Earlier this week, it was widely reported that vinyl is outselling digital downloads in the UK for the first time since the iTunes store was launched here in 2004. The real story is that sales of downloads are dropping not because vinyl is wooing back digital listeners but because streaming is becoming the default way of consuming digital music.
The relentless spin on the so-called “vinyl revival” is getting ridiculous – as the Daily Mash pointed out in a piece about how vinyl has become more popular than food. The Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) has been spinning this line for the last couple years, since taking over the reins of Record Store Day. Unless you are reissuing Foo Fighters albums to be sold in the supermarket chains that have jumped on the vinyl-revival bandwagon, the situation is nowhere near as VG+ as ERA is suggesting.
We have to ask ourselves why people prefer to buy old records. Is it because vinyl is essentially a retro format, so people naturally look backwards instead of forwards? Is it because the whole culture of music – from the BBC 6Music playlist to festival lineups – is so focused on reliving past glories? I’m guessing it’s because these things are a known quantity, and that is what people want from their records: familiarity, nostalgia, a warm and cosy signifier that can be used in ads for banks, cars and clothes.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s great that people are still buying vinyl, and it’s no bad thing that it’s becoming more widely available. But it seems to have had very little impact on the industry at large, apart from making things even more difficult.
Hitting The Links
Sun Ra is often cited as the founding father of afro-futurism, a tangent of thought which extends through the mothership connections of Parliament-Funkadelic, to the astral techno of Underground Resistance, to the aquatic, lardossian narratives of Drexciya; his work examines racial identity and the black experience in America through the eyes of an alien visiting humanity. The language of this deconstruction is peppered with his own neologisms, like the “astro-black” of outer space, the “myth-science” or “solar-myth” of creation, right down to the name he chose for his band, “the Arkestra”, a linguistic riff on Noah’s biblical safe haven.
Giant Abandoned Soviet Spaceship Made of Wood
Buran, the Soviet Union’s answer to NASA’s Space Shuttle programme, wasn’t quite as successful as its American rival. Just one flight-capable Buran orbiter (craft OK–1K1) was completed, and flew only once, unmanned, on November 15, 1988. Today, a handful of relics from the Buran programme lie strewn across the former Soviet Union and beyond, from half-finished orbiters to a series of full-scale engineering rigs and other test articles; among them was this wooden wind tunnel model, abandoned for years in a corner of Zhukovsky Airfield in Moscow Oblast.
Electron Microscope Shows How Vinyl LP’s Are Played
Have you ever wondered how a vinyl player actually plays a record? Well, wonder no more. Microscopic Images shared this image on their Twitter some months back, showing what a record’s groove looks like under 1000x magnification.
The Meenakshi Temple of Madurai, India
Meenakshi Temple was originally built by Kulasekarer Pandya in the 6th century BC, but the credit for the present look of the temple goes to the Nayakas, who ruled Madurai from 16th to 18th century. The reign of the Nayaks marks the golden period of Madurai when art, architecture and learning flourished expansively. The riot of colors, however, is a more recent addition.
Graphic Designer Mark Ohe of Matador Records
Mark’s approach to working with a band always began with hearing their ideas for the project first, because, he pointed out, they always had ideas for it. “It’s pretty rare that someone comes to me and says, ‘Hey I’m doing this record, but I don’t know what to do for the cover.’ That almost never happens. What they really usually need is for someone to edit those ideas.”
Blowing Up The Vinyl Boom
Here’s a fascinating article from FACT on where the real problems lie in modern record manufacturing … to paraphrase James Carville, it’s the electroplating, stupid:
Electroplating, a process which involves coating the master lacquer in a metal layer to produce stampers, is time-intensive and requires highly trained personnel. Those who have learned electroplating are still a long way from being able to prepare the lacquer – the lengthy process requires a great deal of experience and expertise. Only then can it be guaranteed that the music sounds how it is supposed to sound. And all this has to happen quickly – when the music is cut to the lacquer, it can’t be stored indefinitely. A time period of over two weeks is considered to be problematic.
