Vinyl record hunting equipped with smartphone intelligence

There is an annoying trend in second hand record stores. Check out the picture below – I see it quite frequently now: Someone browses the vinyl, makes a pile of records and sets it aside. Then one checks out the records’ prices on Discogs. 

This behaviour has been common for books for a while now, too. There are websites that buy used books for a fixed price, for example Momox in Germany. Usually they pay close to nothing, esp. for paperback books, because these days few people buy used books. But some books are more valuable, and books have the advantage of having a unique ISBN and a scannable bar code on the back. These online buyers have phone apps so you can scan the bar code and the app displays the buying price immediately.
My friends from TRUST Zine have just told me that there now is a record-equivalent to that, an app called MilkCrate which is available for iPhone only at this point. You just input the record info and it will give back the Discogs price. Unfortunately we live in a world where most used record buyers are not buying to listen and own, but to monetize by selling what they find in the stores. To me, this is another factor that takes the fun out of used record shopping.
So it is another factor that has ruined the experience of used record stores gradually in times of the internet:

• A lot of used records are not ending up in stores, but go straight to Ebay or on Discogs in the first place.
• Record stores have instore online access and price records according to Discogs asking prices. Mostly the record owner will choose the highest price, effectively making the record too expensive and hard to sell. This drives up prices and makes cheap finds more unlikely. It also means that the owner will sit on the records for a long time and as a potential buyer you keep seeing the same records for a long time.
• In times of smartphones the record buyers in the store also have access to the same online databases to check out prices.

This means the knowledge about music and vinyl records moves from the individual into the cloud. Good deals get constantly harder to find and if they happen, someone with a smartphone is likely to discover it faster than you. To flip it on ebay. It does not take much to find the good deal if you can use cloud intelligence. 

This is a serious blow to the fun of record hunting and crate digging I think. 

Small techno vinyl labels share same fate as punk vinyl labels

Check out this very interesting piece that appeared in Groove Magazine in February. Sorry, it's all in German. But if you have been to Germany and drove in a car, for example while touring, you know what Stau or Vinylstau is. 

This article deals with "Techno in the times of a vinyl comeback" and analyses the current state of affairs, especially major labels reissuing back titles on vinyl like crazy. The article's angle is from a small techno label’s point of view. I think the analysis is really spot-on, and the discussion below is interesting, too. I agree with most points being made.

I remember that in the 90s, the few remaining vinyl pressing plants survived to a large extent because of techno – or dance vinyl maxis in general. They had a considerable volume of 12” and pretty decent vinyl runs. In this environment, small punk vinyl labels like HeartFirst could get their releases done efficiently – at good quality and fair prices within a reasonable time. So it was mainly dance music and indie labels that kept the pressing plants in operation in the 90s. Besides cross-financing by CD production I guess.

Also mastering studios were keeping busy cutting dance vinyl, or even dubplates. Generally, it makes little difference if you produce a small run of vinyl, of 100 or 5000 – you need to cut a lacquer as the first step of the production process. I remember going to my mastering studio in the 90s (Studio-Nord-Bremen) and the last client before me had been the rather famous DJ Sven Väth.

We have come a long way since these days, and most dance DJs have switched from vinyl to digital. The much commented Laptop DJ, in private circles even the dreaded Youtube DJ. But some techno labels today still want to release vinyl because they stick to their roots.

The Groove magazine article points out:

• Today only the most dedicated techno underground labels are still doing vinyl
• They are competing with the majors for pressing plant capacities for their reissues
• The print runs for techno vinyl are way down – the same as for most punk vinyl labels
• The sound quality of record pressing has gone down, or is, at best, much less predictable than before
• The delivery times, even for small press runs, is extremely long – three months is no exception, sometimes more if it is around Record Store Day or Christmas

So I guess the harsh market realities for small labels today are the same, independent of musical genre. And all this in the times of the much commented "vinyl comeback".

Turning 13 pieces of scrap metal into record presses (again)

Cries of joy by vinyl enthusiasts were heard around the internet when articles appeared about 13 abandoned vinyl presses that had resurfaced in Chicago recently. They were acquired by Quality Record Pressings (QRP) n Kansas and shipped there. As you know if you’ve read this blog before, every report about a pressing plant needs a statement about their sizes. Because size really does matter in this business I guess. So the article goes on to state that Quality Record Pressings thus “has just doubled its capacity to become one of the USA’s largest vinyl pressing plants.” Oh well.

Check out the video above about the operation so far. You can find a more down to earth article than the Fact Mag one about the find here on Analog Planet. I really gotta give it to Quality Record Pressings – They got their PR skills alright. They are not in business for long but they have the most videos about vinyl pressing of any company out there on Youtube. The news about the 13 presses spread really fast. In the videos the owner of the plant comes across really nice and dedicated. I just wish the video above spent less time showing cruising forklifts, but more on technical details on how they want to refurbish these pieces of metal trash. At least during the last 60 seconds you can get an impression how the new owners are a little unsure about how many presses they can bring back to life. It will not be all of them because the condition varies a lot and they are different models, too.

So these machines don’t look too great to me and they might need a lot of restoration work to make (some of) them function again. Only then the pressing capacity could indeed double. Also, as the article and the video says, the presses were “last used in the ’90s to produce bootleg 78s for export to India.” Not exactly the top-quality products in a demanding market.

Check out this video about Quality Record Pressings which explains vinyl pressing in general and their operations. Their workflows look very lo-tech to me, but that is not a bad thing in my book. The final result matters. And – just like everyone else, they are mainly doing rereleases of old classics, i.e. Cat Stevens, Jimi Hendrix, Doors, Johnny Cash, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. But that's better than 78s of bootlegs of Beatles and Beach Boys that the presses churned out during their Chicago days in the 90s. Also note that in this video during the tour of the place you can see a PLASTMATICS LP and poster as well as a DEATH IN JUNE cover on the wall. So I guess they also do some punk vinyl at Quality Record Pressings.