Vinyl Age

CHAPTER 1

Playing the Record Game

As highlighted in our introduction, the internet has revolutionized record collecting. It has simultaneously erased old barriers to access and erected new ones. While reviving vinyl’s relevance, the internet has also turned parts of the record game into a highly speculative stock market where fortune favors the rich. It has superseded the simple world of handwritten want lists and printed price guides and put a complex new system in its place. For both new collectors and those looking to get deeper into records, it’s easier than ever to see what’s out there. But it’s also become more challenging than ever to collect records at the highest level. This chapter will map the new economic and cultural landscape of contemporary record collecting. Using charts drawn from Carolina Soul’s private sales data, I’ll detail the rules of the new record game, the challenges it presents to those looking to play it, and strategies for overcoming these challenges.

A RISE IN PRICES

One glaring effect of the internet on record collecting is a general rise in prices. From Rumours to rare Rex Harley, any given piece of vinyl is probably more expensive now than it would have been in, say, 1995. Although the record’s no longer the dominant music format, interest in vinyl both new and old has undeniably produced a seller’s market. By opening the record archive up to an international buying pool, eBay auctions have tended to redistribute vinyl wealth upward toward the 1 percent and away from everyone else. In turn, this has made rare record collecting more a game of the privileged than ever. As a result, some folks feel priced out, while others have been discouraged from even getting into records in the first place. While less expensive records are still more accessible to the average collector, the rise in record prices across the board has put the squeeze on all but the wealthiest buyers.

At the deepest level, this raises ethical questions about where records are going—both literally and figuratively. Can a system that takes records away from their local owners and puts them in the hands of a minority of rich international collectors possibly be just and fair? What’s more, most valuable records now go to high-income countries like the US, the UK, and Japan, with very few going to countries in Africa or South Asia (see Fig. 2). Wouldn’t it be better if radio stations, museums, schools, and universities could keep record collections whole, rather than the market scattering them around the world? These questions, however, point to structural problems without immediate, quick-fix solutions. They will require large-scale changes by the entire market, maybe even in the structure of capitalism itself. In the meantime, though, the situation is far from hopeless—the record game operates on many levels, and some are more exciting than ever. But if you don’t know the rules of a game, you’re doomed to lose out. And before you can play the record game well, you need to understand how it works—one method is provided below.

TASTE

Knowledge of the record game is necessary both to succeed within it and to go beyond it. Even seemingly negative trends can be played to your advantage. For example, now that rare records have gone up in price, you can flip ones you don’t want in order to buy those you need. As it’s still possible to dig up such valuable records in the vinyl wilds, you can play the speculative game to expand your personal collection. All it takes is a little know-how, a willingness to travel, and an openness to getting your hands dirty.

This is just one example of a theme that I’ll expand upon below: wealth can’t buy taste. The most expensive records are not de facto the best. If you look at the best eBay sale aggregator, Popsike, you can sort completed record auctions by highest price. The records at the top of this list, the ones with the most outrageous price tags, are an aesthetic mixed bag—some are great, some just average, and some actively annoying, while still others are rare souvenirs of no particular musical interest. See Appendix 1.

The same goes for Carolina Soul’s private list of top sellers—a high price is no guarantee of aesthetic quality. For example, compare two of the company’s highest-priced Northern soul auction results: a vinyl promo. Does this mean the Larry Clinton is approximately 3.3 times the record of Saints? Of course not. In fact, I personally find the gliding elegance of “I’ll Let You Slide” superior to Clinton’s work on “She’s Wanted.” Yet the internet—by archiving, organizing, and making sales data publicly available—has seduced many into mistaking a high price for a marker of superior musical quality. This is because, at first glance, a price list seems objective, a way out of the subjective wilds of judgment and evaluation.

But data can’t save us. For example, in the case of the expensive Northern soul 45s above, remember that for any given genre, sales data reflect the taste of a small, wealthy niche audience, numbering only a few hundred people worldwide. It’s far from a value-neutral expression of the vox populi. Given that the buying data reveals only the tendencies and predilections of specific classes of buyers, it’s important to hang on to your own sense of judgment. You can use data as a tool to flip records, as a whetstone to sharpen your own taste, and to find out about music you haven’t heard. But there is no set list of classics to which you must automatically pay obeisance. Record data is fun and useful, but it does not reflect a standard on which to build a canon any more than Rolling Stone’s “500 Greatest Albums of All Time.”