{Silke Maurer of Handle with Care, one of the largest production agencies for records:} “In the last four years, vinyl production has almost doubled here. That sounds super, but you have to take a closer look at how the numbers come together. In the same timeframe, the first run of a title has reduced nearly by half. That means more work for the press. The machines have to be reconfigured more often, which takes a lot of time. But the real problem is not in the pressing – the bottleneck is in the electroplating.”
Thus, having to constantly create new lacquers for short runs (as records – especially in the dance realm – don’t sell close to the numbers they did twenty years ago) in a process that is time consuming and takes expertise creates real headaches. Pain also comes from the constant recalibrating and readjusting of the pressing machinery to handle each new short run project. These machines are all over thirty years old, remember, with new models only now appearing in limited form.
And then, here come are those mustache-twirling major labels:
There was a gold rush at Sony and the other majors, and it’s hard to shake the feeling that the labels are trying to sell their archive a third time, this time to middle-aged buyers who can remember buying vinyl, naturally switched over to the CD, sold or threw away their old vinyl and aren’t completely happy with streaming today. A look at the vinyl section of a large Berlin store proves the shelves are full of reissues of old titles, mostly from major labels. Record players can be purchased right at the checkout. There’s nothing wrong with that – music should be sold in the formats that meet customer demand. But there are indicators that the majors are actively trying to secure substantial vinyl production capacity at the remaining pressing plants. How? By paying in advance. There might even be presses completely reserved for certain companies. That techno EP can wait – Led Zeppelin can’t. In the course of researching this article, we received emails that confirm such requests by the majors.
If this is the case – and the pressing plants are denying it – it would mean that the majors are attempting to buy their way into an industry that they played a significant role in destroying. And they are attempting once again to starve the indie labels, the very labels that never gave up on vinyl. On Record Store Day, when the shops are full of specially-made vinyl records and customers wait in line for these limited editions, the pressing plants have already had many hard weeks of work leading up to it. Who knows how many machines were quickly patched-up in lieu of a proper repair? Nobody has time to take a breath. The next releases are already on standby, and the machines continue to run at a furious pace.
Music On The Bones
The latest Fugitive Waves podcast discusses the fascinating history of Soviet ‘bone records’:
Before the availability of the tape recorder and during the 1950s, when vinyl was scarce, ingenious Russians began recording banned bootlegged jazz, boogie woogie and rock ‘n’ roll on exposed X-ray film salvaged from hospital waste bins and archives.
“They would cut the X-ray into a crude circle with manicure scissors and use a cigarette to burn a hole,” says author Anya von Bremzen. “You’d have Elvis on the lungs, Duke Ellington on Aunt Masha’s brain scan — forbidden Western music captured on the interiors of Soviet citizens.”
Listen to the podcast here:
These records only played on a single side, and the quality was low, but they were extremely cheap: A single disc only cost about one ruble on the black market, as opposed to five rubles for a two sided-disc. And it was subversive. According to Artemy Troitsky’s 1987 book Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia, they often contained surprises for the listener: “Let’s say, a few seconds of American rock’n’roll, then a mocking voice in Russian asking: “So, thought you’d take a listen to the latest sounds, eh?” followed by a few choice epithets addressed to fans of stylish rhythms, then silence.”
Soon, an entire underground network of bone music record distributors popped up, called the roentgenizdat, or X-Ray press. Analogous to the samizdat that reproduced censored publications across the Soviet bloc, the roentgenizdat was soon distributing millions of Western records.
Here’s a great TED Talk on X-ray bone records where Stephen Coates asks the question, “What would you risk for the sake of music?”:
And here’s a lively debate over on Discogs.com on whether bone records should be included and cataloged on the site.
The First New Vinyl Pressing Machine In Thirty Years
German-based company Newbilt Machinery GmbH & Co. is now shipping the first, newly-manufactured vinyl pressing machine in more than 30 years. According to details from Plastics News (PN), Newbilt has partnered with Connecticut-based Record Products of America, a company specialized in creating vinyl molds, with prices starting at $100,000.
