The record collector is a joke. He is abusive to his gimp and I've only been there twice. I live 3 blocks away but was rubbed the wrong way (noayo).
Dude doesn't know his blues so he constantly underprices that genre. But everything else he will price whatever he thinks he can squeeze out of you. He's always grumpy and mad at people who don't spend $200+... Which is me
This is very true and that is why I have never felt like new vinyl is a good investment.
And new vinyl wholesale prices.... HIGHWAY FUCKING ROBBERY.
Seems to take at least 10 years before one can gauge this theory. So could be true or it might not be. Hard to figure.
A lot of recent 45s have jumped up in price. Maybe because of their limited availability. I was offered $100 AUS for Speedometer's version of Beyonce's 'Work It Out' on 45 & that is like less than 2 yrs old. 500 pressed.
We have local hip hop records that were released 2/3 years ago that are already worth 10/20 times their price. The limited runs drive up the price.
One crew recently saw their album go for almost $400 2nd hand. It probably took them 30 sales of the original to equal that price now. If they had sat on a box they'd probably have enough to put out their next album. It wasn't an anomaly. Plenty of people want it. Thing is, they never saw any money from their label anywy. The irony. Non-hip hop label/people rorted them.
Another crew saw their album get sent back from another store's dead stock (on other side of the country) after 3 years to then be sold in another store in Sydney almost immediately for $80.
This is very true and that is why I have never felt like new vinyl is a good investment.
And new vinyl wholesale prices.... HIGHWAY FUCKING ROBBERY.
Seems to take at least 10 years before one can gauge this theory. So could be true or it might not be. Hard to figure.
A lot of recent 45s have jumped up in price. Maybe because of their limited availability. I was offered $100 AUS for Speedometer's version of Beyonce's 'Work It Out' on 45 & that is like less than 2 yrs old. 500 pressed.
We have local hip hop records that were released 2/3 years ago that are already worth 10/20 times their price. The limited runs drive up the price.
One crew recently saw their album go for almost $400 2nd hand. It probably took them 30 sales of the original to equal that price now. If they had sat on a box they'd probably have enough to put out their next album. It wasn't an anomaly. Plenty of people want it. Thing is, they never saw any money from their label anywy. The irony. Non-hip hop label/people rorted them.
Another crew saw their album get sent back from another store's dead stock (on other side of the country) after 3 years to then be sold in another store in Sydney almost immediately for $80.
I wasn't talking about buying new vinyl as an investment toward future value, I was talking about buying new vinyl in my shop for resale, not a good investment when you're only making $5 on a $10 investment and you can't move more than 4 or 5 copies of the thing.
I try to buy stock of records I like, but buying a box of every title that comes out is a good way to go broke quick.
Hasn't this been happening since Ipods started takin' off? I cant seem to pry my neighbor from his Fania/Latin collection.
Yeah, well, I managed to pry my neighbor off her collection of such gems as various Barbra Streisand albums, the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, two (that's right biatch, TWO) copies of the West Side Story soundtrack, doubles of the Camelot soundtrack (Goulet up in this mofo), some Barry Manilow, other such heat like that. That's the kind of heat *my* neighbors have on vinyl. It's like my own personal Goodwill smorgasbord.
you cali dudes are a crybabies, try being in kentucky--hit the yard sales and fleas.
There we go. I am sure if I was in Seattle, Portland, or L.A., I would be complaining like everyone else here. But my method in finding records? No method, just look.
Like a lot of you, I look for many different reasons, whether it's to discover music, fill my collection, find weird and trippy samples, or solely for resale.
When I'm in a store, I know what I'm getting into, the whole "value" and "demand" thing. But I can turn around and say fuck it. That's not going to stop me from looking, yet if it's worth something to me, and I have enough, I'll buy it. But it's all about the church bazaars. 100 LP's in a slightly soiled box for $10? Yeah, I'll take it.
Think about it though, record collecting as a hobby (and really any collecting hobby) is self contained, it's not like an article in "Rolling Stone" will drastically change anything, other than letting people know that "those old beat up records might be worth more than you think." Think of the Amoeba article in "Rolling Stone" a few years ago, or something in the Sunday paper. It's the difference between any of us and those who watch "Antique Roadshow" hoping that Tom Jones album may be worth $15,000.
I've got three friends lined up. It all started with this girl asking me to rip her granparents records for a christmas gift and I could keep the records
My friends dad has a good folk collection I want to ask him for doubles but It won't happen
It also may give rise to more and more folks just dropping records off to goodwill.
That is the hope.
Hasn't this been happening since Ipods started takin' off? I cant seem to pry my neighbor from his Fania/Latin collection.
