900,000 in 2006, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

But shipments jumped about 37 percent in 2007, to nearly 1.3 million records. Three years ago Warner Bros. Records returned to the format when it opened becausesoundmatters.com, an online vinyl store stocked with reissues and new releases. At first, any vinyl release that sold 3,000 copies was considered a success, said Tom Biery, who oversees vinyl sales for the company. By comparison, the 2007 Wilco album, “Sky Blue Sky,” surpassed 14,000 copies.

Vinyl is suddenly chic, he said, even among people too young to have grown up with the familiar crackle of a needle carving through the grooves of an album. “I have friends who have younger kids — 13, 15 years old, even 10 — and all those kids want turntables,” he said. “Their parents are like: Wait a minute. What are you talking about?”

Mass-market retailers like Virgin Megastore and smaller record stores like Mondo Kim’s in Manhattan are devoting more floor space to the antiquarian 12-inch disc of late. Newbury Comics, a chain of 29 music and merchandise stores in New England, has sold 400 turntables since it started selling them in June, Duncan Browne, a company executive, said.

Despite the spike, records still represent a sliver of the music business as a whole. In 2007, for example, the industry shipped 511 million CDs. But given the declining interest in compact discs — those half-billion CDs represented a drop of more than 17 percent from the year before — any growth was welcome, executives said.

This year Capitol/EMI is in the process of reissuing its first substantial vinyl catalog in decades. Some of those albums, like “Pet Sounds” by the Beach Boys, are classic rock leviathans aimed at nostalgic baby boomers. But many are albums by contemporary artists, like Radiohead and Coldplay, who appeal to young music buyers, Mr. Gagnon said. Most are pressed on acoustically superior 180-gram vinyl, and many are packaged in gatefold jackets, so they can serve as collectors’ items for young fans who might also have the music in its digital form.

With music so abundant on the Internet, record label executives said they needed to make physical copies of albums stand out as desirable objects in order to get people to buy them. Vinyl albums are up to the task: they are exotic because of their novelty and retro allure, and more physically imposing than CDs. (And the 12.5-inch album sleeve is an ideal canvas for cover art.)

Deluxe editions are trophies of sorts for passionate fans, Mr. Biery said. In September, for example, Warner Bros. Records will release a new Metallica album, “Death Magnetic,” in a five-record box version — each of 10 songs will get its own side — for about $115.

Many new-generation fans of vinyl view LPs as branded merchandise, like band T-shirts or posters, as much as a practical means of acquiring recorded music, said Matt Wishnow, the founder of Insound, an online music and merchandise company. In the last two years vinyl sales have expanded to about 50 percent from less than 20 percent of the company’s business, he said. (The median age of its customers, he added, is 25.)

In an era when “everybody’s music collection is the same” thanks to file swapping, collecting expensive, unwieldy LPs is a conspicuous way for the superfans to advertise their cognoscenti status, he said.

“It’s a customer who wants to have vinyl in their home the same way they want books in their home,” Mr. Wishnow said. For such a customer, he added, the message is, “ ‘When I can have all the music in the world in the palm of my hand, what does it say about me that I spend $15 to $20 for this format that is a pain to store and move and is easily damaged?’ ”

Young vinyl collectors said digital technology had made it easy for anyone — even parents — to acquire vast, esoteric music collections. In that context, nothing seems hipper than old-fashioned inconvenience.

“The process of taking the record off the shelf, pulling it out of the sleeve, putting the needle on the record, makes for a much more intense and personal connection with the music because it’s more effort,” said R. J. Crowder-Schaefer, 21, a senior at New York University who said he became a serious vinyl disciple a few years ago.

Along the way, devotees often cross paths with their parents, who are still upgrading their audio technology. Meghan Galewski, another student at New York University, bought her father, now 56, an iPod for a recent birthday. He bought her a turntable for hers.

“He thought it was stupid that I wanted this old technology,” Ms. Galewski, 21, said. She had to tutor him on how to use his iPod, then rifled through his stacks of records from the ’60s and ’70s to appropriate gems like his original “Woodstock” LP set.

But for Corinne Monaco, 17, who lives in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, her interest in vinyl provides a way to bond with her parents. Afternoons on the sofa listening to Jethro Tull and Jimi Hendrix albums with her father, she said, give her “a chance to see where he was coming from, with the music of his youth.”

INDEED, records force children of the digital age to listen to music in the rigid manner of previous generations, said Scott Karoly, 21, a student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a recent vinyl convert.

No longer can they use a click wheel to sample songs from Miley Cyrus, Nas, Black Sabbath, John Coltrane and the Scissor Sisters within minutes. With vinyl, listeners cede control to the artist. They let the music wash over them, in the original order of songs, at the original pace. “I have a ton of music on iTunes,” Mr. Karoly said, “but with that music I get A.D.D. really quick. With my LPs, it’s like reading a book as opposed to clicking through articles on Yahoo.”

“When you put on a record,” he added, “it’s an event.”

For a second there I thought that...

seriously. almost jumped out of my chair

this is why i still pretty much only listen to vinyl at home

I just started copying my record collection to digital this weekend. rough project to be honest, think I may need to rethink things a bit and pick up a few external backup-drives.

I actually wanted to ask some of the tech heads about this. I have a pretty basic setup, 2 1200's and a mixer that needs to be replaced. Once I replace the mixer, I can channel it to my receiver and then to the computer.

Would this be optimal or would there be another way of going about transcribing my vinyl collection to Digital? I've only got a modest amount of vinyl (around 5 crates, a couple hundred give or take).

I would go out and get yourself a phono preamp. Do not go through a mixer of any sort as that's going to color the sound in an unneccesary way. I got one from BBE at Guitar Center a while ago for not a lot of money (don't recall the amount anymore).

If you want to get extra fancy, use an hi-fi oriented elpitical needle when recording - one that favors sound over better tracking, since you're not going to be scratching and doing any fast cueing while recording.

You may also want to get some gruv glide or similar to make sure the records are good and clean before you go recording.

I actually saw it on TV (and might have read it on Wire mag?) few months ago how vinyls are making a come back. You just can't beat the sound and feel of a vinyl.

But I did think this thread was about...ya know...

i totally thought the thread was about hubert st.


as for the comeback of vinyl, when have 7" 45s ever sounded anythign other than crap? Indie 45s are gettign some trendy attention, but record stores and distros seem to keep closing...

you can go straight into your computer without an external amp (via your mixer outputs) you may want to invest in a stereo di-box though, go from your mixer to the stereo di-box then out of the box to your computer and use the ground lift option on the box.

as for quantity, I have over 10 thousand records, collevted from the late 70s and am recording them all in wav format. space is going to be an issue for me.

Was right there with you!

assuming 10000 avg 30 minutes per recorded at 24/96 no compression stereo, you're looking at 10TB roughly. but to go through that effort you'll want to have a backup of it too...instead of RAID I'd invest in a tape library since this is data that's essentially static, plus with tape you can add more as you need and replace just the ones that fail. will set you back ~$6k though with the tapes.