Giving in to the power of vinyl: Unless you’re that Brazilian businessman who is trying obtain every record on the planet (he’s up to about 6 million) just because he can, record collectors pretty much have to possess a wide and eclectic taste in music. No doubt that applies to my own collection (a little less than 6 million) that features plenty of jazz, blues, rock and soundtrack albums. That doesn’t necessarily mean all the records in my collection are actually good.
Is Bandcamp the Holy Grail of Online Record Stores?: Bandcamp, which started in 2008 and is run out of a number of small offices in San Francisco, Brooklyn and elsewhere, became profitable in 2012 and sells a record every five seconds. It grew 35 percent last year and has paid $169 million to artists, according to its website. Its chief executive, Ethan Diamond, mentioned in an interview that “plenty of artists” have made more than $100,000 each through it, and all of them get the same deal: The site keeps 15 percent of each sale. (By comparison, iTunes takes about 30 percent, and going that route also requires being on a label or working with an independent distributor, which takes another cut.)
15 Places to Scope Out Vintage Vinyl Records in Greater Cleveland: Are you a music collector, or just appreciate the earthy sounds from older vinyl records? This list of shops can help you in your search for good music.
Music Matters Jazz announces 13 new Blue Note Records vinyl reissues for 2016: Music Matters Jazz has announced their final round of new Blue Note Records vinyl reissue titles, and it’s a whopper. For many years, Music Matters has been crafting the definitive Blue Note reissue series, with sound quality that rivals or even exceeds the originals. Now, the last titles are being announced. It looks like the company will stay around as long as there is stock on hand, but there are no new Blue Note titles that will be reissued after these.
William S. Burroughs’s rare tape experiments released on vinyl: Turns out Naked Lunch author and Beat Generation icon William S. Burroughs was also an experimental musician. Throughout the 50s and 60s, Burroughs worked with tape, cutting up and rearranging recordings of his and others’ voices into dizzying rhythmic collages and unsettling ambient slurries. While it wouldn’t pass for true experimental music today (rearranging recordings, or chopping samples, is maybe the most common method of music production), at the time Burroughs’s method was quite new and radical, maybe even more so than the purely textual “cut-up” technique he made famous in his Nova Trilogy.
