Around 20 years go I started on a never ending journey of trying to catalog, or at least rationally store, the CDs that I have in my house. I concentrated on CDs because that’s actually fairly tractable: you can rip them into iTunes/Apple Music and then give them a unique serial number. With LPs you can’t really do this, so I didn’t even bother trying.
About ten years ago, having cataloged a few hundred disks I got bored and gave up, reasoning that everything was either in the download or streaming catalog anyway, so I’d probably end up throwing away all the CDs.
Alas this has not come to pass. First, the streaming services are kind of a shitty way to collect music. Second, a surprising amount of stuff is not available for download, or for some reason the downloadable version of the music ends up being wrong in various ways. I’ve seen:
Bad liner notes, if the liner notes exist at all.
Downloads with missing music.
Downloads with track breaks or random dropouts where there such things should not have happened.
Downloads with tracks completely mislabeled in some way.
So over the last ten years I have found myself still buying the occasional collections of physical media. This is especially true if a CD (or set of CDs) costs much much less than the comparable download, which happens a lot these days.
The result of all of this was that my house started to fill with the discarded husks of all these CDs, and if for some reason I needed to find one for reference the task was starting to become impossible. So I re-started the cataloging project which had the unexpected side effect of me using discogs much more than before to verify which releases of what music I had bought when. But also I found myself replacing the occasional mis-produced download with no liner notes with the actual CDs to re-rip. And so on.
But, if you are buying CDs on discogs you will inevitably end up also buying vinyl there. And thus we come to my subject today.
These days vinyl appears to be the only actual artifact of music that anyone can sell at any level of margin of profitability. People will buy records now for $30 or more that cost $8 per disk in the 80s and 90s, which I guess given inflation is about right. The new records are usually better quality heavy vinyl too, with heavier sleeves and higher quality printing.
As I am only human, who am I to be able to resist such things. In fact while I am skeptical that vinyl will save the industry from a revenue standpoint I am all for it when it comes to providing me with a nice artifact with which to mark my musical tastes. CDs, as I have remarked before, are a terrible product for that. CDs carry music just fine, but everything else about them and their packaging is a soul-less black hole that is completely devoid of any artistic or emotional connection.
So if people can make vinyl LPs and sell them for $30 to $60, I say go for it. After all, one cannot own too many different masterings of the classic Coltrane albums (Blue Train man, Blue Train).
But of course this sort of thing can run into pitfalls.
Today I went to a new-ish record store in Pittsburgh. It is called “Rosie’s Records” and is in the Lawrenceville neighborhood in town. I pawed through the record bins a bit. I avoided the temptation to buy a mono copy of the Miles Davis record Round About Midnight since I had just re-bought all that stuff on CD. “Dodged a bullet,” I thought to myself.
In another part of the store I saw the recent 35th anniversary re-pressing of the first Tracy Chapman record. That would be a nice thing to have, so I put it in my bag. Then in another bin I saw a heavy vinyl re-issue of the now classic B-52s album Cosmic Thing. That also seemed like a good thing to get.
I happily paid for my picks and carefully put them in the car to drive home. About 10min into the drive I realized that I had probably bought Cosmic Thing in 1989 when it came out. Back then it was thought of as a bit of pop sellout on behalf of the until-then beloved punk band. But whatever, I always liked that Love Shack song.
So I got home and went over to the 5 crates where all the records are and scanned the spines. Sure enough, there was Cosmic Thing. A bit further down the pile of records in “C” was also the familiar brown record cover of Tracy Chapman, which I must have also bought back in 1988/89 because the local radio station where I lived then played the hell out of that record. Two for two.
Finally, to maximize my embarrassment I noticed on the way to the records in the “C” pile that I also owned an album by Count Basie called Sixteen Men Swinging. This was odd for two reasons.
Why was it filed in the “B” pile?
I had just bought an album by Count Basie called Sixteen Men Swinging on discogs to fill out an order that I made a couple of weeks ago because I felt bad spending $10 shipping on a single $5 record (this record is a story for another time).
So, we go from two for two to three for three.
At least I’m consistent.