Jan 12 2007
..and what’s the deal with.. vinyl releases?
Los Campesinos!
Sky Larkin
Kate Nash
The Indelicates
Johnny Foreigner
What do all of these artists have in common? It isn’t that they are all great, even if that is indeed the case. It’s that I am a big fan of all of them and yet I don’t own a single thing that they have released. Why not? Because all of their releases are on vinyl.
Technically Los Campesinos!, Sky Larkin and Kate Nash haven’t actually released anything yet, but in the coming weeks they will all release debut singles. All of these will be on the 7″ format. I don’t know a great deal about how the industry works on a financial level, but can someone explain to me exactly why this is the case? Surely a CD is far cheaper to produce than vinyl, and surely more people have access to CD players than to record players. So what possible reason is there for cutting out a chunk of the market?
You could argue that there is always a digital alternative as most of these songs will made available as downloads at the same time. I’m sorry though, but the day I pay £1 for a DRM infested piece of crap from iTunes will be the day that I’m done with music. It isn’t an elitist “I want a tangiable product” thing, however nice that is. I understand that for small bands digital distribution is a fantastic thing, and would support it, if only I could do whatever I wanted with the songs I’d paid for on whatever devices I choose to.
All of which leaves me with no legal means with which to obtain releases from the above artists. This essentially forces my hand into downloading copies, which really doesn’t help anybody. It’s actually getting to the point where I’m considering getting a basic record player (and whatever I’d need to rip them to mp3) just to be able to get hold of these releases. Which all seems a bit silly in this day and age.
So can anyone explain this to me? Is there a good reason for the upsurge in vinyl releases? Am I missing out on something spectacular?
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7″ singles are my favorite format ever. theyre so great.
But.. why?
Pointless nostalgia. People prefer poorer quality recordings (and decide to call it “warmth”)
Plus walking home from the shops with a CD in an HMV bag looks lame. You will never get laid. Walking home with an lp in an obscure indie-music-shop bag makes you look cool. Females will worship you for your god-like taste in music. Chances are you will bump into Natalie Portman on the way home. She will decide she now prefers lame geek boys, and invite you out to coffee. Later you can fuck to the sound of your impeccable vinyl choice. Cue end credits.
Fuck. I’m getting me a record player.
Dunno if it applies to these bands but theres an upsurge of vinyl sales because of superior quality, not poorer quality. These days you get better quality from vinyl than CDs. Due to the “Noise Wars” they compress the audio on CDs to make it more agressive for a first listen but it looses alot of quality. You don’t notice it as much unless you listen to both. I have CD and vinyl of a few thing, using Broken Social Scene for an example the sound is much clearer on the Vinyl version of the album than on the CD.
I know there is the “vinyl is of higher quality” argument, and I don’t know enough to give an opinion one way or the other.
Even if it is though, it still seems strange to not release a CD version and thus end up losing sales. I don’t think the reason can be because of quality because if it is, why are the songs available on iTunes? They would be as “inferior” as the CD ones.
So it’s all rather baffling to me.
Hello,
yes, you’re right in most ways - can’t speak for the others (on your list - not THE others - not that I can speak for them either) but we (The Indelicates) released our debut single on vinyl for the following reasons:
It being on a very small label we only had funds available to do a single pressing/packaging print run. The minimum order for it to be worthwhile is 500 copies, any less and the bulk price goes up too much. This order has to be in one format only and actually works out about the same for CD as vinyl. Either way you can’t do 250/250 or some other arrangement as the bulk discount applies to single product runs only.
Given this choice and the relatively small number of copies, we decided to go with the 7″ because we were assured that lots of indie clubs/radio stations wouldn’t play CDs and demanded vinyl. Also, not being very famous, a lot of of our market is quite collector-y and prefers records. There was also a general sense that it was the done thing to release an indie debut in that format - which isn’t a very good reason at all, really, but made sense at the time - as well as a slightly embarrassing degree of vanity being exercised, in that we kind of wanted a nice black record with us on to look at lovingly and put on the mantelpiece.
Having made that decision, and unable to have CDs made as well, we put it on iTunes because if you do it through CDbaby, it doesn’t cost very much and is, supposedly, made available on a variety of download sites. I also dislike the way iTunes restricts access to stuff that you own, but, as you can always burn a CD then reimport the tracks as mp3s we thought it would be a good way for people to get access to the files and then illegally fileshare them - thus supplying people without record players or iTunes with the music anyway. I’ve had the mp3s on soulseek since they came out anyway…
So that’s why we did it, and rubbish reasons they were too. Our next release, which is technically only coming out in Germany - but available from our record company by mail order anyway - IS on CD, so that should be better.
