October 31st, 2007
Response to Wired’s “Vinyl Maybe Be Final Nail in CD’s Coffin”
Wired recently published a piece called, “Vinyl May Be Final Nail in CD’s Coffin”. It is an interesting look at Vinyl’s recent rise in popularity which has become a hot topic amongst various publications. Since this piece ran on Monday, I have had at least a dozen links to the story forwarded to me. I would like to offer my own thoughts on the post.
I run a vinyl-only online store and vinyl imprint called Vinyl Collective. I started this in August of 2006 when I had a strong feeling that a focused vinyl site and community might receive a favorable response. I had been releasing vinyl through my label, Suburban Home, since the very beginning and as a music fan, I have long loved the format. I have released vinyl for bands like Every Time I Die, Minus the Bear, Fear Before the March of Flames, Portugal the Man, Drag the River, Tim Barry, and I have upcoming records coming out from Sparta, the Playing Favorites, Minus the Bear, Every Time I Die, Norma Jean, Poison the Well, Portugal the Man, and more.
As I type this on the final day of October, I can attest to the fact that Vinyl’s momentum is on the rise. Our sales for the month doubled what we did in September and September was previously our best month. We have been so busy that we have decided to hire a part-timer to help out with orders, a decision we were very careful in making as we recently downsized our operations in May of this year due to our declining revenue from CD sales.
As much as I can back up Wired’s claim in a rise in vinyl sales, it is in no way the final nail in CD’s coffin. I offer the following data with a release we licensed for vinyl, Minus the Bear’s “Planet of Ice”. As of last week, the album has soundscanned 31,000 copies (digital and CD sales combined); we have sold nearly 3,000 copies of the double LP version of the album. I expect this album to soundscan around 100,000 copies by this time next year and IF we continue to repress the album on vinyl, it might be possible that we could do 10,000 copies on wax. I might also add that when speaking of Soundscan (they were quoted in the Wired piece as saying, “Our numbers, at least, don’t really point to a resurgence,”), they have no idea what they are talking about. I mentioned selling nearly 3,000 copies of “Planet of Ice” and you know how many were registered through Soundscan? Zero! I made the decision not to put a barcode on the record and have made no attempts to sell it to chain stores. Chain stores don’t know what to do with vinyl and I would rather indie stores make money off of my products. Nearly all of the records have been sold through the Vinyl Collective website or through mom and pop retailers, many of which don’t even report to Soundscan. Soundscan is an antiquated gauge of sales and only scratches the surface with regards to vinyl sales. Labels like No Idea, Fat Wreck, Death Wish, Bridge 9, Asbestos, and so many more sell a bulk of their vinyl pressings directly to customers and not one of them report those sales to soundscan.
I would like to offer my opinion on why I think vinyl sales are on the rise. In this absolutely fucked up, fast paced world we live in, there is something therapeutic about physically picking up a needle, placing it on Side A of a record, and sitting back enjoying the music that comes out of your speakers. CDs and digital has made music disposable and of little to no value and in most cases, it has become background noise for our crazy lives. With vinyl, you have something real, something tangible, something with beautiful artwork, something that sounds absolutely amazing. Vinyl makes music special, unique, and well, you actually feel a part of it. It has become so easy to record a band’s music and to release it to the world as a CD or digitally that music has become so incredibly oversaturated. No music fan can possibly keep up with even 1 percent of the new music that comes out on a weekly basis. With vinyl, it costs so much more and is such a bigger process that it almost weeds out much of the bullshit. When someone decides to release something on wax, you are taking a very big risk with a much smaller payoff. The price it cost us to press the first pressing of 2,000 copies of Minus the Bear’s “Planet of Ice”, I could have pressed 12,000 CDs. And speaking of “Planet of Ice”, nothing beats the day I received the first pressing. Take a look for yourself (photos of 1st press and test pressings). The packaging is beautiful; as of this writing we have pressed it on 6 different colors and there are collectors out there who have purchased all 6. Vinyl puts the art back into music and allows bands to offer their fans their albums exactly how they had envisioned it. It gets fans excited and gives them something to be passionate about. I mean, who out there actually collects mp3s? Its like saying you collect air. With vinyl, you are getting something in some cases only 100 other people have. It is the ultimate homage to your favorite band to own the rarest pressing of a release or as some of our customers do, collect every single color of every single pressing of a release. Look at our message board and you will see people posting all day and night discussing new releases, wishlists for records, photos of their records, pretty much everything and anything about vinyl (nearly 30,000 posts so far). There is even a thread about the Wired piece. I can go on and on about why I love vinyl, but it will never replace CD as the format of choice because people actually have to make an effort to buy, collect, and listen to vinyl. But you know what? That is ok with me. I don’t have any visions of grandeur when it comes to my thoughts on the vinyl format. I just hope to carve out my own little niche and hope that I can do well enough to put dinner on the table and to provide for my family.
