People in used record stores :GL related Question

[Borderstone]

How many of you have ever been in a used record store and have had to witness the "cringe" inducing sight of people "slamming" through the records.......
but most of all "slamming" through the Gordon Lightfoot albums?

I tell you,if i didn't have all of his LPs already,I'd save everyone that I could! I also witness these nit-wits putting them back upside down,sideways & of course in a different lettered section.

These LP's end up bent,ripped or at worst broken. Do they not understand that someone else just might want to buy what they could care less about?

I "soooo" want to tell them off & call them an idiot,mainly for having little regard forthe peole who have to straighten this mess up! Sheesh!

[BILLW]

It's a sign of the times my friend. Just do the best you can - you can't change them.

Bill

[Nightingale]

I know exactly what you mean Borderstone....drives me crazy!

We have a used book/music store in town and I have to check all the albums I buy to make sure it's really what it says it is on the album cover. I have gotten several albums that contained something really lame inside and not what it was supposed to be at all.
The store owner always takes them back but still, it's such a disappointment when you thought you were getting something you really wanted and didn't.

I also get really upset when people deface books in any way.
I always loan out books if someone wants to read something I have but there are certain people that I won't do it for anymore. One lady returned several paperbacks with the back covers ripped completely off!
I asked her what happened and she said she tore off the backs to use as a mini dustpan...what the heck is that all about?

Some people just don't get it......

[Jesse Joe]

One lady returned several paperbacks with the back covers ripped completely off! 
I asked her what happened and she said she tore off the backs to use as a mini dustpan...what the heck is that all about?
 
Some people just don't get it...... Nightingale

And she had the courage to tell you what she did... {unbelievable}

[Borderstone]

Not the courage Jesse......the bold faced ignorance & indifference. In other words,she viewed it as "no big deal" or noraml behavior.

[Jesse Joe]

Originally Posted by Borderstone

Not the courage Jesse......the bold faced ignorance & indifference. In other words,she viewed it as "no big deal" or noraml behavior.

That's right Borderstone, it's like Nightingale says, " Some people just dont get it."

[Yuri]

"That Late Night Record Shop"

The lowly record store - an endangered species nearing extinction. Like seniors hustled off to nursing homes, vinyl too suffers an indignity, filed away in the bowels of some second hand store to gather dust and await it‘s ultimate demise. Both are from another era, no longer respected or appreciated - soon to be forgotten.
The future belongs to the digital download.

I feel sad for the today’s youth who will never know the joys of going to the local record store to browse through the bins, to check out the cover artwork, credits and liner notes. To let your fingers flip through the stacks and finding that gem that just happened to pique your interest. To hear albums playing on the stores speakers enticing you to check out that artist you had never heard of when you entered. That joy of adventure and discovery…

(I’ve already lamented enough over the transition of various media formats in a previous post now reproduced in my blog.)

http://thunderhouse-yuri.blogspot.co...s-digital.html

My favourite second hand record closed a number of years ago. Peter Dunn’s Vinyl museum was like no other. On entering the doors of this record emporium, this temple to vinyl, this monument to the 33&1/3, one was greeted walls wallpapered by orphaned record covers of familiar friends. From ‘Cream’ to ‘Deep Purple‘, ‘Cat Stevens’ to Petula Clark, Frank Sinatra to Duke Ellington, 'Iron Butterfly' to…..well you get the idea. Yes even Lightfoot - racing to the stacks after work in hopes of finding another ‘Two Tones’. Previously enjoyed records in bins as far as the eye could see! Peter Dunn’s would find these treasures and lovingly clean and restore the vinyl before placing it into a new antistatic sleeve. The outer record cover would also now protected by a heavy duty plastic sleeve bearing the store’s logo. A second hand store offering first rate treatment for those beloved platters. How I miss that store.

