Analogue Productions - Atlantic records 75th Series.
- Thread starter wezzywest
- Start date
daytona600
Registered User
2,000 numbered Copies
1st 500 copies subscription only $4,560 (plus tax ) $2.28million
Placed a Big stock order but remaining unsold 1500 copies doubt many will escape the USA
1st 500 copies subscription only $4,560 (plus tax ) $2.28million
Placed a Big stock order but remaining unsold 1500 copies doubt many will escape the USA
crimsondonkey
pfm Member
No one is forcing anyone to buy anything.
If people prefer they can always buy cheaper reissues or hunt down the OGs at whatever price they go for.
Seanm
pfm Member
It's still grifting. This shit takes up a lot of bandwidth.
gavreid
Pretty Words...
Is it an admission from Atlantic that they're unable to keep their popular back catalogue in print to a standard that people want or just a small, prestige run for the affluent, American, collector market? Perhaps a bit of both. Both RTI and AP have been struggling with quality issues recently if my last 3 purchases are anything to go by...
Tony L
Administrator
I find it entirely harmless. It all helps fund the labels and rights holders, some of that will be used to preserve the masters for future generations. It provides a really easy simple way for audiophiles to find at the least very decent sounding copies of titles that where decent condition originals are scarce and obviously carry risk of disappointment etc. This sort of thing will never deter the hardcore collectors who want mint 1st pressings, but they are often a great alternative and good investment too. I consider myself to have a very good record collection, lots of really nice original pressings, yet looking at Discogs so many of my most valuable albums are audiophile cuts (Nimbus WYWH, DCC Made In Japan, Classic LZ1, DCC Doors etc). All stuff that was a little expensive at the time, but has done very well. I certainly don’t feel ‘grifted’ by any of these! If the Acoustic Sounds cuts are limited to 2000 a throw they will be great investments. Some of the dad-rock titles will go to >£200-400 overnight.
PS Can’t see Close To The Edge or Foxtrot making a great 2x45!
Seanm
pfm Member
Yeah fair enough. I do think it's a bit different now that the practice is more generalised though. Grift is the wrong word but the overall direction is towards cynical gouging and churn, and it's execs being funded here, not artists and indy labels. It's just a slightly depressing picture.
Tony L
Administrator
It always has been that way!
To my mind as long as the product is good, and Chad, Don Was, Craft etc do deliver very good product, I can accept it. Especially if they are good investments for the end-user, which they usually are. My core priority is seeing the masters preserved for future generations, e.g. in the underground mountain bunker Fremer toured recently, which can’t be cheap, and a good high quality alternative to freeware EU pirate shit on DOL etc being presented to the end user. You can walk around any city centre record shop and see pirated shit likely taken from CD or worse needle-drops and wearing a £15-20 price tag. In comparison giving Chad £50 for a really nice product carefully mastered and served up in a beautiful sleeve seems like a bargain to me. Especially when over time that £50 will likely be worth £200, and the DOL pirate just refused as valueless by any credible record dealer. I just bin them if they come in with collections.
PS I know Chad’s taste is ultra-conservative and he’s clearly making a lot of money, but I’d cite his Pharoah Sanders Karma (one of about two non-safe choices in his catalogue!) as one of the best sounding jazz records I own. That thing kicks! A bargain.
Thanks for that recommendation, must pick up a copy (most 'audiophile' re-releases are musically too safe to interest me).
Seanm
pfm Member
It’s just a shame those are increasingly the only options - £10 pirated garbage or £50 Veblen good/speculative investment. Two sides of the same coin IMO and mutually reinforcing: sweating IP so shamelessly and restricting access to good quality to the very wealthy obviously feeds the pirate market. Doesn’t have to be this way as the Blue Note Classic series shows. It’s short termist and unsustainable but yes, fundamentally ‘‘twas ever thus, that’s the music industry.
Tony L
Administrator
I take your point, but the very basic covers really let them down IMO and I’d happily pay an extra fiver for a proper heavy (non-gatefold) tip-on sleeve. It is even more obvious with Blue Note as the cover art is as good as it gets. The art deserves something of the quality of a US original, not a mid-80s bargain-bin reissue.
As someone who really discovered music in the late-70s and through the ‘80s I was used to crap quality thin card sleeves etc. Finding original US jazz pressings later on was a real eye-opener, the quality of those original Impulse, Blue Note sleeves are just amazing. Folk buying them today should experience the same IMO. Blue Note’s decision to give the more obscure corners of their catalogue amazingly over the top packaging with the Tone Poet range looks odd when the absolute classics arrive in what look like bog standard 1980s budget reissue sleeves, yet still command a >£20 price tag.
gavreid
Pretty Words...
You'll be a year or two older than me but even laminated sleeves and anything fancy, like die cutting, had pretty well died a death by the early 80s. Looking at my collection in Discogs there's one or two Stiff records with laminated sleeves and Costello - Almost Blue is the last one time-wise in 1981.
Tony L
Administrator
I’m 60, but started fairly early. There were still some great sleeves of my era, pretty much anything on Factory, OMD’s first album etc, plus go back to the late-70s and nice laminated sleeves were still fairly common, e.g. 1st B52s, Slits Cut etc.
One of the reasons I became such an obsessive record collector is I remember borrowing a couple of Hawkwind albums at school; Doremi with its black and metallic silver sleeve, and Space Ritual with its huge fold-out sleeve, yet when I looked for them in the local new shop they were crap quality reissues. Just so many examples where the 1st press had a textured sleeve, inner, poster or something, and the reissue not. I knew that wasn’t right so dived straight into the used market for the things I’d missed and with few exceptions have stayed there ever since. Another reason was the local shop had a habit of selling terrible quality imports, Spain, Portugal etc, so even on recent stuff you’d likely lose out. I had to swap-out a lot of records I bought at that time as the UK pressings just slayed the imports sonically and on packaging.
As time went on into the ‘80s the quality of stuff on major labels just got worse and worse, though there is a lot of decent quality indie stuff of that time with very nice, if often fragile covers (4AD etc).