I love the fact that people are talking about vinyl and know that pieces like the one on Wired’s website will create more enthusiasm about this beloved format. I just hope people don’t get the idea that there are riches to be had putting out vinyl and that this is music’s next big trend. I’d like to close with the following LL Cool J lyric, Don’t Call It a Comeback, I’ve Been Here for Years.
Written by Virgil Dickerson
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On October 31st, 2007 at 8:17 am
Tom said:
you know i can totally understand and appreciate how people like vinyl because its more of an experience, bigger artwork, supposedly better sound, etc, but when you say stuff like:
“as of this writing we have pressed it on 6 different colors and there are collectors out there who have purchased all 6.”
“With vinyl, you are getting something in some cases only 100 other people have. It is the ultimate homage to your favorite band to own the rarest pressing of a release or as some of our customers do,”
this is exactly what i hate about the vinyl resurgence. sub pop basically came up with the idea of multiple colors, and they have always said it was nothing more than a SCAM to get people to buy more copies. instead of propagating elitism and exuberant prices on ebay, why cant vinyl labels press single colors and focus more on making the product something people feel they can actually listen to without losing value and more importantly get it out to more people who want it and dont want to pay/trade out the ass to do so.
On October 31st, 2007 at 8:32 am
Virgil Dickerson said:
tom, i hear what you are saying. I didn’t establish the idea of multiple colors and it has become a necessary part of vinyl collecting. I guess by the same reasoning, you could say that shows that sell out should be put into bigger venues so that everyone gets a ticket, but in certain situations, people are going to have to miss out on a show or get less than ideal tickets.
If labels were to press records on single colors with nothing distinguishing pressings, there would be little to separate record buying from CD purchases and at this point, there really is nothing special about purchasing a CD. Sure, it an be elitist when certain individuals madly collect everything, but this is the same idea that fuels coin collecting, sports cards, stamp collecting, and any other form of collecting.
When digital music has made it effortless to have millions of copies of songs and releases, I find it exciting to know that certain records have extremely limited pressings.
but i see your point and realize that vinyl collecting is not for everyone.
On October 31st, 2007 at 11:34 am
Captain Wrong said:
Actually, I think you both make excellent points.
Here’s my take: having been a long time (25 years) collector, I see the recent uptick in new releases not as part of some movement, but as a bit of a trend. I think a lot of it has to do with the lavish packaging and colored vinyl of the Southern Lord/Hydra Head variety. I don’t mind that, because it’s probably helping a few good labels stay in the black, and that’s a-ok to me.
I think the impact of this on CDs or digital anything is nill for all the reasons you mentioned.
Y’know, I could swear I remember this “back to vinyl” movement way back in the grunge years about 10 years ago. I remember laughing at people buying Pearl Jam LPs with no way to play them. I have to wonder if we’re not seeing some of that same thing now.
One other thing, aside from the “I have this and you don’t” appeal, I think there’s also the audiophile snob appeal. I’ve been in too many places where some one allegedly golden ears enough to prefer “warm” vinyl over digital treats me to their stereo and the turntable is frankly a toy. There’s no way someone can honestly tell me they prefer the sound of worn out vinyl on a rinky dink turntable with a trashed out stylus to anything digital, yet I’ve had too many people try to convince me of this. There’s still this conventional wisdom that analog is better than digital and while sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. And far too many people who think they are buying vinyl for the sound quality wouldn’t know what to look for in a good turntable or how to set one up (or even that it would need set up) if their life depended on it.
Sorry for the rant. I got nothing against records, but too many record buyers are insufferable assholes. :)
On October 31st, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Gonz said:
i love buying wax. its something i got into when i was younger just because there were albums i wanted that were vinyl only then it kind of grew from there. too bad i dont have tons fo expendiable cash i would spend so much at vinyl collective
On October 31st, 2007 at 9:03 pm
Wells Tipley said:
Wells from ICON here. I saw the Wired post and was glad to see Virgil’s response and the comments here. It’s definitely an interesting topic, and one of particular concern to me, as I’m in the business of making little shiny plastic discs - and not big black wax ones.
