LPs

[MartinH]

Very much so and the people that pay these prices also tend use extremely high-end turntables. They can afford it.

[dhibbard]

Martin you might consider donating them to a library that has a note worthy music school. I've found a lot of rare lps in the music libraries. 

[Ilja]

I have found that the resurgence of the LP turntable as a "fashion" item has helped quite a few people get their first acquaintance with classical music - and beggars can't be choosers.


Here in Leiden (Netherlands, student town) we have three pretty well-stocked second-hand LP shops that sell their products at as low a price as 50 cents (plus a few charity shops). I don't buy there often, but one is a mate and I've sometimes bought LPs for students when I thought they might appreciate it as a "gateway drug" to the genre. Sure, pop/hiss/crackle, but if they like the music it might drive them to Spotify (to which they all have a subscription) to search out less sonically challenged experiences.


And personally, the experience of browsing through LPs is second to none.

[terry martyn]

Hear,hear!

[Christopher]

A designer friend of mine buys LP's not for the record but for the retro covers which he incorporates into his works... I don't know if this includes classical!  Separately, I was talking to the guy at the till in my local music shop on Saturday which has successfully moved into the LP-niche market (Record Corner in Godalming, FYI!) - he told me that where an LP is pressed dramatically changes it value.  He gave me the example of an album by a band (might have been Pink Floyd) - its LP's normally sold in the range of £20-30, but he had handled one that had been pressed in Mozambique (!) and it sold for £6000. Who knew?!  So some of you might want to check the contents of your collections!  He himself is in a band and, rather depressingly, told me that despite having over 100,000 hits or streams on spotify and other services,  he and his bandmates received for that just £30 between them.  Whereas they received a much larger percentage of sales for their albums which they managed to sell in hard copy.  So the lesson is, keep buying CDs and LPs to support artists in all genres!

[Ilja]

Sure, Spotify is hardly a goldmine (hardly a secret); this gives some info about the way Spotify pays out artists. Moreover, their model doesn't favor classical music since only individual streams are counted, not their length: so a performance of Mahler's 3rd generates a third as much revenue as your average punk rock band album. Also, artists are paid as a share of total revenue, and with over 1,2 million artists on Spotify... There's simply too much music being sold for individuals to make a living.


But whatever you may think of that, I'm convinced that media such as CDs are on the way out, the more so since they lack the boutique analog appeal of LPs. We shouldn't hang onto these: their production cost may be relatively low, but distribution remains expensive, and the rest of the music market has long since moved to a download/streaming model. In general, I buy the download and then listen to it via Qobuz or Spotify - that way I try to maximize, in my own very modest way, revenue for the creators.

[izdawiz]

I still play my cassettes! I love how handy they are, you can pop them in and out, press play and stop and play again and continue where you left off. Plus they are not as fragile as CD's that can get scratched. Digital is definitely more convenient and my most often used medium. However there is something special about tapes/ cassettes and how much more portable they are than LP's. I also started seeing that they are becoming quite expensive also. 

[Alan Howe]

Cassettes were a disastrous recording medium. I thought they were going to be the answer to crackly LPs, but the sound on them was usually worse than on vinyl - and when they went wrong the result was total disaster. The Germans called that disaster 'Bandsalat':

[Santo Neuenwelt]

Steve mentioned that soon little new classical music on CD will be made. I hope he is wrong. I am not a fan of streaming music unless you can download it to your hard drive for the same reason I do not want my computer files on a cloud server somewhere in the world. I want control of my files as well as my music.

That said, I am very grateful for the music which has been put on Youtube, both live performances of music which has never been recorded or recorded music no longer available. There are many an interesting work I have found there. But that is I think very different from Spotify. Performers and music lovers are making the music to like minded people and not trying to make a buck off of it.

[MartinH]

Cassette was awful - I remember being able to buy some RCA tapes for "4 for $10" and even then it wasn't a bargain. But they worked well enough for the truck. Even worse were 8-track tapes, a path I never took.

in my area there are several large stores that buy/sell/trade used media. The largest, which deals mostly with LPs, has no interest in classical at all. And I agree with Ilja - there's nothing like browsing through a record store. I used to look forward to trips to Los Angeles and New York to browse the shelves, read the liner notes at Tower Records and HMV. There were some store that had floor copies of records you could take into a booth and listen to, and then in back the unopened copies for sale. I really miss those days!

[Sharkkb8]

....floor copies of records you could take into a booth and listen to, and then in back the unopened copies for sale. I really miss those days!

Wow, I hadn't thought about that for decades.  Those of us who admit to remembering it are giving away our ancient-ness.   

[kolaboy]

The worst medium by far was the 8 track cartridge; double tracking, horrible divisions/cuts - not to mention the damage they could do to your person when they inevitably slid off the dashboard and into your lap...

I had high hopes for the elcaset in '76, but in spite of a greatly improved sound quality the medium never caught on with the public...

[Alan Howe]

Elcasets would have been far superior to standard cassettes. I guess they were too expensive by comparison.

[raffite33]

I sold my LPs off around 1988 or so.  I'm with Alan, good riddance to them.  I would have to say that a large part of the problem was the increasingly poor quality of the pressings.  By the end, I was buying brand new LPs, and the first time I'd play them, my ears were assaulted by the crackle.  Seemed like I was wasting my money on a high end turntable and hideously expensive cartridges.

Sad to say the same kind of thing is happening with CDs.  Jewel cases, which were thick & heavy in the beginning, became thin and flimsy (and easily broken when the the mailman dances on them).  The discs themselves aren't faring much better.  In the first ten years or so of my collecting, I only got one CD that had anything wrong with it (it just wouldn't play on any machine).  Now, the situation is very different.  I order new CDs, and, when I get them and I remove the cellophane, I find scratches on the playing surface.  (and, yes, I know a re-wrap when I see one, having been burned on that many times when buying through Ebay or the Amazon Marketplace).  I'm at the point where I will not purchase CDs on Supraphon or anything manufactured in Italy (Urania being the absolute worst).

Add to this all the labels foisting off CD-r's on unsuspecting customers, unrealistically high prices in the secondhand market, the near extinction of brick-and-mortar shops, rising international postage rates, increasingly poor postal service, having to pay North Carolina sales tax on discs I order from other states, having to order from Japan to get the format (SACD) I want...  Well, let's just say that, when the CD is dead, it won't be just downloading and LPs that killed it.

[semloh]

I still have about a hundred LPs left from a big collection - all genres. Some of it was sold but most was eventually given en masse to charity shops. The survivors are either collectors' items, or still waiting for me to digitize them (because they are not available on CD). Once that's done they'll go to charity.

Some CD reissues of LPs have poorer sound quality, and sometimes the sound has obviously been altered. But, for me, the LP is of historical interest only - rather like the lamplighter and the knocker-upper!