I went down to my local record store to buy a record, a new Blue Note Tone Poet release featuring Blue Mitchell called Down With It.
The price of the record was $69.99. I nearly shit my pants.
I really like Blue Mitchell, but …
I get that record prices, like everything else, have increased. But 70 bucks for a single record? On what planet is that reasonable? I have 76 Tone Poets. The last one I bought, just a few weeks ago, cost $44.95. A quick glance at Amazon right now shows some Tone Poets - I'm talking about single records - reaching $70-plus!
It's hard to understand. Or maybe it's me. I come from a time when four loaves of bread could be had for a dollar. A record was $4.99, sometimes $5.99. Double LPs were maybe $7.99.
I was making $6.33 an hour building railway cars. I don't know why I remember that but I do. It was an awful job to be sure, but a record only cost about 45 minutes of my labour - a fair trade. Now, even though I get paid much more for my labour, I have to measure the cost of a record in hours! WTF?
So why are records suddenly so expensive? Is it greed on behalf of the distributors? There's some second hand evidence this might be the case, at least here in Canada. A friend of mine who owns a record store told me the Canadian Tone Poet distributor suddenly slapped a $10-per-record increase on all records a few months back.
That's what sucks about supply and demand. One has to hope nobody else wants you want. Right now, too many people want great records and the demand is higher than it's ever been. Only a few pressing plants that have the capacity to handle large record runs still exist, and typical lead times can stretch to a year or longer. To combat this, some labels - Mobile Fidelity is the latest - have opened their own pressing facilities. Jack White, of White Stripes fame, wants more labels to do the same and has started calling attention to the issue. He knows what he's talking about because he invested a considerable amount of his own money to build a pressing facility to accommodate his Third Man Record label's pressings. Some of the other, smaller labels appear to have been listening. VMP (Vinyl Me, Please) has recently announced plans to build their own facility, and I imagine other labels will follow suit. Will all this bring down prices? Hopefully. But - probably not.
There's a lot of cost factors at play in the production of a record: mastering expertise, the cost of vinyl, superior packaging, artist residuals … quality doesn't come cheap, but it shouldn't come this expensive. Even the shitty European copyright troll labels - DOL, WaxTime and the like (who don't have to worry about artist residuals or paying a Joe Harley his due) - are pricing their much more inferior records similarly. They used to be priced far cheaper than "legitimate" records - under $20 originally - but they now seem to have decided to cash in on the latest vinyl trend by pricing their inferior products at the same price point as the much better quality pressings. They do seem to be spending a bit of money on packaging, but they're really just baiting the hook. Like all other knock offs, European copyright troll records have to at least look like the real thing.
In the case of the Tone Poets I understand why the cost of manufacture is high. But $70? Come on!
I'm so glad I bought most of my records decades before this nonsense began. I think I'm gonna tap out of the ring.
I went down to my local record store to buy a record, a new Blue Note Tone Poet release featuring Blue Mitchell called Down With It.
The price of the record was $69.99. I nearly shit my pants.
I really like Blue Mitchell, but …
I get that record prices, like everything else, have increased. But 70 bucks for a single record? On what planet is that reasonable? I have 76 Tone Poets. The last one I bought, just a few weeks ago, cost $44.95. A quick glance at Amazon right now shows some Tone Poets - I'm talking about single records - reaching $70-plus!
It's hard to understand. Or maybe it's me. I come from a time when four loaves of bread could be had for a dollar. A record was $4.99, sometimes $5.99. Double LPs were maybe $7.99.
I was making $6.33 an hour building railway cars. I don't know why I remember that but I do. It was an awful job to be sure, but a record only cost about 45 minutes of my labour - a fair trade. Now, even though I get paid much more for my labour, I have to measure the cost of a record in hours! WTF?
So why are records suddenly so expensive? Is it greed on behalf of the distributors? There's some second hand evidence this might be the case, at least here in Canada. A friend of mine who owns a record store told me the Canadian Tone Poet distributor suddenly slapped a $10-per-record increase on all records a few months back.
That's what sucks about supply and demand. One has to hope nobody else wants you want. Right now, too many people want great records and the demand is higher than it's ever been. Only a few pressing plants that have the capacity to handle large record runs still exist, and typical lead times can stretch to a year or longer. To combat this, some labels - Mobile Fidelity is the latest - have opened their own pressing facilities. Jack White, of White Stripes fame, wants more labels to do the same and has started calling attention to the issue. He knows what he's talking about because he invested a considerable amount of his own money to build a pressing facility to accommodate his Third Man Record label's pressings. Some of the other, smaller labels appear to have been listening. VMP (Vinyl Me, Please) has recently announced plans to build their own facility, and I imagine other labels will follow suit. Will all this bring down prices? Hopefully. But - probably not.
There's a lot of cost factors at play in the production of a record: mastering expertise, the cost of vinyl, superior packaging, artist residuals … quality doesn't come cheap, but it shouldn't come this expensive. Even the shitty European copyright troll labels - DOL, WaxTime and the like (who don't have to worry about artist residuals or paying a Joe Harley his due) - are pricing their much more inferior records similarly. They used to be priced far cheaper than "legitimate" records - under $20 originally - but they now seem to have decided to cash in on the latest vinyl trend by pricing their inferior products at the same price point as the much better quality pressings. They do seem to be spending a bit of money on packaging, but they're really just baiting the hook. Like all other knock offs, European copyright troll records have to at least look like the real thing.
In the case of the Tone Poets I understand why the cost of manufacture is high. But $70? Come on!
I'm so glad I bought most of my records decades before this nonsense began. I think I'm gonna tap out of the ring.
