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Author Topic: Vinyl record sales increase John Walsh Film God Posts: 2490 From: Connecticut, USA, Earth, Milky Way Registered: Oct 1999 posted 06-10-2008 09:22 AM                     Retailers giving vinyl records another spin Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved 1:11 a.m. EDT, Tue June 10, 2008 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."  |  IP: Logged Leo Enticknap Film God Posts: 7474 From: Loma Linda, CA Registered: Jul 2000 posted 06-10-2008 10:22 AM                        As a die hard vinyl (and shellac) collector I've noticed that not only are more new records being pressed (even of the classical and jazz titles I tend to go for), but the price of decent second-hand stuff is shooting up. Five years ago LPs in almost new condition were virtually being given away by second-hand shops: similar titles go for a fiver or more now. Part of this is the eBay phenomenon (in particular, places like charity shops are now looking at what records go for on the site and then pricing theirs accordingly), but a lot of it is that people are finally realising that the CD (and successor digital file formats) wasn't designed for sound quality: it was designed for convenience. Playing a record is more of a faff, but a well mastered and pressed LP played on a decent turntable and cartridge quite simply sounds better. Some of the recently reissued Blue Note titles on 12" 45rpm vinyl are fantastic (though at $50 a pop, not cheap), and even classical labels which had previously abandoned vinyl completely such as Deutsche Grammophon and EMI have brought a few titles back into their catalogues. This must be about the first example of a consumer media technology which became almost totally obsolete and was then resurrected, if only to a limited extent.  |  IP: Logged Damien Taylor Master Film Handler Posts: 493 From: Perth, Western Australia Registered: Apr 2007 posted 06-10-2008 10:39 AM                     Tell me about it Leo. I'm only 21 now, but if I hadn't started collecting at 15 I would never be able to do it now. I remember when I started people used to leave boxes of the things on the verge for bulk refuse. I now jokingly refer to those times as the golden era of collecting, when records were treated as a burden rather than an asset. The charity shop markups are just crazy, the way they price it, they just have no idea. Collecting used to be fun because it was so cheap. I don't think I want to be part of a world where Mrs. Mills is worth $3. (No offense to the honky-tonk piano fans, before you all come out of the woodwork) One thing i'm pretty sure that will remain constant is the 78's. You can't pay people to take a lot of the 78's out there.  |  IP: Logged David Stambaugh Film God Posts: 4021 From: Eugene, Oregon Registered: Jan 2002 posted 06-10-2008 11:13 AM                        The "Turntable Junkies" thread on the Afterlife forum has this info about Fred Meyer posted. Last week I went to the Fred Meyer in west Eugene to check it out. In the electronics section, where they have racks and racks of CDs and DVDs on display, if you look really hard, way over in a corner, there's a single cardboard box of records sitting on a shelf. There's a plain white sheet of paper taped to the front of the box with the words "VINYL RECORDS" printed on it in big block letters. I guess that's is in case nobody knows what they are. I went nuts and bought albums by R.E.M., Foo Fighters, and Metallica. At the checkout stand, the cashier looked at me like they used to do in the early days of DVDs when I'd buy a widescreen version, when most people bought fullscreen, like "Are you sure you really want to buy these?" There's something satisfying about taking a vinyl record, every one of which is flawed in some way, and extracting good listenable sound from it.  |  IP: Logged Monte L Fullmer Film God Posts: 8367 From: Nampa, Idaho, USA Registered: Nov 2004 posted 06-10-2008 01:21 PM                     quote: Damien Taylor The charity shop markups are just crazy, the way they price it, they just have no idea I can agree here. A few years ago, the majority of all the thrift stores in this area would charge a quarter to a dollar for their vinyl. Now, half of them are shooting the price up to a discount $2.49 to almost $6.95 level - levels when vinyl was being sold as new in record stores back in the '60s. This really makes it hard to find cheap vinyl and good bargains, esp when the store DO markup vinyl that has been used as "Fido Frisbees" since they, as above, don't know what they are doing, or really know what they got. They just go by what eBay is doing on their auctions and by word of mouth.  