In other words, in the big-data internet era, remember that economic value and aesthetic value are never synonymous. Prices are moot when it comes to all the important questions about a record on its meaning, affective power, and historical significance. Some one-dollar records are amazing, while many expensive ones are dull. In this, as in so many other cases, you cannot trust the “rationality” of the market. Now that the internet has thrown records into a stock exchange, they’ve become subject to a host of irrational crazes and manias worthy of the Dutch tulip trade.

The internet has also put the price of individual records in flux. This means that a record you love can dramatically plummet or jump up in financial value. Take, for example, Ann Sexton’s soul perennial “You’ve Been Gone Too Long,” two of three versions of which have been dropping in dollar value (see Fig. 3). According to Carolina Soul data maven Nate Smith, this is because “the market was spooked for the most sought after version on Impel when in early 2013, quantity surfaced and 14 copies were sold on eBay over the course of just one month. The most common pressing, the Seventy Seven yellow label version, has suffered an even more dramatic decline in value, –50%, because people have been pumping copies onto eBay steadily since the early 2000s.” In response, one might be led subconsciously to reconsider Ann Sexton’s 45 in light of this market revaluation. You might start thinking of “You’ve Been Gone Too Long” as a more “common” sounding record than you once thought, equating its higher quantity with lower quality. But while your experience of listening to Ann Sexton encompasses a complex range of personal associations, thoughts, and feelings, the record’s going rate on eBay is a simple number. On the flip side, when a record rises in value like Eula Cooper’s “Let Our Love Grow Higher” has (see Fig. 4), you may find yourself second-guessing your previous take on the record, straining to hear what others now seem to hear. Or in the case of a record that has maintained a steady value, like the Honey Drippers’ “Impeach the President” (see Fig. 5), you may assume it’s a classic simply because it seems impervious to fluctuations in the market. But you must remember the market is just one source of information, and a narrow and faulty one even in the best of times. Charting prices is essential and a useful research tool if you want to flip records, but resist the temptation to conflate the voice of money with the voice of a record itself, because in reality the two speak different languages.

GAINED VALUE: Equatics “Doin It” (no label)

REISSUE: Now-Again, Feb 2010

RE-PRESS: Jul 2017

LOST VALUE: Milton Wright “Spaced” (Alston)

REISSUE: Jazzman Oct 2008

GAINED VALUE: M’Boom “Re:Percussion” (Strata-East)

REISSUE: Think!, Oct 2012

LOST VALUE: Edge Of Daybreak “Eyes Of Love” (Bohannon’s)

REISSUE: Numero Group, Oct 2015

GAINED VALUE: Stark Reality “Discovers Hoagy Carmichael’s Music Shop” (AJP)

REISSUE: Now-Again, May 2015

LOST VALUE: Brief Encounter “S/T” (Seventy-Seven)

REISSUE: P-Vine, Oct 2010 and Jazzman, Jan 2011

GAINED VALUE: Patterson Twins “Let Me Be Your Lover” (Commercial)

REISSUE: Think!, Sep 2013

LOST VALUE: Freddie Terrell’s Soul Expedition “S/T” (Lefevre Sound)

REISSUE: Jazzman, Jan 2005

GAINED VALUE: Rhythm Machine “S/T” (self-titled Lulu)

REISSUE: Now-Again, Jul 2012

LOST VALUE: Tommy McGee “Positive-Negative” (MTMG)

REISSUE: Numero Group, May 2016

As mentioned in the introduction, reissue labels were the first to capitalize on the internet’s expansion of popular musical horizons. Labels like Now-Again and Numero Group in the US, Jazzman in the UK, and P-Vine in Japan started reissuing records previously known only to “heads” or not at all. Fig. 6 explores the effect of such reissues on the value of original pressings. As you can see, half of the original pressings studied lost some value after their reissue, while the other half saw a rise in value. In other words, it’s unclear whether reissues have an inhibitive or enticing effect on buyers. Whatever the case, it seems clear that reissues and originals can coexist in the marketplace without the risk of one replacing the other.