The Newbit machine could seriously ease vinyl production deals, and spark a new surge in vinyl growth. “The new Newbilt vinyl record press machines are rolling off the assembly line now,” the company declared in a recently-mailed invite to their Alsdorf-based manufacturing facility.
The Newbilt manufacturing philosophy is to essentially an update on an old n’ reliable workhorse design with a variety of modern-day upgrades, including an electronic control system and a hydraulic power supply. “Newbilt is based upon historically proven designs that work,” the company explains. “The antiquated electronic, hydraulic and control systems have been replaced with up-to-date ones to vastly improve productivity and reliability.”
Vinyl Sales May Be Rising, But Have You Seen Who’s Buying It?
Bill Brewster for The Guardian:
The demographic of the average vinyl buyer is very clear. It’s a middle-aged man, possibly bearded (OK, definitely bearded); kids have probably left home, no longer on speaking terms with wife, spare bedroom has become a shrine to his teenage love: the Floyd (their album The Endless River was the best-selling vinyl LP in 2014). Essentially it’s me.
Vinyl will never again reach the 1970s and 80s heyday. Having reached a nadir in 2007, when vinyl album sales slumped to 205,292, last year they topped 1m. The predictions for 2015 suggest double that. It’s now the craft beer of music formats. But just as craft beer is not the answer to the alarming closure rate of public houses, neither will vinyl save the music industry. It will survive thanks to the network of enthusiastic collectors, indie record labels and DJs – but no thanks to any input from the major labels.
The problem the indies face is that they are being crowded out of the marketplace by the enthusiastic entry of companies like Universal Music Group who are said to have reissued 1,500 different titles on vinyl this year – most of which could be picked up in a charity store for pennies.
Empire Building: Vinyl Edition
[Josey Records managing partners Waric] Cameron and [Luke] Sardello say they approached [vinyl pressing plant owner Stan] Getz about buying A&R in July. They’d known him for years, having run dance-music labels of their own in the mid-1990s; like every local label, they had to get their records pressed at A&R, especially since the CD essentially killed the vinyl industry by the early 1990s and the nearest facility is now in faraway Salina, Kansas.
As recently as five years ago, buying a record-pressing facility might have been considered a dreadful investment unless you also had a time machine to go with it. Yet sales of records continue to climb: According to figures provided by the Recording Industry Association of America, more than 13 million LPs were sold in the U.S. alone in 2014. Numbers haven’t been that high since 1990.
“The business of vinyl is an old business model, and it’s the one that has survived everything,” Sardello says. “Vinyl has survived streaming, and not only has it survived, it’s thrived. It’s up 40 percent each year. So what else is there to detract from it? It’s never been easier to access music, and yet vinyl is as strong as it’s been for the last 25 years.”
At the same time, they will begin opening other Josey Records stores: Cameron says he wants to have six to 10 more outlets in the next two years in “major metropolitan areas,” including San Antonio.
“The thought was always vertical integration,” says Sardello, “We started thinking about bands. We started thinking about a label. We started thinking about a studio. We started thinking about more stores and how we can work with bands and labels and go from pressing your records to distributing our records to putting them in our stores to sending your band on a store tour.”
Kudos to these guys, who I’d met on and off back in my DJ’ing days. The lede buried in the main story, but that I highlight above, is the plan to eventually cover the manufacturing, distribution, and retail stages of releases under the company operation. This is the strategy major labels used to dominate in their heyday, so it’s interesting to see an independent upstart take on similar goals. Of course the elephant in the room is that today’s ‘physical product’ climate is much different (despite comparisons), and the majors themselves no longer follow this process – acquiring equity in streaming services, in hopes to somewhat replicate the traditional food chain, seems to be the current major label modus operandi. So it’s a gusty move to pin such high aspirations on a format with an unpredictable shelf-life … vinyl’s extended perseverance is an optimist’s hope. But, as I join in optimistically rooting for vinyl, I’m also rooting for Josey, and we certainly need more gutsy maneuvers like this in the independent music biz. Rock on.
