Losing interest in vinyl, there I said it!

I have to say after all these years of loyalty to vinyl, I am rapidly losing interest in it. I can't believe I am saying this!

I was in town recently and I had three LPs in mind to purchase....

Dave Rawlings - Poor Dave's Almanack
Sonny Clark Trio - The 1960 Time Sessions
Willy Watson - Folk Singer

I walked away emptyhanded... WHY you might ask!

The reason is very simple the price, to buy the three LPs would have cost me €110 (about $128) and I am just not prepared to pay that amount any more.

Typical of the record companies they are killing the goose that laid the golden egg for a second time.

I am a vinyl addict, a vinyl nerd, call me what you will, but an idiot is not of them.

JG

 

I find prices of new records +/- stable for last couple years....

 

Not sure you need to buy expensive new records to have a big interest in vinyl

I have a ton of old ones accumulated over the many years since I was a kid, and buy a select group of new ones, maybe 20 per year, but most of those new ones are relatively inexpensive, mostly modern artists on indie labels. But yea, I can see what you mean, I'd get tired of paying that much for new records too.

 

I get it, having grown up with vinyl i don't have any great fascination with it.....its not holy........you can get a nice DAC/player which does quite well. Prices for vinyl are really nuts too.

That said, i still buy it, and you are nuts if you don't get that David Rawlings record on vinyl! man it sounds so good!

 

On the Steve Hoffman Board... *gasps* how dare you?!

 

If I come upon something where I would actually like to own it on vinyl, I'll seek it out - newer releases, original pressings, reissues.

But my days of stopping into the record shop to browse and maybe buy something spur-of-the-moment are over. I did that a lot for years. I've now got a lot of records, so if I can't find something to listen to, that's on me, not my collection.

For me, acquiring vinyl is more fun when it's intentional, not out of boredom or keeping up with a hobby (vinyl for vinyl's sake).

 

Yeah, this. I got a few new records for Xmas and splurged some of my extra cash on some presents for myself, but I get a lot more satisfaction when I find four used records for ten bucks like I did last night. Unless any of them is a lot more trashed than they seemed in the store, I'll get as much musical pleasure out of any of them as I would out of a $25 reissue.

 

I appreciate the OP's frustration.

The cost of new records is going up, a lot. And often the quality of the pressings is going the other way.

Prices in the used market are rising as well, again in no relation to the condition of the albums.

I've adjusted my LP buying to must-have titles now, and check sites like this to get a sense of the quality of the pressing before I dig into my wallet.

On the used front I check out record swaps. In my experience the prices at these events are more reasonable.

I have also started buying CDs again. If you have a good spinner they can sound fine.

The Dave Rawlings album is great on CD.

 

Exactly. I pay about $15 - $20 for new LP's and look for sale items and markdowns, and almost always use a B&N coupon. If there's an album that I want and it's over $30, I wait until I can buy it cheaper. Pretty much the same as anything else. And I almost never buy three albums at once, I just don't have that kind of spending money. I buy one thing at a time and enjoy it, I've always done that.

Anyway, "vinyl" isn't a thing to be "loyal" to, it's just another music format. If you can get the music you want cheaper in another format and it's satisfying to you, that's terrific. I always try to go for the cheapest option with the most potential for satisfaction.

 

It's inflation. Inflation calculator tells me that an $8 vinyl record from 1980 costs $23.63 today.

 

Have you given up on gas for your car, too?

 

I love the lp's I have, but can't see the point for new stuff of paying more for it than a cd.

 

That analogy makes no sense. It's not like you can switch from petrol to some other option which costs a quarter the price and is (to many people) a perfectly fine alternative. (And probably won't have to be returned to the garage for being faulty.)

 

There’s lots of new and used reasonable priced vinyl available. Yes there are high priced exceptions

 

Exactly. For several years I was in hard core acquisition mode but now that I’ve built a nice collection I’m sort of done with that side of the hobby (at least for now!)

 

It makes sense as there is something called inflation.

 

15.00/20.00 is a good price.
I won't quibble if that's the cost for new vinyl. I'll pay more for 45RPM LPs.

 

I understand the OP frustration. I rarely buy new vinyl anymore due to prices and quality. And I have a rule that I verify on this forum the sound quality before I buy any new vinyl .

Jim

 

Buy used. Use the spin clean. Enjoy the bliss.

 

You can pick up recently released/reissued vinyl releases, usually within a week or so of release, if not the next day...

Buy used.

 

If you live in L.A. I guess it's given for an abundance of used vinyl.

 

I wish I could. It's ridiculous that we don't have alternate fuels as the norm already, and that we don't have far better public transportation that utilizes alternate fuels, where you don't have to drive yourself anywhere if you don't want to--but you can still get anywhere you'd like to go. It's also ridiculous that self-driving vehicles aren't the norm already. All of this stuff should have been developed years ago.

 

I agree with @Mazzy -- lot's of stuff out there if there any record stores near you. I walked into Waterloo the other day and left with 8 or 10 records, some of them quite good. I think the cost was under $60 bucks. Obviously, the trick is to go during the weekdays, and depending on the store, when they replenish the bins, but before they are picked over.
There are an awful lot of decent reissues of old hard rock, prog, etc. that I've been buying- the original pressings are astronomically priced- virtually all of these are pulled from digital files, but many sound good.
I've also started to buy older CD issues-- never cared for CD-- precisely because some of the original vinyl is so expensive, in the hundreds if not thousands of dollars now.
I typically buy between the extremes- cheap or expensive b/c it is rare or desirable older copy. A steady diet of $50 new reissues can get costly fast.
There are also some tried and true dealers who will let me know when they get things that are likely to appeal to me- and they accumulate them, and ship them in larger lots. So, it's a more expensive outlay than one or two records, but you get a dozen or more in a box and it keeps you amused.
The other thing to think about if you've been accumulating records for a while is to take a voyage through your stacks- my bet is, you have records you haven't listened to in years. I always find something- 'oh, I forgot I had that,' or 'wow, I haven't listened to that in years.'
I've gone through periods where I didn't buy much; and others where I'm binging mad.
Not unusual for me. I've even had periods where I didn't have a system set up. And then I get something going again, and marvel at how I lived without it. It's not a bad life....

 

I just ran the cost through an inflation calculator and got the same result. Guess we're just getting old. Mowing a yard got me $10.00 = new record for me back in 1980.

 

Thats over $40 a record. I wouldn't pay that either unless they were multiple album sets or 45 RPM remasters. You need to find a better place to shop.