I also miss Canada’s own ‘Sam The Record Man’ owned and operated for years by Sam Sniderman. Sam started selling records from the trunk of his car as early as 1937 but only opened his flagship Yonge Street store in 1961- just in time for the music of that explosive era. Sam Sniderman operated more than a record store for it was a place for music lovers to meet and musicians to congregate. Sam assisted numerous musicians over the years. His store has had visitors such as Gordon Lightfoot, Ronnie Hawkins, the members of Rush and even Elton John. Sam’s store is referred to in the Barenaked Ladies Tune ‘Brian Wilson’ as “that late night record shop”. The iconic spinning record sign has appeared in countless movies including David Cronenberg’s ‘Scanners’ and the quintessential Canadian film ‘Going Down The Road’. In fact, Cronenberg worked at Sam’s Yonge Street store as a teenager. Sam Sniderman became a member of ‘The Order Of Canada’ in 1976 and was also awarded a ‘Juno’ for special achievement in the recording industry. Sadly Sam’s couldn’t compete with digital downloads and closed the doors for the final time last year. The neon record signs above his store are being restored and protected as historically important.

I spent a good deal of my youth and an even greater amount of my wages in those record stores. How I miss those stores, whether offering new pressings on virgin vinyl or old treasures waiting for someone to rediscover them and offer one more spin on the turntable…..

Yuri

[Yuri]

Vinyl goes from throwback to comeback

Young fans say analog records sound warmer and fuller than digital music
The Boston Globe
By Jonathan Perry Globe Correspondent / June 2, 2008

http://www.boston.com/ae/music/artic...k_to_comeback/

Monica Morgan, an 18-year-old high school student from Jacksonville, Fla., is taking a breather from scouting prospective colleges in and around Boston. She is standing inside Newbury Comics in Cambridge, scouring the bins of new LP releases by artists such as Gnarls Barkley and Bjork. Rows of colorful album covers catch her eye.
"My dad just gave me a record player, so I mostly like to buy vinyl," says Morgan. A stash of records originally owned by her mother, and now bequeathed to her, led Morgan to her latest love. "I have some old Beatles records with my mom's maiden name on them," she says. "I just like the way they sound."
Almost any other decade, this scenario would have been ordinary. But the scene - a teenager perusing stacks of cumbersome vinyl in a sleek digital age that is gradually rendering the compact disc obsolete - was unfolding on a Friday afternoon in 2008. And it is one that is being replicated in small but growing numbers across the country. Although she may be an anomaly among her peers, Morgan and other young music fans are embracing the virtues of vinyl.
Mike Dreese, cofounder and chief executive of the New England music store chain Newbury Comics, says his company's vinyl sales, which had been increasing at an annual rate of about 20 percent over the past five years, are 80 percent higher than they were at this time last year.
"Right now, we're selling about $100,000 a month worth of vinyl," Dreese says.
But why vinyl and why now, especially when even CD sales have plummeted 40 percent since 2005? Dreese blames the sterility of technology. "I think there are a lot of people who are looking for some kind of a throwback to something that's tangible," he says. "The CD was a tremendous sonic package, but from a graphic standpoint, it was a disaster. People still want a connection to an artist, and vinyl connects them in a way that an erasable file doesn't."
Vinyl lovers insist that analog records sound warmer and fuller, as opposed to the brighter yet brittle digital experience of CDs. The compressed sound of MP3s, meanwhile, sacrifices both the highest and lowest ends of the sonic spectrum.
"It's unbelievable how much vinyl's coming out," says Josh Bizar, sales director for musicdirect, a company that specializes in analog products ranging from new and reissued vinyl to turntables. "We're seeing this explosion of young people under 25 who never even saw an LP as a child running toward a format that was pronounced dead before they were even born. But if a title has any kind of mass appeal, it's coming out on vinyl today."

The new push for records is also coming from musicians. Elvis Costello issued his new album, "Momofuku," on vinyl two weeks before the CD and digital versions were released. And the Raconteurs, led by White Stripes frontman Jack White, recommended that listeners hear their new album, "Consolers of the Lonely," on vinyl (it is also available on CD and as a download).

