[Dixielandjazz] Resurgence of Vinyl

Sun Aug 31 15:13:21 PDT 2008

This is a discussion list.  

To:  DJML and musicians and serious jazzfans list

From:  Norman Vickers, Pensacola

>From NYTimes Sunday 8-31-08

Hope some of you will find this of interest.  I still have lots of LPs which
I occasionally play on my turntable. Have equipment to transfer to
audio-cassette or CD if necessary.  Mostly I just listen when the mood
strikes me.

High end vinyl generally costs more than CDs, I read.  I'm not a trader in
that market.

  _____  

August 31, 2008

Another Spin for Vinyl 

By ALEX WILLIAMS
<http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?ppds=bylL&v1=ALEX%20WILLIAMS&fdq=1996
0101&td=sysdate&sort=newest&ac=ALEX%20WILLIAMS&inline=nyt-per> 

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
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/recordi
ng_industry_association_of_america/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  Industry
Association of America. 

But shipments jumped about 37 percent in 2007, to nearly 1.3 million
records. Three years ago Warner Bros.
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/warner_bros_entertain
ment_inc/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  Records returned to the format when it
opened becausesoundmatters.com <http://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
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/w/wilco/i
ndex.html?inline=nyt-org>  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
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/b/the_bea
ch_boys/index.html?inline=nyt-org> , are classic rock leviathans aimed at
nostalgic baby boomers. But many are albums by contemporary artists, like
Radiohead
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/r/radiohe
ad/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  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
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/m/metalli
ca/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  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
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/new_yor
k_university/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  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
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/jimi_hendrix/i
ndex.html?inline=nyt-per>  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
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/miley_cyrus/in
dex.html?inline=nyt-per> , Nas, Black Sabbath
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/b/black_s
abbath/index.html?inline=nyt-org> , John Coltrane
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/c/john_coltrane/
index.html?inline=nyt-per>  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." 

--End--