Ipods haven't really affected record sales/drop offs but it's pretty much killed the used CD market from a seller's point of view. Market is way oversaturated right now. We've got some used CD titles you never used to see and they just sit here collecting dust. I've always said and thought that vinyl will have a much longer shelf-life than CD's in the end. Long live wax!
I've got three friends lined up. It all started with this girl asking me to rip her granparents records for a christmas gift and I could keep the records
My friends dad has a good folk collection I want to ask him for doubles but It won't happen
Hell yeah.
I want to post a flyer in my building - "Will by records" There's mad old folks here that I know have some old NYC Latin joints.
Most of the time I've found that friends' parents are more than willing to let you take their old records off their hands. I mean, a lot of the time people just have them stashed away in the attic or basement or boxes in the garage. Now, 99% of what people's parents have is total crap, but it's that 1% that makes it worth it. I've never come upon anything really but I've hit a few things that are decent. Back in the day when I was just getting into collecting I was hyped because a friend's dad had "Age Of Electronicus" by Dick Hyman and he let me have it. Not many people's parents have crazy shit like that though. Like I said, mostly I run across Streisand, Manilow...or if the parents were into rock it's 70's commons like Boston, Kansas, etc.
Some say that in the future ??? the near future ??? there will be no records, and so no record stores of any kind to sell them. All your music will arrive sucked through a cable or beamed from a satellite or by some means not yet imagined. (Pill form, possibly.) You will never need to leave the house. In fact, that pretty much has already happened.
So maybe, in the long view, it doesn't matter all that much that after more than 30 years Rhino Records ??? the Westside store, not the quirky label it spawned, which itself has been subsumed into a vast corporate sea ??? is going out of business, with a parking lot sale this weekend to cash out what's left of the inventory. Aron's Records, in Hollywood, also is set to shut its doors for good sometime next month, after even more years of operation.
Each was, in its day, an institution, the king of its territory, a mecca for music lovers who wouldn't be caught dead in a Tower Records or Virgin Megastore, or anywhere that charged retail. (Though the economy of scale would suggest otherwise, prices have always been lower in the indie stores than in the big chains.)
The trend is national, if not worldwide: There are, by one count, only around half as many independent record stores in the country today as there were 10 years ago. Whether it's the slump in album sales (down 7% last year, according to SoundScan), or an increase in the downloading of tracks (up 150%), or competition from online shopping, or the various technological and cultural shifts that have driven the youth of America to different distractions, it's a changing world, and one less inclined to support small businessmen selling music out of (mostly) small rooms.
Some Internet retailers, such as Miles of Music or Forced Exposure, which sell real CDs, or eMusic.com, which sells MP3s, are trying to function as virtual independent record stores. They cater to tastes outside the mainstream, posting lists of "employee favorites" and describing their offerings in knowledgeable, friendly, sometimes cheeky terms; even through the computer screen one senses their engagement. (And many real-world stores, of course, also have a Web presence.)
But Amazon.com, whose clear business plan is to one day sell everything to everybody, has also put significant energy into creating the illusion that its website is just a friendly corner store. It remembers your name if you've shopped there before, says hello when you click in, knows what music you like, and recommends some more.
I know that for some, and not only of the X, Y and Z generations, cyberspace is as authentic a marketplace as any other, but I am old-fashioned enough to want to get out of the house once in a while, into real three-dimensional spaces stocked with things you can see and smell and pick up and turn over to see what they look like on the other side.
Proust had his madeleine, but nothing unlocks the seven volumes of my memory so much as handling some LP I bought when I was 13 or 14 years old. There are those of us for whom music is a fetishistic activity, in the primary meaning of fetish: "an object that is believed to have magical or spiritual powers." Can one fetishize an MP3 file? I haven't been able to yet. (You can fetishize the player, as Apple accountants can attest, but that is a different thing.)
Records Ltd., a storefront operation on Victory Boulevard in Van Nuys, at the end of a 25-minute bike ride, was where I first bought records, and I remember not only the records I bought there but the act of buying them (after the long act of deciding what to buy). Record albums seemed to hold clues to the future, my future, and going to the record store was in some way a first step into a wider world. It was the first place I spent time around ??? not "with" exactly, but around ??? adults who, like the acts whose music I bought, were on my side of the generation gap. I knew they knew things I didn't know yet, but might soon.
Later there were Vinyl Fetish and Bomp and Moby Disc and Texas Records and Bebop and Aron's and Rhino and a place across the street from Hollywood High in a building that's no longer there where I stopped every day on the way home from my first real job. And as I had occasion to travel the country, there were Wax N Facts in Atlanta, Homer's in Omaha, Other Music in New York and Harvard Square, Waterloo in Austin, Reckless Records in San Francisco, Schoolkids in Chapel Hill, Sonic Boom in Seattle (two locations), Millennium Music in Portland, Ore. (ditto), Let It Be in Minneapolis, Third Street Jazz and AKA in Philadelphia, the Record Exchange in Princeton, and others, here or already gone, whose names I can't always recall but whose dimensions remain vivid in my mind.
