This company lets you press human ashes to vinyl: You can either put licensed music on it, previously recorded spoken words or leave it audibly empty to revel in the cracks and pops as the record spins. The service also allows you to have personal sleeves designed, including details such as date of birth. The UK-based company founded by Jason Leach says: “When the album that is life finally reaches the end, wouldn’t it be nice to keep that record spinning for eternity?”
Bleachers’ Jack Antonoff Writing a Book About Record Stores: Bleachers frontman and record producer Jack Antonoff is writing a book called Record Store, the New York Times reports. The book is still in its planning stages, but is set to be “a heavily illustrated anthology of essays, interviews, photographs, and ephemera that will pay tribute to the cherished, and endangered, cultural institution.” Rather than emphasizing the record shop as a place for crate-diggers, Antonoff’s book will focus heavier on how the record shop fostered a community for normal music consumers. It’s also about about ’90s CD culture. Antonoff plans on releasing Record Store in 2017.
Disconest gives you the key & BPM of every record on Discogs: The brainchild of Iclandic tech-wizard and music obsessive Karl Tryggvason, Disconest should prove to be an invaluable tool for vinyl DJs, who often have to rely on their own judgement for working out BPM and key info. For fans of truly underground music, there might be some records that the site doesn’t work on–if it’s not on Discogs or The Echonest, it won’t give any info–but with millions of tracks between them, it’s rare that you’ll have trouble.
NEH grant will preserve Afrika Bambaataa archive: Bambaataa’s archive comprises hundreds of boxes, including 450 containers with 20,000 vinyl records, many of them annotated by Bambaataa and numbered in the order he acquired them. This record collection helps tell the story of hip-hop’s emergence and development. Once cataloged, the CHHC will make a complete list of Bambaataa’s legendary vinyl available to the public, and place selected images of his annotated album sleeves online.
Rebirth of vinyl sees sales overtake the internet: Musicians make more from records than they do from songs streamed on sites like YouTube and Spotify: Artists in America earned $416 million (£294 million) in royalty revenue from records last year, according to figures from the Recording Industry Association of America. Free music streamed through the web through sites like YouTube and Spotify brought in just $385 million (£282 million) over the same period. Musicians are riding a wave of renewed interest in vinyl and in the US 17 million discs were sold in 2015, a rise of 28 per cent on the year before.
Toronto’s Viryl sets the record straight on vinyl: This would be a sweet comeback story for a beloved industry if it wasn’t one marred with a big issue: production. From independent local jazz musicians to major record labels representing worldwide pop acts, attempts to have vinyl LPs available on shelves on an album’s release day has proved to be a major problem. The reason is that record presses haven’t been built in decades. Brave technicians have attempted to refurbish and rebuild, but the aging machinery simply hasn’t been able to keep up with demand. That is until now.