"I prefer vinyl," says White, 32. "We talk about this backstage; as musicians it comes up a lot. It's a shame the new generation is missing out on albums - not just the sound quality, but the artwork, the experience of holding something tangible in your hands."
Scores of listeners have begun to follow White's example.
Bizar's firm, musicdirect, services 250 to 300 independent record and electronics stores worldwide and stocks CDs and MP3 players. But it is the company's analog-related inventory that is causing a stir: Sales of albums and accessories like needle cartridges and record cleaners have jumped 300 percent in each of the past four years, according to Bizar.
Sales of turntables, which can run anywhere from $150 to $24,000 (including models that can now transfer the sound on vinyl to a listener's portable player or computer) have spiked 500 percent annually during the same time span. Indeed, huge retail outlets such as Best Buy now stock an array of turntable brands and styles that reflect the surge in both technology and demand.
"They cannot make them fast enough," says Bizar. "Owning a record album is certainly a lot cooler than owning a digital subset of zeroes and ones on a computer. And the simple act of playing an LP takes a certain single-mindedness that seems to go beyond today's culture of multitasking. It's not as easy as just pushing a button."
Merge Records founder Mac McCaughan estimates that for every 10 albums his label puts out as a digital download or CD, eight get a vinyl release. "It's not going to come back and replace CDs or MP3s," he says. "But if you do it right and make the vinyl heavy and make the packaging nice, it's everything that people liked about music in the first place."
Then there's what Bizar calls "the collectibility issue." A limited-edition LP box set of Radiohead's 2007 album, "In Rainbows," which retailed for about $80, sold out briskly. A recent search on eBay found the now out-of-print package selling for $300.
Music fan Nick Pioggia, 25, buys even more vinyl now than he did as a teenager. "I got into it because the [punk] music I was trying to find was only available in that format," says Pioggia, who also runs a small label called Painkiller Records in Boston. "No one cares about CDs anymore, but someone will still buy an album because it's got the huge artwork and is a limited pressing. That's the biggest draw."

New releases are typically being pressed on vinyl in quantities of about 10,000 per title. But when it comes to the demand for lavish reissues, that number can double or even triple. Bizar says his company saw 35,000 advance orders for the four-LP edition of Led Zeppelin's "Mothership," a career-spanning collection released this spring. While that is certainly a far cry from vinyl's heyday of the 1970s, Bizar calls the demand for a bulky box set that retails for roughly $60 a pop "astonishing."

As an enticement for consumers to buy a record rather than a 99-cent download of a single, artists and record labels now usually include a CD version of the album with the LP package gratis, or enclose a secret code that allows listeners to download for free the album they just bought on vinyl.
The idea represents a compromise for convenience-minded consumers and artists who want their creative work to be something more substantive than a digital file. "If you're an artist," says Dreese, "you're like, 'What do I have to show my grandkids?' "
No one artist has released more records since the early 1990s than Robert Pollard, both solo and with his band, Guided By Voices.
"I have to have vinyl," says Pollard, who's issued dozens of records on labels large and small, including his own in-house imprint. "To me it's psychological. If it's not on an LP, it's not real. Anybody can make a CD, but as we used to say, 'Vinyl's final.' "
Evan Shore, singer-guitarist for the Boston band Muck & the Mires, recently announced that his band's next Extended Play would be a "vinyl-only release." With a European tour this summer, the reasoning was simple: "Vinyl is huge in Europe."
Geoff Chase, a 40-year-old "classic rock" fan from Watertown, says he stopped buying records because many older titles weren't available on LP to replace his worn copies. Until now.
"What got me back into it big time," says Chase, "was that one day I found an old [stereo] receiver on the sidewalk."
He took it home, hooked the receiver up to his turntable, and put on his copy of AC/DC's "Back in Black."
"I could not believe how good it sounded," Chase says. "I was blown away."
© Copyright 2008 Globe Newspaper Company.

[Jesse Joe]

This is great to know, I myself do prefer vinyl. There was something special about buying a Gordon Lightfoot LP compare to a CD. The larger photo for one thing, and you didn't need a magnifying glass to read some of the small print found on CD's. The sound of that needle touching the vinyl just before that beautiful STEREO music would come on.