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 06-10-2008 01:32 PM                        I am tempted to buy the vinyl version of some great album, just for the fun of opening the plastic and cracking the gatefold for the first time again. I don't really know why that was such a cool experience EVERY time, but the kids today are missing out.  |  IP: Logged Bill Enos Film God Posts: 2081 From: Richmond, Virginia, USA Registered: Apr 2000 posted 06-10-2008 01:38 PM                     I didn't like CDs when the first came out, then I realized that they had bottom end and high end and clarity than vinyl is not capable of. Not to mention noise after the second or third play. Only good thing I can say about LPs is that the cardboard jackets are more durable than jewel cases and there is more room for pics an information.  |  IP: Logged John Walsh Film God Posts: 2490 From: Connecticut, USA, Earth, Milky Way Registered: Oct 1999 posted 06-10-2008 02:32 PM                     I tend to agree with Bill; while I do like LP's, the low cost but high quality of CD's is hard to deny. You need a lot more money to get that warm LP sound. Sorry about posting a topic already covered! There's getting to be so much info on FT, it's hard to keep track of.  |  IP: Logged Tim Reed Better Projection Pays Posts: 5246 From: Northampton, PA Registered: Sep 1999 posted 06-10-2008 03:44 PM                       Wow, I thought they stopped pressing discs years ago!  |  IP: Logged Joe Redifer You need a beating today Posts: 12859 From: Denver, Colorado Registered: May 99 posted 06-10-2008 04:38 PM                        quote: Mike Blakesley I am tempted to buy the vinyl version of some great album, just for the fun of opening the plastic and cracking the gatefold for the first time again. I don't really know why that was such a cool experience EVERY time, but the kids today are missing out. Bullshit! How can that even compare with peeling off shrinkwrap, then attempting to peel off those seals and then those magnetic "security devices" from the inside of the jewel case?  |  IP: Logged Allison Parsons Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 630 From: East Peoria, IL Registered: Oct 2004 posted 06-10-2008 05:33 PM                        Here's a picture of most of our new LP's at the store I work at. We have close to 600. That doesn't include the used stuff. We have everything from The Monkee's reissues to the 300 soundtrack. It's amazing whats all on new vinyl anymore. I just got the Mulholland Drive soundtrack on vinyl!  |  IP: Logged Dick Vaughan Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1032 From: Bradford, West Yorkshire, UK Registered: Jul 2000 posted 06-10-2008 05:54 PM                        Monkees reissues on vinyl !! Now at last I can replace my 40 year old Monkees Headquarters and More of The Monkees  |  IP: Logged Allison Parsons Jedi Master Film Handler Posts: 630 From: East Peoria, IL Registered: Oct 2004 posted 06-10-2008 06:13 PM                        Piscies... and More are the two we have in. All on Sundazed vinyl. Not sure if they've released the others yet. If for some reason anyone is hunting for anything special, let me know and I can send you a link to our Ebay store. Everything we have in here is up on ebay. Not sure if the mods will let me post a link to it or not.  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 06-10-2008 06:43 PM                        So Allison, do you find that vinyl buyers typically have good turntables or are they more into the big cool packaging?  |  IP: Logged Claude S. Ayakawa Film God Posts: 2738 From: Waipahu, Hawaii, USA Registered: Aug 2002 posted 06-10-2008 06:55 PM                        I have been collecting Lp's since I was in high school and have invested a lot of money collecting them until cd's took over. Most of my vinyl records are classical. I still have most of my collection which include about 45 complete operas and among them is my favorite , Georg Solti's recording of the complete DER RING DES NIBELUGEN by Richard Wagner. The collection also include every piece of music Ludwig Van Beethoven wrote in a collection released by Deutche Grammophon Gellellschaft (DGG). Another favorite in my collection is a set of Beethoven Symphonies recorded by Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony on the original RCA Victor Red Seal label released when the maestro was still alive and recording music in the mid fifties. I bought this set along with many others with school lunch money I had saved. It's no wonder I was a very skinny kid when I used food money for music. I never told my mother I was doing this. Since I am very busy now with my work and listen to music only on my iPod Touch, I have not listened to any of the music in my Lp library since the early days of cds. I still have my Thorns turn table with a Shure SME arm with a V15 cartridge and hope I can sit down one day and listen to some of my favorite vinyl records -Claude  |  IP: Logged

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