Amazon Clogs Up Pressing Plants With Most Pointless Reissue Series Ever
FACT:
Reissues make up a fair chunk of the vinyl market, so it’s no surprise that Amazon wants a piece of the action. However, its attempt isn’t a Death Waltz-style endeavour with bespoke artwork and coloured vinyl, it’s a shameless cash-grab that will no doubt clog up more of the world’s already stretched pressing plants.(
*The five reissues up for pre-order are soundtracks for five of the most 80s movies to come out of the 1980s: Dirty Dancing, The Goonies, Top Gun, Footloose and Rocky IV. Great for a Spotify playlist, but probably not worth mining our planet’s precious resources for.
All well and good, and the world is full of unnecessary reissues, but when you realise that all five are available for under £10 on Discogs, the choices are somewhat more mystifying. All five will be available on the 9th October.
It’s been a strong week for wholly necessary soundtrack reissues though, with first Jackie Brown and now The Sopranos getting the wax treatment in the last few days.
Admittedly, that Jackie Brown soundtrack is pretty solid.
It may be a bit elitist to poop on these opposite-of-hip vinyl titles, but it’s hard to argue that there’s any demand for them. They were probably very cheap to license due to pre-existing soundtrack agreements, and Amazon sees this as a potential nostalgia-fueled win. If you have never pressed a record, or haven’t done so in at least a decade, then you may not understand why some are up in arms over this news. Clogged up plants and incredibly slow (or even unpredictable) production times make things very difficult for a by-the-seat-of-one’s-pants independent label. With a limited number of record presses available (previously) any major entry into the production line will have a decelerating impact.
Update: Errol Kolosine comments:
To be fair, this says they are “getting into the vinyl pressing business” – they aren’t, although one can certainly imagine Amazon doing so if it made sense.
Also, these do actually seem like pretty standard soundtrack reissues that are on the reputable Legacy imprint (Sony). Yes, they are only available via Amazon, but maybe that’s because they already surmised that their audience wants this stuff. A little investigation into the track listings of these records reveals pretty quickly who the demographic might be – both ironic and un-ironic.
Can’t Stop the Music: Submerged Turntable Plays Perfectly
*Watching the record swirl in the water is an eerie sight, powerfully evoking visuals of the monster floods we’ve watched wipe out human settlements in epic disaster movies as well as in real life. The knob to control the record player is built into a branch that hangs over the pool. *
New Pressing Plants, Old Vinyl Presses
Anyone who knows about the current record industry knows that vinyl presses are hard to come by. There are a limited number of functional machines on the market, and none are currently in production (at least for the moment, although you will occasionally hear rumors). In order to locate and purchase presses, the founders of Cascade had to go on what Lanning describes as an “epic quest to locate equipment.”
As demand for vinyl continues to increase, old record presses have rapidly been escalating in price. The Cascade crew searched for equipment, while watching their dream of record production sky-rocket in cost. Finally their epic quest led them to Canada where Cascade was able to acquire six presses from the former Rip-V plant. Originally those six presses were used by the Hub-Servall Record Manufacturing Corporation in New Jersey.
However, there were still many challenges ahead, as their “new” presses were 43 years old, and needed considerable maintenance and set-up. Lanning jokes that the presses are “like tanks”; sturdy and well-made, just in need of some TLC. Amazingly, Rainey, Gonsalves, and Lanning were able to convince Dave Miller, one of the original builders who worked on those presses in the early ‘70s, to help with the project. Miller flew out to Oregon in November of 2014 to help with the set-up and repairs.
It’s heartwarming to see new vinyl pressing plants opening up, like Cascade Recording Pressing in Oregon, as profiled here on Discogs. I’ve known that an impediment to opening a new plant is the limited number of working presses available and I’m intrigued by these intricate tales of quest, like searching for the remaining Valyrian swords (Game of Thrones reference, watch out). It’s also nice how the plant aims to serve labels in their region foremost … in a perfect world, every part of the country would have its own pressing plant.
Update: Here‘s a great tale of the discovery of ten record presses in Mexico City. (via Analog Planet)