The record is one of many currently being sold by 'depakh7' - who looks to be one of those very special Japanese dudes who obsessively collect every pseudo-mainstream record you kinda wish you had bought (that one James Iha solo LP on vinyl? check. the lead 12" single from that one James Iha solo LP? he's got that too), and keeps them all in great shape. These loyal and diligent acolytes of MTV culture are and have always been important archivists of Western ephemera, but this historic set of auctions unfolding over the next 2 weeks or so comes at a unique time for recorded music, and highlights the interesting turn record collecting in particular has taken in the last few years or so.
You probably remember the 'Housing Bubble', right? Well, it seems we've entered a Vinyl Bubble, wherein prices for used or even almost-new records take on exponential -even asymptotic- behavior. Here is a graphic that will familiarize you with the concept of bubbles:
Where are we on this curve? Seems like we're past 'Media attention' and well into 'Enthusiasm', no? Following auctions like the one above will give you an idea, but perhaps it's not representative, perhaps the vinyl copy of August and Everything After, the album that soundtracked my drive to middle-school (on CD, natch) every other day for 3 years, is actually the El Dorado of records. There is some merit to this idea - the record seems to only have been pressed in Europe, it's unequivocally their best album by a wide margin, and it looks tasty - full color inner sleeve with lyrics and that big photo of the band smiling and playing their brand of R.E.M-meets-Rusted Root in a dingy alley.
Did this photo ever =Music, for you?
The only thing better would've been a limited first run press on translucent yellow vinyl with one of Adam Duritz-bro's dreadlocks thrown in for good measure. Is it $400 tasty though?
This seems to be a good place to introduce my concept of the 'Danger Zone' of collecting anything. I'm sure sociologists have another term for it, but I call it the Danger Zone because it occurs after that interval of time between when someone was most likely to have positive associations with said media (in the case of pop-rock, we can safely assume 'teenager') and when they were most likely to have sold it because they were ashamed/needed money (college) and when they were first flush with both discretionary cash and free time (late 30's). So the Danger Zone is breached anywhere from 15-35 years after the item was first popular, and it causes significant upward price momentum on the most valuable of whatever the collected asset class happens to be. In the case of the Counting Crows, I imagine it's due to some middle manager at First Citizens bank who heard on NPR that "Vinyl is Back!!" and decided to spend some of his six-figure income on reclaiming misspent youth...
...which is an old story, and it's why sports cars and cosmetic surgery exist, but it's not the whole story. Vinyl itself going through something of an appreciation 'mania' lately. Presumably, people are realizing that the world and music especially are being qualitatively debased by digital technology and are in a mad scramble to grab the last 'authentic' experiences available, very accessible in neatly indexed form of course by same digital technology. Of course, getting a record by the Counting Crows on vinyl in NC in 1993 would've been quite a task in the first place, because the format was basically being dug a mass grave by the RIAA from the years '92 - 97, so that gives it a little added value. But why are new records being 'flipped', within 2 years of their release for 4-5x their purchase price, when they're still widely available on multiple formats? Should I save vinyl to pay for my children's college, or a down payment on a house?
No. I think there's a finite limit to the price people will pay for records and we're rapidly reaching that point. The only advantage that vinyl confers over modern, infinitely more convenient streamable, playlistable formats (besides its textural artifact qualities, kewl colors and the not-insignificant matter of terrible remastering jobs) is its undeniably superior sound quality, even for music that was recorded digitally, on a shitty laptop with a $12 mic. But here's another fact: 32-bit, 192 khz digital audio sounds indistinguishably as-good (better if you consider the zero noise and better dynamic range) as analog records. They only told you CDs sounded as good, but seriously, I'm a vinyl purist and I'm telling you, 2-channel 32/192 audio is perfect**. Why oh why can't we have Perfect Sound Now and Forever?
a) a 3 minute song in 32/192 format takes about 1 GB of space. (that means my iTunes library would currently take up about 100 TB in high-fidelity files. most people have access to 5-10 TB storage, tops)
fun fact: iTunes supports 24 bit/96 khz playback (but won't stream it via AirTunes). if you input a 32/192 file it will 'down-sample' (I have no idea how this works) to 24/96. still though, what a difference it makes. try it for yourself!
b) to disseminate (i.e. stream) such a song via the internet requires a ~50 Mbps connection (at the time of this writing, I am sucking wind on a 3 Mbps, although some parts of the country are getting 15-20 Mbps regularly)
c) at the rate things are going, we should see the necessary storage/transmission requirements met by decade's end.
That's right, 2020. By 2030, physical formats are going to seem seriously old-hat and I feel sorry for people laying down 3-4 figures for records that won't fetch that much even in inflation-adjusted dollars 20 years from now.
Is it time to sell, Sell, SELL? I think 'depakh7' is being a bit premature. Enjoy your records/tapes/cd's for another 5-7 years. We'll still be in the Danger Zone for people like me who sold their emo records only to see them appreciate 10x not even 10 years later, and would like to pretend they didn't. At which point, you can take their money and invest in S/S action figures from the 80's (the smart money's on Dino Riders and Boglins) or maybe a Jensen Healey.
No comments:
Post a Comment