Over at ICON, our CD sales (we do a bunch of other stuff too) are keeping pace with last year, and in a lot of months we’re actually seeing a lot of growth in our CDs sales.
What is interesting though is where those sales are coming from. If you look at Q3 07 vs. Q3 06 - our runs of 5000 are down considerably. But in its place, we’re seeing an increase in 1000 runs - and we are now offering 500 runs, which have been a big seller.
Another thing driving our CD growth, is a wider variety of customers coming into the fold. We’re seeing labels maybe pressing fewer discs per run, but we’re working with more labels.
This could be due to us working hard and going after a lot of work, but it also may be what I’ve heard called the “last man standing” idea.
It goes like this: Manufacturers and brokers anticipate a downturn, and leave the market. As that happens, the manufacturers and brokers left, pick up their business and are cushioned from the downturn… this keeps happening until you have only a few companies left standing - and doing quite well without all the competition.
It’s actually what happened with vinyl way back when… leaving us with handful of pressing plants we all use today.
So, we’re not sweating the “death of CDs” all that hard. We do right by our clients, and we do awesome work. That’ll keep us around.
We’re not stupid either though, since the beginning, we’ve always tried to offer ancillary services to our clients… with one of the ideas behind it being that people won’t always need CDs.
So, we offer audio mastering, DVD authoring, tee shirts, and now stuff like Drop Cards and Digital Distribution. One thing we don’t offer though is vinyl! This idea has been floated around a few times since we began the company a few years back.
It’s definitely not for a lack of love: Fat Rich, our sales guy, is mailordering old 7″es all the time, and runs Parts Unknown Records, an active label putting out a lot of vinyl. I’m typing this post in a room full of white 7″ boxes and put out 8 7″es in a row in the 90s before giving into releasing CDs as well.
There are a few reasons I’ve decided to stay away from vinyl at ICON. Before the real increase in vinyl sales that we’re having nowadays, it was our reputation. We make a lot of CDs for a lot of people. The last thing I wanted to do was stake our reputation, and risk our CD sales on the possibility of screwing up a few low-margin vinyl brokering jobs.
As the volume went up on people pressing vinyl, it was considered again. But, still, the idea of brokering vinyl never felt right for us. First, it’s not like CDs, where plants don’t want to deal direct with customers. The vinyl plants have all been dealing direct for years and are set up to do so. What value am I adding for our customers to the process? And secondly, most of the service sucks at these vinyl plants, which means I’d be passing on shitty service to my customers. No way.
But really, my opinion (and it’s just that) is that I think the future of vinyl is tied to the future of CDs. So, hedging ICON’s bets with vinyl doesn’t really make sense to me. If digital downloads are going to all-but bury physical media, vinyl will go down with that ship. Sure, people will still press it, just as they have since CDs buried vinyl all those years ago. And there will still be the few people making it and buying like the past 20 years.
But what I think we’re seeing with the surge lately of vinyl is this… shit is crazy. everything is all churned up. so people are doing stuff different. Some people are embracing legit digital downloads in a big way. Other people are passionate about illegal downloading. Tons of people are finding out about music through social networks. And still other people, are being drawn to what’s missing from all that stuff: the intimacy physical product. And if that’s what you’re drawn to, you’re not going to the CD, you’re going to vinyl.
Aw jeez, I wrote a lot. Sorry.
See ya,
Wells
On November 1st, 2007 at 8:13 am
Jordan Pastepunk said:
Great post Wells. Thanks for the insight into the current state of your business. Have bands you’ve worked with taken to the Dropcards and the like?
On November 1st, 2007 at 11:04 am
Wells Tipley said:
Jordan,
The dropcards thing is actually looking pretty promising. We’ve sold 2 orders for them this week (really the first full week of having them on the site). We did a 20k unit order and a 2,500 unit order.
Also, when I sent out the newsletter we do, the most clicked link on there was the article about dropcards.
Cool!
Wells
On November 1st, 2007 at 12:02 pm
Ken Cheppaikode said:
wow, I am out of touch. I had no idea that Minus The Bear are that popular.