Just as you shouldn’t take the market as a reflection of universal taste, don’t take reissues as a reflection of the underground’s taste. Take the reissue canon, too, with a grain of salt. Though respected reissue labels have brought many cool records back into wider circulation, their catalogs do not directly reflect the will of the independent music community or of hardcore diggers. What gets reissued is often an accident of copyright, the condition of master tapes, and specific dealings between labels and artists. Musical greatness or historical significance is no automatic guarantee of a prestigious reissue, while a subpar record is sometimes cynically reissued as a “lost classic” just because a deal made financial sense for its reissue label.

NAVIGATING TASTE COMMUNITIES

To establish your taste in records contra the market (including the reissue market), you needn’t go it alone. There are a variety of face-to-face and virtual communities out there, each with its own record canon methods of interpreting and using vinyl. Joining in the life of such communities will help you resist internalizing market prices as your aesthetic values. The internet has spawned a dizzying number of small taste cultures, micro-scenes, and boutique associations focused on particular subgenres. And despite the homogenizing effects of gentrification on culture, local music scenes still exist everywhere. Some are bigger and/or more interesting than others, but all challenge the objectivity of the price system in their practices. Engaging with them will help you learn and clarify your own taste.

In “real life,” find local record stores and determine their genre specialties; find niche clubs and take in their house sound. Tune in to college and community radio stations and/or volunteer there—these are spaces to learn. In Carolina Soul’s area, North Carolina’s Triangle (Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill), each local institution carves up music in a different way. While there’s some overlap, each scene has its own style. The four major independent radio stations—WXDU, WXYC, WHUP, and WKNC—attract different types of DJs and are almost always immediately distinguishable from one another. All their sounds draw heavily from their vinyl music libraries, and each one will expose you to a different vibe. Likewise, each record store in the Triangle has a distinctly different focus. For example, the records in Carolina Soul’s store in Durham skew toward black popular music from the 1950s to the 1980s, while the stock of All Day Records in nearby Carrboro leans heavily toward more contemporary dance and electronic records. Sorry State Records in Raleigh specializes in punk, hardcore, and metal. Local labels like Merge and Paradise of Bachelors put out primarily indie rock and boutique folk, respectively—and so have different canons and record cultures. The more music communities you can find, the more raw material you will have to draw on in order to decide what’s important for you. If you enter into these communities with openness and love, you will find models for new ways of hearing cool records. Not only will it help you find these records, but it’s also genuinely rewarding to make friendships and intellectual connections with people. In communities of friends, people trade and gift records all the time.

If you’re introverted and all this proposed social interaction sounds overwhelming, there’s always online record life. You can use social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) and online message boards (for example, Soul Source for soul and Terminal Boredom for punk), although the latter have somewhat faded in importance in recent years. Facebook has invite-only and public groups (like Now Playing) in which you can trade records, and socialize with other record collectors. Record Instagram is another way to explore new music. While it tends to be a little more braggy than other sites, it’s still a rich research tool. While people come to these groups for all sorts of reasons, and they’re easily infiltrated by what hippies used to call “breadheads,” such communities couldn’t exist without people who find much more in the music than a way to make a buck. After all, despite the boom in prices, the profit margins for records will never equal the outrageous ones of corporations and finance firms.

On the internet, music writing and radio have also been subject to fragmentation and diversification. While older websites like Pitchfork and Rolling Stone sometimes continue to write as if they possess an omniscient grasp of the scene, smaller genre-specific sites and independent streaming radio stations are better sources to learn about new movements and trends. Rather than look to large corporate websites for the key to all mythologies, find ones that connect with you and your community’s particular interests. For example, if you want to dig deeper into contemporary dance and electronic, start reading Resident Advisor. For the history of psych, loner, and generally out-there countercultural music, look into the archives of sites like Perfect Sound Forever and the WFMU blog. There are niche publications online for almost every genre, so just start poking around. Go down YouTube rabbit holes and test out what the algorithm churns up. And maybe above all, listen to independent online radio. Freeform stations like NTS (London and now LA), Red Light Radio (Amsterdam), Intergalactic FM (The Hague), and WFMU (Jersey City) play tons of vinyl, run for twenty-four hours a day, and will expose you to new artists and subgenres hourly if you give them a chance. NTS in particular, because it permanently archives all its shows, is a treasure trove (and where Carolina Soul has had its own show for more than four years now).