Rarities now common target at vinyl show

As vinyl records resurge, rarities become focus of today's show in Toronto

GREG QUILL
ENTERTAINMENT COLUMNIST

Record shows used to be gathering places for boomers buying back their past and geeky collectors looking for a priceless score.

But these days, says Akim Boldireff, co-promoter of the Toronto Downtown Record Show, one of Ontario's biggest bi-annual vinyl-heavy record markets – it's taking place today at the Estonian House Banquet Hall, 958 Broadview Ave. – they're attracting a new generation of vinyl virgins who are discovering the hi-fi delights of analogue recordings, vintage and new, and rare music that never made it to digital formats.

"Sales of vinyl recordings last year were 85 per cent higher than in 2007, and this year we'll see a 150 per cent increase over last year's sales," says Boldireff, a rare records and music paraphernalia dealer/collector since 1992. He puts together the Toronto Downtown Record Show – staged in March and November – with fellow dealer Aaron Keele.

British music trade journals reported recently that single-song 45-RPM discs – the mainstay of the industry half a century ago – are now outselling CD singles there. And with high-end turntable sales hitting pre-CD levels (attributable to a small degree to their use by DJs), vinyl pressing plants in Quebec unused for nearly two decades now run 24 hours a day to meet the demand in North America. Contemporary artists are shunning the CD format or augmenting their merchandise with value-added, premium-priced 12-inch discs, so it's not surprising that Boldireff and Keele are seeing more dealers, and customers of varied ages, at their shows.

Today's show, a themed celebration of the 40th anniversary of Led Zeppelin's first appearances in Toronto – twice at the Rock Pile at Yonge St. and Davenport, and once at Massey Hall, all in 1969 – will showcase the collections of more than 100 selected, high-quality dealers from across the country, and some from overseas. As many as 100,000 items, including ephemera, memorabilia merchandise, vintage photographs, posters, CDs, DVDs and, of course, LPs and 45s, will be on display and up for grabs.

"I suspect the increase in demand for vinyl started when young music fans, raised on CDs and MP3s, started plundering their parents' old record collections," Boldireff says. "With a half-decent turntable, vinyl recordings offer an entirely different listening experience."

Younger buyers are also finding something more intrinsically valuable in a vinyl recording with aesthetically pleasing, full-sized covers, Boldireff says. CDs, he says, "seem disposable by comparison" and he points to the increasing amounts of vinyl in the city's few remaining independent music stores – Rotate This and Play De Record, in particular – as evidence of the vinyl craze.

That's good for his business, but the new appetite for vintage vinyl (served very effectively by Internet markets such as eBay and Gemm, where rare records fetch the highest prices) mean Boldireff, Keele and their colleagues have to travel father afield to get the goodies they used to find in abundance in neighbourhood basements and attics when music fans were ditching their old vinyl for CDs.

"There are more collectors and more buyers now, and they're sucking up the vintage market or hanging onto their old records," Boldireff says. "We spend more time in the U.S. because there's a greater volume of material, and with the recession hitting so hard there, more people willing to sell."

Apart from Beatles, Rolling Stones and Elvis originals, and almost any 1970s indie punk recording, the most collectible vinyl these days, he says, is jazz and blues from the 1950s and '60s – "it holds its value" – and progressive, psychedelic and European rock from the 1960s and '70s.

"Reggae, particularly poor quality Jamaican pressings, and British folk from the 1960s, are also very valuable – almost anything from that period is worth buying," says Boldireff, who counts among the most valuable recordings in his collection Rush's first, privately released, self-titled album on the defunct label Moon Records – worth $1,000 or more.

Lately he and Keele have been scouring the northern U.S. for Northern Soul, a sub-genre comprising small independent labels established in the 1960s and 70s in African-American urban centres outside Detroit.

"They were pressed in small batched and sold as less expensive alternatives to major label product," Boldireff says. "Now they're extremely rare and very valuable."

There's much novice vinyl collectors can look forward to as well, says Keele, who once owned a test pressing of the first Who album (value: $2,000).

"All new-release vinyl on limited edition pressings by popular bands stands a good chance of being collectable," Keele says. "If the band itself stays popular, the LP itself should hold a strong value."

SOURCE: http://www.thestar.com