[Nightingale]

Nice stories about the record stores...I miss the artwork and lyrics that I can actually see without reading glasses...lol.
Album covers and cd's just can't even be compared.
I always break those flimsy cd covers first time I open them. That's really annoying.

I guess the vinyl comeback story explains why all the teenagers in the family are raiding my stash of old records.
I gave them all away except for the Moody Blues and a few other random albums that were my favorites.. The rest were just collecting dust along with so much of my other "collected stuff".

The teenagers really love all the classic rock music. It's nice to have something in common with them.

[joveski]

and if you have a decent turntable, vinyl does sound better than a CD

[JohninCt.]

Originally Posted by joveski

and if you have a decent turntable, vinyl does sound better than a CD

Uh oh, that is the one thing that is always open to debate. I have both, and at times I buy older LPs and burn the stuff I want off them to cds. They are way more convinient than lps, and you sure can search faster, especially when you insert them into a multi disk cd player. As for the sound quality, i have heard all that warmer and lifelike sound on lp stuff, and i don't see it. I have a high end system with 72" tall VPMS Super Towers, + 2 JBL 100s on the other side of the room, with an SAE Preamp and 2 CE Crown amps for over 1000 watts of power. I use a Pioneer table with straight arm and have different cartridges from Stanton and Shure etc.. I use a Sony 400 disk cd changer, and a Sony W500 cd burner in my system. I really can't say I notice a difference, unless the cd I bought was poorly made by the company. But I can say the same for records, the early Lightfoot lps on UA weren't so great for quality either. Anyhow, unless you listen with high end earphones, other noise can be distracting to the music also. Yes, so lps are making a comeback, to a slight degree, but I don't expect it will ever be anything big, and the next media for music should be a chip type thing where you just slip a wafer into a player and there is your album. No moving parts is the final answer.

[Gitchigumee]

I was actually in "my" used record store 2 blocks from my office on Tuesday during my lunch hour. I pop in from time to time to check if there have been arrivals of any used Lightfoot CDs or LPs. The store I frequent is incredibly well-run and organized. All LPs are in plastic covers and the sections are neatly labeled. I have never witnessed customers abusing the merchandise in any way.

The store can also order new stuff or old stuff upon request, including the more obscure things you would not normally find in stores. They have mostly used CD's, but way in the back of the store there is the section with all the albumns.

There's just something about the feel, sound and smell of flipping through those things that takes a person back in time. Since I was a child during Lightfoot's hayday, I do not have a collection of his LPs from that time period and so whenever I spot a Gordon Lightfoot album, I snatch it up even though I have not had a working turntable at home in years. There's something about owning an album that was produced and sold THEN, that makes me feel like I have in a small way transported myself back in time to when the music was brand new.

I haven't ever had a problem with MY used record store, so guess I should count my blessings. Unfortunately on my last trip, I came up with zilch for Lightfoot stuff, but there's always tomorrow...

[JohninCt.]

I kind of judge by what I see at tag sales and flea markets, how big an artist really is. Sure there are Billboard and sales figures, but when I see a lot of used GL albums around, it makes me feel good to know how well he has sold. And I have seen many of them for sale through the years. I copied all mine to cds, except the ones he signed, and sold them off. I also made some cds for my cars/truck, that have the songs I like best.
Interesting thought, if you copy from an album to cd, will you lose that supposedly different sound that the album has? I doubt it as the cd always is a direct copy. As I said, I don't see any difference.