On November 5th, 2007 at 8:08 am
A Few Mostly Music Morning Links » resist - cleveland design said:
[…] Indie HQ has a great response to Wired’s article on vinyl. I mentioned selling nearly 3,000 copies of “Planet of Ice” and you know how many were registered through Soundscan? Zero! I made the decision not to put a barcode on the record and have made no attempts to sell it to chain stores. Chain stores don’t know what to do with vinyl and I would rather indie stores make money off of my products. Nearly all of the records have been sold through the Vinyl Collective website or through mom and pop retailers, many of which don’t even report to Soundscan. […]
On November 6th, 2007 at 1:45 am
Vil Vodka said:
What I have come up with after reading the Wired article (as well as the Hypebot article about the emerging music middle class and the Seattle Times article about indie artists struggling in the digital era) is that the landscape of selling recorded works of indie music is fucked. Let me outline the three major formats to sell recorded music and tell you how I (someone who is trying to grow my relatively new company) see where they stand and co-relate with the other formats.
1. VINYL. We agree that vinyl is the premier format. It sounds better and holds a far greater aesthetic value. The problem is that, although it is growing, 90% of the potential music buyers have no idea this format still exists. And by the time everyone gets the memo, it could possibly be considered a tired trend. Is vinyl really stable enough to build a new company around?
2. MP3s. We all agree that mp3s is the lower tier format. It sounds the worse, it holds no re-sale value, and is the easiest to dispose of. In a perfect world, mp3s would just be available for free to everyone as a means of sampling music before you purchase the more premier products of CDs and vinyl. The problem is that the world’s fastest growing music store (ITUNES) sells these disposable poor-quality files for 99 cents a pop. Therefore, bands and indie labels everywhere are signing on with CDBABY, Tunecore, IODA, and The Orchard to have their music be among the iTunes catalog. If iTunes is destined to be the world’s biggest music store, can a new record company afford to not offer mp3 files designed to sell? Can they afford to give digital music away in hopes to sell vinyl to a fraction of the downloaders willing to pay the premium?
3. CDs. CDs are now considered a cliché and antiquated format. But by who? Some hip columnists? Wall Street? And maybe they will be right sooner than later. The problem is that CDs they still account for about 75% of total music sales worldwide by some accounts. For the same reason Soundscan’s methods over-inflate the sales of CDs compared to vinyl, it could also deflate the true landscape since indie bands are selling thousands of CDs each week at merch tables around the world. So, can a new record company really afford to dismiss the CD as a passing format? And let’s suppose you make a decision to release only vinyl with a side note to your customers that CDs are passé. Can you really afford to send a possible “if you still collect CDs you may not be hip enough to buy our brand” message to your prospects? Especially in this era of so many choices?
What I have learned from the Music 2.0 era is that what can be sold can also be given away. So is the trick knowing what your potential customers expect for free vs. what they will actually pay for? Or is the trick convincing your potential customers that what they can have for free is worth paying for?
Vil Vodka
Vodka Tonic Media
On March 26th, 2008 at 11:04 am
How To Press Up a Vinyl Single and Add Instant Kudos to Your Release - MusicBizHacks.com said:
[…] Return of the Record: Vinyl Sales on the Increase (Amoeba.com) Amazon Vinyl Store (Amazon.com) Teens Not Buying CD’s Anymore? (Exclam.ca) Hard to Find Records (HTFR.com) Vinyl Gets its Groove Back (MIT via Time.com) pdf file. Slashdot response Vinyl Maybe Final Nail in CD’s Coffin (Wired.com) Digg response IndieHQ response Putting a New Spin on Vinyl Records (NPR) How to Reissue a Record (Classic Records) The Making Of Vinyl (Random Good Stuff) Vinyl vs. iPod (The Huffington Post) The CD is Dead… Long Live the New CD ? (LAist) The End Of the Music Biz As We Know It (Forester Research) The Inevitable March of Recorded Music Towards Free (Techcrunch) Share This! These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]
On April 1st, 2008 at 2:48 pm
Physical Music Distribution: How And Where? - MusicbizHacks.com said:
[…] Why Do People Buy Records? (MatadorRecords.com) Find Music Distribution (About.com) IFPI Publishes Digital Music Report 2008 (IFPI) 28pg PDF Vinyl Roundup (Donewaiting.com) Coalition of Independent Music Stores (CimsMusic.com) Music Industry Statistics (Wikipedia) The Vinyl Frontier (Test Industries) Response to Wired’s “Vinyl May be Final Nail in CD’s Coffin”(IndieHQ) USB Turntables Raise Vinyl From the Dead (Straight.com) Share This! These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. […]