So I'd say we're just about on time then.
Vinyl Me Please (store, exclusives, swaps, etc)
- Thread starter Captainfog
- Start date
dbarila
Well-Known Member
What happens when the vinyl bubble bursts?
Prices come down, there's way less stuff being pressed and my collection is worth less than half of its current value.
jamieanderson1968
Well-Known Member
I have to go and get a PO box so my wife does not see all the extra records I can buy for the same price
Less people buy vinyl. Less vinyl eventually gets made. More people go to digital only, more physical stores close. @NathanRicaud will continue to prop up VMP.
dbarila
Well-Known Member
Then you just start buying for the next revival.
TenderLovingKiller®
Well-Known Member
Anyone who collected comic books and/or sports cards in the 90’s can see the writing on the wall it isn’t a matter of if but when.
dbarila
Well-Known Member
I mean, even in the 90s and 2000s a lot of albums still got a limited vinyl release. I could do with cheaper prices and not having 20 color variants to choose from TBH.
gregathon
Active Member
Honestly this is how I got into comics, I could buy whole runs of Spider-man in the late 90's for cheeeeap. But yeah feels the same. Numbered, stamped, holographic, polybagged, signed, variants...
TenderLovingKiller®
Well-Known Member
Yeah, there were a lot of divergent forces at work. gigantic runs, tons of variant covers and reprints, plus people started treating all their comics as collectibles meaning lots more NM copies of “rare” issues.
And, dare I say, comics did the same thing we are seeing now. EVERY issue had a variant cover. Every. Single. One.
Although, I should also mention that I got into vinyl buying because IT WAS CHEAPER THAN CDS.
Yup. Even as recently as 2007 that was still the case.
TenderLovingKiller®
Well-Known Member
So true. I lived in a college town with three quality record stores when I started collecting back in 2006. Anything more than $10 was crazy.
I remember buying the first Wolf Parade LP at their show. The LP was $10 and the CD was $12.
TenderLovingKiller®
Well-Known Member
Ah, the good old days.
TheThinWhiteDuke
Well-Known Member
I've written about this at length before- but the first time vinyl crashed was a mass exodus to a superior sounding new format (CD) and the reason the comic/trading card bubble burst was that the majority of the target audience grew out of it leaving wannabe speculators holding the bag with tons of product. I don't need back issues of 90's X-Men anymore- i do and will always need my Hendrix Family reissues.
Predicting a vinyl bubble burst is to either predict music fans are actually going to abandon physical product for good, or that there is going to be something else that will supersede it as far as quality and collectibility. My opinion is the reason the "bubble" is still going over 15 years later is trifold:
- There isn't as much competition for media collector's dollar. With streaming TV and movies, and with 4k not really the game changer that BD was, a lot of people aren't splitting their entertainment budget with TV show box sets or movie upgrades anymore.
- You don't have to buy everything that you kind of like anymore. With Spotify around to scratch the gratification/preview itch, consumers can pick and choose what albums they want to have a special physical copy of. And nothing is taking it's place; we've been through it all at this point and vinyl won out.
- Third and most importantly: Ten years ago the record labels listened to us. A ton of those LP's from 2007-2010 sound like trash. Listeners wanted quality for the price premium. They responded by contracting guys like Bellman/Gray/etc on overdrive to make definitive sounding reissues of tons of albums. So the quality is there.
So I think what you actually have instead of a bubble is a millennial generation (aprox with some X'ers and Zoomers on both sides) that have survived the Recession of 2008 and now the COVID crash and are using their income to fuel a record industry- maybe as a form of escapism (I don't know enough to expound on that). If SHF is any indicator of how long that type of buying behavior can last, this should be going for a long time yet.
ByersVinyl
Well-Known Member
Oddly I was considering this topic myself earlier today, I’ve started to think about greatly reducing my spend to vinyl I will spin a lot, not just FOMO or more just picking up every new release that interests me.
Starting to remind myself i can stream a lot of these albums. God a lot of the time I have the vinyl edition but I stream or at least play it on my Hi-res player a whole lot more (because I’m listening on the move).
I might not have reached this point just yet but I’m bloody close.
These trends or behavioural changes tend to spill out to the populace I notice - so I’m not discounting a vinyl bubble burst. I know I’m no longer prepared to simply accept £30-£40 costs.
Fuck I started by picking up a tonne of secondhand vinyl for 50p. Each !
TheThinWhiteDuke
Well-Known Member
Yeah I think consumers resisting a price point is more of a market reaction than a sign of a full on "bubble burst". People are going to charge as much as people are willing to pay. Sometimes they nail the sweet spot and sometimes they overshoot it (Blowout bin, baby!) and sometimes a bunch of children in charge of a record club will go into the hole on a $500 Grateful Dead box set reissue full of stuff all the fans already have.
Same. I think the Herbie box felt like my last extravagance. I've more or less built a list of stuff I'd really like to own on vinyl and given you and I are in 'let's get fucked by customs' land my real wants aren't cheap. At least not for me with my level of disposable income. So the idea of chucking 30 to 40 quid at something that's alrigjt but isn't really going to get much of a runout just doesn't float my goat these days.
And the sheer number of variants out there is insane. Just press the fuckers on black and make them all nice, flat and clean!