It's not just record stores, of course, that are losing their independents. Their disappearance comes alongside the death of local television, locally programmed radio and independent bookstores, not to say independent pet stores, barber shops and burger joints.
Notwithstanding an anomaly such as Amoeba, the 800-pound gorilla of indies and a tourist attraction whose fame has spread wide, the independent record store is fundamentally a neighborhood institution, with a neighborhood clientele. They may only stand silently shoulder to shoulder thumbing the racks, but they nevertheless form a kind of club, a community of people who take their music more seriously (sometimes way, way more seriously) than most.
Anyway, it isn't over yet. We may be living in the twilight of the independent record retailer, but there are those who will not go gently into that twilight. There are sellers whose intent is (possibly to their disadvantage) more missionary than mercenary ??? whose staff have a record they want to play you, not merely sell you ??? and buyers who like a place that cares, and who need to look beyond the new big thing or even the next big thing.
You can still find me there among them, going through the bins, still trying to work out my future.
There are those of us for whom music is a fetishistic activity, in the primary meaning of fetish: "an object that is believed to have magical or spiritual powers." Can one fetishize an MP3 file? I haven't been able to yet.
Comments
Seems to take at least 10 years before one can gauge this theory.
So could be true or it might not be. Hard to figure.
A lot of recent 45s have jumped up in price. Maybe because of their limited availability.
I was offered $100 AUS for Speedometer's version of Beyonce's 'Work It Out' on 45 & that is like less than 2 yrs old. 500 pressed.
We have local hip hop records that were released 2/3 years ago that are already worth 10/20 times their price. The limited runs drive up the price.
One crew recently saw their album go for almost $400 2nd hand. It probably took them 30 sales of the original to equal that price now. If they had sat on a box they'd probably have enough to put out their next album. It wasn't an anomaly. Plenty of people want it. Thing is, they never saw any money from their label anywy. The irony. Non-hip hop label/people rorted them.
Another crew saw their album get sent back from another store's dead stock (on other side of the country) after 3 years to then be sold in another store in Sydney almost immediately for $80.
I wasn't talking about buying new vinyl as an investment toward future value, I was talking about buying new vinyl in my shop for resale, not a good investment when you're only making $5 on a $10 investment and you can't move more than 4 or 5 copies of the thing.
I try to buy stock of records I like, but buying a box of every title that comes out is a good way to go broke quick.
That is the hope.
Hasn't this been happening since Ipods started takin' off?
I cant seem to pry my neighbor from his Fania/Latin collection.
Yeah, well, I managed to pry my neighbor off her collection of such gems as various Barbra Streisand albums, the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, two (that's right biatch, TWO) copies of the West Side Story soundtrack, doubles of the Camelot soundtrack (Goulet up in this mofo), some Barry Manilow, other such heat like that. That's the kind of heat *my* neighbors have on vinyl. It's like my own personal Goodwill smorgasbord.
There we go. I am sure if I was in Seattle, Portland, or L.A., I would be complaining like everyone else here. But my method in finding records? No method, just look.
Like a lot of you, I look for many different reasons, whether it's to discover music, fill my collection, find weird and trippy samples, or solely for resale.
When I'm in a store, I know what I'm getting into, the whole "value" and "demand" thing. But I can turn around and say fuck it. That's not going to stop me from looking, yet if it's worth something to me, and I have enough, I'll buy it. But it's all about the church bazaars. 100 LP's in a slightly soiled box for $10? Yeah, I'll take it.
Think about it though, record collecting as a hobby (and really any collecting hobby) is self contained, it's not like an article in "Rolling Stone" will drastically change anything, other than letting people know that "those old beat up records might be worth more than you think." Think of the Amoeba article in "Rolling Stone" a few years ago, or something in the Sunday paper. It's the difference between any of us and those who watch "Antique Roadshow" hoping that Tom Jones album may be worth $15,000.
I've got three friends lined up. It all started with this girl asking me to rip her granparents records for a christmas gift and I could keep the records
My friends dad has a good folk collection I want to ask him for doubles but It won't happen
Ipods haven't really affected record sales/drop offs but it's pretty much killed the used CD market from a seller's point of view. Market is way oversaturated right now. We've got some used CD titles you never used to see and they just sit here collecting dust. I've always said and thought that vinyl will have a much longer shelf-life than CD's in the end. Long live wax!
Hell yeah.
I want to post a flyer in my building - "Will by records"
There's mad old folks here that I know have some old NYC Latin joints.
amen brother!
ps. do you need more mixes?
hollur.
http://www.anythingbutipod.com
By Robert Lloyd, Times Staff Writer
Some say that in the future ??? the near future ??? there will be no records, and so no record stores of any kind to sell them. All your music will arrive sucked through a cable or beamed from a satellite or by some means not yet imagined. (Pill form, possibly.) You will never need to leave the house. In fact, that pretty much has already happened.
