Articles of Interest

The Last Record Store

Valley-based Turn It Up! remains a successful outpost of old-school music-buying.

By Matthew Dube

He stole the entire Bob Dylan section.

The grizzled and affable gentleman—think Jeff Bridges in Crazy Heart—in the oversized Celtics warm-up jacket was a fixture for several days in early 2001. He'd come into the Northampton Turn It Up! soon after I'd hung the Open sign and spend his mornings listening to music and chatting about everything from the weather to Kevin McHale to Fred Eaglesmith.

Then one day, as I was on the phone with another customer, he hurriedly disappeared up the stairs and onto the street. Instinctively I went and checked out the D section, as he'd previously been relaxing at one of the listening stations with a large pile of live Dylan CDs. Sure enough, it was empty. He'd ripped us off.

I sprinted out of the shop and found him—and the stack of Dylan—in the alleyway behind the store. Later I spoke with a policeman, recommended a few jazz CDs for someone's birthday, bought three boxes of dusty LPs, and helped an elderly man call a cab.

Just a typical day in the wacky life of a record store employee.......

Read the rest here: http://www.valleyadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=11462

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A comprehensive report about record conventions and record collecting, certainly worth the time to read:

Preamble / By Way of Introduction

This paper represents a component of my research into vinyl record fairs and vinyl record collecting, work that has been ongoing for close to three years now. I was first drawn to record fairs as a burgeoning collector, but my research interest in records has grown beyond the phenomenological aspects of the consumption and collecting of musical recordings. Indeed, the question “Why do people collect records?” I find to be unsatisfying, if not because the answers are simple then because there are simply too many of them to be useful for a broader understanding of the forces at work.

Instead, I’m interested in what we can learn about music recordings as commodities in contemporary Western society through the study of record circulation; that is, the buying, selling, and collecting of records. What types of value and capital inform the exchange of musical recordings? To what degree are these processes of exchange dependent upon the subjective lived experiences, emotional lives, and individual interactions of and between individuals? And finally, in what ways can these subjectivities inform responsible research into musical cultures and communities?

This morning I will focus specifically on the experiences of record dealers—the collectors concerned with finding that mythical “compilation of every good song ever done by anybody” alluded to by the band LCD Soundsystem will have to wait patiently for the next conference—and my proposal, drawing from anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s concept of commodity value, is that the exchange of records at record fairs is structured and disciplined by a broad confluence of mutable values, which differ from record to record and from dealer to dealer depending on their individual circumstances, their expectations of their customers, and their business philosophies. My findings are based on ethnographic research at Chicago-area record fairs conducted over the last three years, a number of interviews with record fair dealers and organizers, and a survey of 30 vendors at a record fair in April, 2009.

Read the rest here: http://atm4.net/?p=294
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Hot Wax – Vinyl Making a Comeback

By Bryan Reed

Perched behind his old Apple laptop and a glass counter filled with stickers and buttons emblazoned with the names of punk bands, Scott Wishart is an anomaly. Lunchbox Records, the Central Avenue storefront he owns, is one of an ever-slimming number of truly independent record stores. As the posters for local shows and indie-label releases plastered on the windows of the shop can attest, Lunchbox isn’t the place to go to pick up the latest T-Pain or Taylor Swift CDs. But that’s precisely what drives Wishart’s business.

As a specialty shop, Lunchbox has been largely unaffected by the record industry’s catastrophic fall from grace that began around the turn of the millennium when a kid named Shawn Fanning developed a little computer program he called Napster. Internet file-sharing boomed, then gave way to digital music sales through services such as iTunes. All the while, CD sales busted with little help from the antagonizing efforts of the Recording Industry Association of America. Big box stores like Best Buy and Wal-Mart continually downsize the floor space devoted to music. At large, the future of recorded music looks dismal.

But at Lunchbox, business is just fine, thanks in no small part to the store’s unique and eclectic offerings—and helped along by a surprising resurgence in the popularity of the most outmoded of recording formats, vinyl records. Wishart, who has been in the music retail business since 1997, says, “I’ve always bought records, but when I first started, records were on the way out. Labels, especially big ones, weren’t even releasing them and it kind of continued that way until a few years ago.”

Read the rest of this interesting article here: http://uptownclt.com/2010/03/hot-wax-vinyl-making-a-comeback/