‘You don’t have the American version, the one with the extra track, from 1971, do you?” asked the burly middle-aged bloke in what might once have been a Rolling Stones T-shirt.
All around him, knowledgeable collectors of vinyl – men of a certain age, generally – were having roughly the same conversation with equally knowledgeable dealers.
This was the exhibition hall at Glasgow’s Royal Concert Hall yesterday as the latest Music Fair began its weekend residency. At one point, a man walked in with a rolled-up array of original Beatles posters. Nearby, people were wondering whether to spend £110 on a Japanese-issue, red vinyl, mono copy of the early Beatles album, With The Beatles, or £80 on a framed HMV presentation marking one million UK sales of Dido’s album, No Angel. Bootleg recordings of live concerts by everyone from Bob Dylan to the Rolling Stones were also attracting interest.
The fair, which continues today, is part of a network of such events across the UK, and the organisers view them as the future of music shopping.
The collectors are in good company. According to the Official Charts Company and the BPI, the voice of the UK recorded music business, vinyl sales increased by 5% last year, although they still account for a mere sliver of the overall market. Vinyl album sales stood at 219,449, just 0.2% of the market, while seven-inch singles, at 222,193, represented just 0.1%. Some 112.9 million physical albums were sold in 2009, as opposed to 16.1m digital albums. Digital, however, has had an increasingly substantial impact on singles sales. In 2009 there were 149.7m download sales, compared with a mere 3.1m physical sales.
“Vinyl is definitely thriving,” said John Wallace, manager at the organiser, Leicester-based VIP Events. “People are back out there, collecting it. It’s the younger generation that downloads, because they don’t know anything else.”
Despite shifting trends in music, vintage artists who all embarked on their careers in the 1960s remain the most sought-after. “The ones who always stand out are Pink Floyd, the Rolling Stones, The Beatles and Bob Dylan,” adds Wallace, himself a collector of soul records, “though there will be odd new records by certain other artists which might fetch some money. We’ve also noticed that coloured vinyl seven-inch singles are being snapped up.”
Certain items are so rare that, if found in mint condition, could command respectable sums from collectors.
“The Beatles released a single, Please Please Me, in 1963. The first 50 copies or so came out with gold lettering on the black ‘Parlophone’ disc label, on both the mono and stereo versions. If you get a stereo version with the gold lettering, you could be talking about £3000 or £4000. If it’s the mono version, you might get about £300 or £400 for it.”
Edinburgh-based dealer George Robertson, who specialises in blues, jazz and 1960s psychedelia vinyl, said: “There was a downturn in vinyl through the 1990s but there has been an upsurge over the last five years. A lot of people swear by vinyl’s sound, and then there’s the importance of physically owning an artefact from the period in which it was manufactured: it is not like buying a remastered CD.”
Robertson, who is planning to open a music-and-art shop in Stockbridge in the New Year, observes that the internet has impacted on dealers’ ability to acquire fresh stock.
“One of the issues is that people who used to come to fairs to sell stuff to dealers are now selling it themselves on the internet, and getting better prices than if they sold it to dealers. The middleman has gone,” he said.
Robertson concedes that music fairs are even bigger business on the Continent. “The main fairs, in places such as Utrecht, Milan and Barcelona, are big tourist draws. They’re often sponsored by local authorities and can attract between 25,000 or 30,000 people.”
The Glasgow fair is small by comparison but no-one was complaining, least of all the man in the Stones T-shirt, who found what he was after.
SOURCE: http://www.heraldscotland.com
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