So maybe, in the long view, it doesn't matter all that much that after more than 30 years Rhino Records ??? the Westside store, not the quirky label it spawned, which itself has been subsumed into a vast corporate sea ??? is going out of business, with a parking lot sale this weekend to cash out what's left of the inventory. Aron's Records, in Hollywood, also is set to shut its doors for good sometime next month, after even more years of operation.
Each was, in its day, an institution, the king of its territory, a mecca for music lovers who wouldn't be caught dead in a Tower Records or Virgin Megastore, or anywhere that charged retail. (Though the economy of scale would suggest otherwise, prices have always been lower in the indie stores than in the big chains.)
The trend is national, if not worldwide: There are, by one count, only around half as many independent record stores in the country today as there were 10 years ago. Whether it's the slump in album sales (down 7% last year, according to SoundScan), or an increase in the downloading of tracks (up 150%), or competition from online shopping, or the various technological and cultural shifts that have driven the youth of America to different distractions, it's a changing world, and one less inclined to support small businessmen selling music out of (mostly) small rooms.
Some Internet retailers, such as Miles of Music or Forced Exposure, which sell real CDs, or eMusic.com, which sells MP3s, are trying to function as virtual independent record stores. They cater to tastes outside the mainstream, posting lists of "employee favorites" and describing their offerings in knowledgeable, friendly, sometimes cheeky terms; even through the computer screen one senses their engagement. (And many real-world stores, of course, also have a Web presence.)
But Amazon.com, whose clear business plan is to one day sell everything to everybody, has also put significant energy into creating the illusion that its website is just a friendly corner store. It remembers your name if you've shopped there before, says hello when you click in, knows what music you like, and recommends some more.
I know that for some, and not only of the X, Y and Z generations, cyberspace is as authentic a marketplace as any other, but I am old-fashioned enough to want to get out of the house once in a while, into real three-dimensional spaces stocked with things you can see and smell and pick up and turn over to see what they look like on the other side.
Proust had his madeleine, but nothing unlocks the seven volumes of my memory so much as handling some LP I bought when I was 13 or 14 years old. There are those of us for whom music is a fetishistic activity, in the primary meaning of fetish: "an object that is believed to have magical or spiritual powers." Can one fetishize an MP3 file? I haven't been able to yet. (You can fetishize the player, as Apple accountants can attest, but that is a different thing.)
Records Ltd., a storefront operation on Victory Boulevard in Van Nuys, at the end of a 25-minute bike ride, was where I first bought records, and I remember not only the records I bought there but the act of buying them (after the long act of deciding what to buy). Record albums seemed to hold clues to the future, my future, and going to the record store was in some way a first step into a wider world. It was the first place I spent time around ??? not "with" exactly, but around ??? adults who, like the acts whose music I bought, were on my side of the generation gap. I knew they knew things I didn't know yet, but might soon.
Later there were Vinyl Fetish and Bomp and Moby Disc and Texas Records and Bebop and Aron's and Rhino and a place across the street from Hollywood High in a building that's no longer there where I stopped every day on the way home from my first real job. And as I had occasion to travel the country, there were Wax N Facts in Atlanta, Homer's in Omaha, Other Music in New York and Harvard Square, Waterloo in Austin, Reckless Records in San Francisco, Schoolkids in Chapel Hill, Sonic Boom in Seattle (two locations), Millennium Music in Portland, Ore. (ditto), Let It Be in Minneapolis, Third Street Jazz and AKA in Philadelphia, the Record Exchange in Princeton, and others, here or already gone, whose names I can't always recall but whose dimensions remain vivid in my mind.
It's not just record stores, of course, that are losing their independents. Their disappearance comes alongside the death of local television, locally programmed radio and independent bookstores, not to say independent pet stores, barber shops and burger joints.
Notwithstanding an anomaly such as Amoeba, the 800-pound gorilla of indies and a tourist attraction whose fame has spread wide, the independent record store is fundamentally a neighborhood institution, with a neighborhood clientele. They may only stand silently shoulder to shoulder thumbing the racks, but they nevertheless form a kind of club, a community of people who take their music more seriously (sometimes way, way more seriously) than most.
Anyway, it isn't over yet. We may be living in the twilight of the independent record retailer, but there are those who will not go gently into that twilight. There are sellers whose intent is (possibly to their disadvantage) more missionary than mercenary ??? whose staff have a record they want to play you, not merely sell you ??? and buyers who like a place that cares, and who need to look beyond the new big thing or even the next big thing.
You can still find me there among them, going through the bins, still trying to work out my future.