Maybe Diverse Vinyl in the UK. i have ordered my Analogue Productions albums from Michael 45 in Germany, the first three are on pre-order on his site,Where would be the best place to order these from the UK?
No one is forcing anyone to buy anything.Sounds like more grifting at the expense of music lovers.
It's still grifting. This shit takes up a lot of bandwidth.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.
It's still grifting. This shit takes up a lot of bandwidth.
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.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!
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.
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.
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.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.
Doesn’t have to be this way as the Blue Note Classic series shows.
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.
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.