sounds of the sea

Somewhat lengthy post, this.

tl;dr – Has vinyl outlived its time?

I got an email this week from a record label I really like, announcing that they were suspending vinyl manufacturing for this year (and possibly permanently) because the economics no longer made sense. That inspired a few thoughts.

Brief autobiography here. I bought my first LP with my own money in 1965. It was Herman’s Hermits On Tour, and it included Henry VIII. I was 9 years old. Three years later, I bought my next record, The White Album. Starting around 1970 I began spending allowance and odd job money on records, rather than comic books, and by 1976 I had amassed a collection of about 150 records. A few things happened that year not worth going into in this space, and I sold or gave away all of them. Spent a few years as a nomad. Started settling back down in the early 80s, and began reacquiring a decent collection. New records sold for about $5 – $6; used vinyl could be found for 50 cents, maybe some extramely collectible pieces for a couple of bucks. Minimum wage was a little less than $3/hr, so even the lowest paid worker could pick up an LP or 2 a month, and even as many as a dozen used records for $10 – $15. Building a decent collection was not out of reach. This time around, I held on to my records. By the late 1990s I probably owned 300 pieces of vinyl.

When my (now) wife sold her house in California in 2000 to move to the east coast to live with me, she also brought a collection of maybe 200 records with her. The early 2000s were a great time for record buyers. People were literally giving away their parents’ collections. Blue Note 1st pressings from 1964 were selling for no more than $10. You could find all kinds of worthwhile and inexpensive records in second hand shops and garage sales. In Durham NC, where I lived between 1993 and 2022, there was only one surviving used record store, and I don’t think they had bought any records in a decade. Between say 1998 and 2005. I probably added another 300 records to my collection.

You know the story from there. Between Napster, the CD Loudness Wars, and the hip factor, vinyl started the journey back to desirability. (The cartoon with the caption “The two things that drew me to vinyl were the expense and inconvenience” skewers the hip factor brilliantly.) The record shows I was attending in 1999, with about 20 other buyers, started getting crowded by 2010. Record stores started opening in town, and some were buying used records. They weren’t paying good money for them, yet, mind you. But that was to come.

By 2012, artists were releasing new music on LP as a matter of course. The handful of pressing plants that had survived the collapse of vinyl were now running at capacity. Mastering engineers who knew vinyl could name their price. Record Store Day was a pretty big deal. I remember one year (2014? 2015?) driving past the shop a few hours before it opened, and there was a line of 75 people waiting to get in.

Markets are funny things. Economists like to tell us that, in the aggregate, markets function rationally. Resources are allocated efficiently, supply and demand meet at a fair price. I’mm not convinced of that.

When vinyl started becoming a more common medium for new music about a dozen years ago, new releases sold for between $11 and, maybe, $15. Supply was constrained black of expertise, lack of manufacturing capacity, inadequate distribution and warehouse capacity. Hell, the CD shops didn’t even have racks to display records in. Today, with a more mature market in place, new records are routinely priced at $30 (roughly 4 hours pay at minimum wage) and the Firestone Christmas records that used to be 10/$1 at the Goodwill at tagged at $5 apiece.

When I started hosting Afterimages on WHUPfm in 2015, I was quickly drawn to playing a lot of ambient music on that show. One of the labels that started releasing music around that time was Past Inside the Present. Really good stuff, too. I’m pretty sure I purchased their entire (at the time, anyway) discography. But here’s a thing about ambient – it’s not really better on vinyl. 20 minute album sides and surface noise, even on the best pressings and best systems, aren’t the ideal way to spend a rainy afternoon in your best chair reading with zaké and 36 playing on the stereo.

So, this email from them generated some mixed feelings on my part:

“For PITP and fellow labels in our ambient community, alongside indie labels at large, escalating production expenses, notably in vinyl production, have posed significant challenges. Recent updates from our pressing plants reveal staggering cost hikes, despite our best efforts to negotiate and maintain quality standards. Regrettably, we couldn’t find a sustainable solution.

This marks the fifth consecutive year of price hikes from our pressing partners, surpassing our expectations due to skyrocketing raw material costs—a trend mirrored across industries. Coupled with escalating postal service fees, including a hefty 30%-50% rise in record mailer and other packaging costs, the situation is daunting.

Given these circumstances, we’ve made the difficult decision to halt vinyl production for the remainder of the year. Inflation and steep production costs have emerged victorious, albeit breaking our hearts.”

I’m just wondering how much higher retail LP prices have to get before casual fans, who have only recently started buying vinyl again, decide that paying 3x the price for a record over a CD, or 5x the price of a download, or as much for 1 record as 6 months of Spotify, leave the market altogether. Most labels have been carefully managing supply (limited colour vinyl pressing of 100 – 500 pieces are relatively common; even open pressings of 10,000 pieces or fewer are the norm for popular releases), but it won’t take much of a drop in demand to destroy the vinyl market that’s rebuilt itself over the past 2 decades.

I should add that, when I moved across the ocean to Ireland 18 months ago, cost and space constraints required me to sell roughly 40% of my vinyl collection, close to 800 pieces. I got a decent enough price for them, but certainly not enough to consider replacing them now that I’m settled. In fact, I’ve bought nothing but downloads over the past year or so. I’m not sure what it will take to get me buying LPs again

Anyway, thanks for reading this far. If you’re a maker of music and dealing with these issues, I’m interested in hearing your thoughts.