[Yuri]

Retailers giving vinyl records another spin

June 10th, 2008

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) -- It was a fortuitous typo for the Fred Meyer retail chain.
This spring, an employee intending to order a special CD-DVD edition of R.E.M.'s latest release "Accelerate" inadvertently entered the "LP" code instead. Soon boxes of the big, vinyl discs showed up at several stores.
Some sent them back. But a handful put them on the shelves, and 20 LPs sold the first day.
The Portland-based company, owned by The Kroger Co., realized the error might not be so bad after all. Fred Meyer is now testing vinyl sales at 60 of its stores in Oregon, Washington and Alaska. The company says, based on the response so far, it plans to roll out vinyl in July in all its stores that sell music.
Other mainstream retailers are giving vinyl a spin too. Best Buy is testing sales at some stores. And online music giant Amazon.com, which has sold vinyl for most of the 13 years it has been in business online, created a special vinyl-only section last fall.
The best-seller so far at Fred Meyer is The Beatles album "Abbey Road." But musicians from the White Stripes and the Foo Fighters to Metallica and Pink Floyd are selling well, the company says.
"It's not just a nostalgia thing," said Melinda Merrill, spokeswoman for Fred Meyer. "The response from customers has just been that they like it, they feel like it has a better sound."
According to the Recording Industry Association of America, manufacturers' shipments of LPs jumped more than 36 percent from 2006 to 2007 to more than 1.3 million. Shipments of CDs dropped more than 17 percent during the same period to 511 million, as they lost some ground to digital formats.
The resurgence of vinyl centers on a long-standing debate over analog versus digital sound. Digital recordings capture samples of sound and place them very close together as a complete package that sounds nearly identical to continuous sound to many people.
Analog recordings on most LPs are continuous, which produces a truer sound -- though, paradoxically, some new LP releases are being recorded and mixed digitally but delivered analog.
Some purists also argue that the compression required to allow loudness in some digital formats weakens the quality as well.
But it's not just about the sound. Audiophiles say they also want the format's overall experience -- the sensory experience of putting the needle on the record, the feeling of side A and side B and the joy of lingering over the liner notes.
"I think music products should be more than just music," said Isaac Hudson, a 28-year-old vinyl fan standing outside one of Portland's larger independent music stores.
The interest seems to be catching on. Turntable sales are picking up and the few remaining record pressers say business is booming.
But the LP isn't going to muscle out CDs or iPod soon.
Nearly 450 million CDs were sold last year, versus just under 1 million LPs, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Based on the first three months of this year, Nielsen says vinyl album sales could reach 1.6 million in 2008.
"I don't think vinyl is for everyone; it's for the die-hard music consumer," said Jay Millar, director of marketing at United Record Pressing, a Nashville based company that is the nation's largest record pressing plant.
Many major artists -- Elvis Costello, the Raconteurs and others -- are issuing LPs and encouraging fans to check out their albums on vinyl. On Amazon.com, one of the best-selling LPs is Madonna's latest album, "Hard Candy".
Some artists package vinyl and digital versions of their music together, including offers for free digital downloads along with the record.
"We've definitely had some talks with the major retailers about exclusives on the manufacturing end," Millar said of United Record Pressing, which focuses primarily on independent recordings.
An avid music fan himself, Millar says he has moved to vinyl in recent years.
"Once I got my first iPod ... I'm looking at my wall of CDs and trying to justify it," Millar said. "The things I like -- the artwork, the liner notes, the sound quality -- it dawns on me, those are things I like better on vinyl." He welcomed back the pops and clicks, even some of the scratches.
"I like that fact that it's imperfect in a lot of ways, live music is imperfect too," Millar said.
Independent music stores, which have been the primary source of LPs in recent years, say many fans never left the medium.
"People have been buying vinyl all along," said Cathy Hagen, manager at 2nd Avenue Records in Portland. "There was a fairly good supply from independent labels on vinyl all these years. As far as a resurgence, the major labels are just pressing more now."
In this game, big retailers aren't necessarily competing head to head with independent sellers' regular clientele of nostalgic baby boomers, independent label fans and turntable DJs.
"I cannot see that Best Buy or Fred Meyer would order the same things we would," Hagen said. "They aren't going to be ordering the reggae, funk, punk or industrial music."
(The best-seller so far at Fred Meyer is The Beatles album "Abbey Road.")

[Jesse Joe]

Good ole Vinyl...

YouTube - SV - Gordon Lightfoot - The Wreck of...