Hope that helps, :)
Simon Indelicate
All I know is, if you buy the single now, it will be worth ten times the amount in the future. And the fact it is vinyl makes it sound even more valuable to the people who only just caught on to the fact that ‘this band’ are amazing. It’s history, so Vinyl treats it as such..
If my band were to ever release a first single, I’d like it to be on vinyl, I’d find it a greater thing to treasure than the same song on CD.
i think that if you like a song, you should support the artist and buy it.
Really? Even if you have no means to play said song?
Simon what film is that then?
It may be that these artists want to reach their core audience, who are buying vinyl. Yes, vinyl is “coming back”. Truth is, it never went away and probably never will. Learn why in my ebook:
“The Fascinating Hobby Of Vinyl Record Collecting” which is available at my website:
http://www.collectingvinylrecords.com
Hiren - Garden State, vaguely.
Robert - I have no problem with vinyl in itself, and if people want to buy their music on it, that’s fine. The “core audience” thing is just created elitism. I’m not allowed to be part of that audience just because I don’t own a record player? I’d happily buy music from these artists, but they (or their labels) are restricting my access to it. It all seems rather self-defeating to me.
Simon (The Indelicate one, not the regular one) - Sorry it’s taken so long for your post to appear here. For some reason my filter thought it was spam and sent it to the special section I rarely check. No idea why it did that. You must be rather bot like or something.
Thank you for taking the time to explain the vinyl reasoning, and being in one the bands I brought up in the first place, I really can’t argue with what you’ve said. It’s interesting to hear how it all works from the artists point of view, and it does expose things I was unaware of.
The main thing there that I find a little odd is the bit about radio stations and clubs demanding vinyl. That seems incredibly archaic, as I would have expected most, if not all, to have at least moved onto CD, even if they weren’t entirely digital, by now.
That’s a very cool stance on the downloading thing too. I hadn’t actually considered that you could burn them to CD and then rip them back off again, so that’s handy to know for the future. If I’m honest, I just searched Singing Fish for We Hate The Kids and it popped right up, so I was reasonanbly happy.
Glad to hear that the next one is on CD though, and I’ll certainly be first in line to order one once they become available. Looking forward to seeing you guys at the Command House in a couple of weeks too!
Thanks again.
my God you know two simons how scary is that!!
If you count people posting comments like this as “knowing”, I actually know many more Simons.
Only one Hiren though.
I know 2 Hirens.
Aside from the financial/business label reasons for producing vinyl over CD for me it comes down to the fact that Vinyl looks and feels so sexy (ours is blue) and there’s something lovely about its tactile nature that’s lost with CDs. Also, they sound a lot better (honest, it’s all in the Digital/analogue conversion). Also, if it has nice artwork you can stick it on your wall, which you wouldn’t do with a CD.
Since the broadband era begun I’ve changed my buying habits to buying Vinyl copies of things, then downloading the mp3s - then I have something I can listen to, and something I can hold, look at, make condensation on, use as a black mirror etc etc. the Possibilites are endless.
For us, we wanted to have something out there that we were proud of so we went the whole hog and went down the Heavyweight, coloured route so it probably did end up costing more to produce cds. However, if we don’t sell them we get to keep them, so…
itunes is rubbish as well, I discovered emusic recently which has no DRM and higher quality mp3 encoding. our single will be out on others apart from itunes, don’t know what exactly yet but it will be. from MONDAY.
in the meantime, I say preorder the 7″ from recordstore.co.uk
Ta,
Doug Sky Larkin
x
Hey, we are that chaps that released the Johnny Foreigner single and will be releasing a new single (yip on 7″ again) in march/april.
For me vinyl singles are so much better than CD singles, they look and feel so much better and if the artwork is done well they become more of a art form rather than just a single (the next Johnny Foreigner single will have 3D artwork!)
With being in a band as well to me the ultimate thing to have released would be a 7″ single and I hope that the bands feel the same.
Surprisingly making a vinyl single is not that difficult, yeah its not as easy as banging out a few CDRs on your home PC and selling them but if your are going to get them made professionaly then its just the same, its more expensive but there is just a thing about vinyl, plus in some cases a limited run of vinyl sells a lot better than CD’s
If you dont have a record player and you want a CD copy of a single I dont see a problem with the band burning you a copy or even once the single has sold out them allowing it to be downloaded for free, this obviously depends on the size the label but if they are relativly small then I dont see why not.
ps sorry for the plugs!