Vinyl in the Mainstream Press

[Bedroom Eyes]

From today's Philippine Daily Inquirer front page.

This is supposed to be a pic of the library at Camp John Hay. Look closely at the shelves on the left. Are those VINYL RECORDS????

Pahamak talaga iton PDI This is the Baguio Audio Boys(highlander, WiFi) top secret and we were hoping to keep it as such until we convince CJH to relinquish this garbage to us for free

[KD]

Pwede bang maging basurero din?

[Bedroom Eyes]

Pwede bang maging basurero din?

KD, pwede Yung VG,NM to M sa amin Yung the rests sa iyo

[KD]

Langya.

But, seriously, can those LPs be borrowed?

[Jon Agner]

From today's Philippine Daily Inquirer front page.

This is supposed to be a pic of the library at Camp John Hay. Look closely at the shelves on the left. Are those VINYL RECORDS????

Pahamak talaga iton PDI This is the Baguio Audio Boys(highlander, WiFi) top secret and we were hoping to keep it as such until we convince CJH to relinquish this garbage to us for free

Saan nila patutugtugin yan? eh mukhang JVC boom box lang yung nasa ilalim ng TV?

[bb3]

hi bot,
i had the chance to browse thru and play those records last year pero mukhang pinagpilian na ng mga kano before they left and turned over the lps. manipis na ang classic rock collection. the pop/r&b portion is mostly "american taste". a lot of country and western though.
the condition of the records are mostly g-vg, not unlike those you might find in radio stations.
but having said that, i still felt like a six yr old let loose in toys r us!

jon,
they had a failry decent jap "home system" to play the records with.

[Bedroom Eyes]

hi bot,
i had the chance to browse thru and play those records last year pero mukhang pinagpilian na ng mga kano before they left and turned over the lps. manipis na ang classic rock collection. the pop/r&b portion is mostly "american taste". a lot of country and western though.
the condition of the records are mostly g-vg, not unlike those you might find in radio stations.
but having said that, i still felt like a six yr old let loose in toys r us!

jon,
they had a failry decent jap "home system" to play the records with.

boy/KD,

Honestly, I have not seen and touch it yet but we came to know of this treasures(garbage ) from some friends who have worked and had connections on the old Camp John Hay of yore.

Buti ka pa nga naka " Up Close And Personal" ka na We will try to investigate this weekend the vinyl "Toy R US" collections. If there are goods news from the visit we keep it close to our heart , but if bad we will announce it to everybody

[Jon Agner]

Boy,

OK, and I thought they were just there as display. Buti naman meron sila. At least those that can get to visit CJH can listen to these records.

Thanks.

[Bedroom Eyes]

Boy,

OK, and I thought they were just there as display. Buti naman meron sila. At least those that can get to visit CJH can listen to these records.

Thanks.

Jon,

after our visit this weekend sa bahay namin(Baguio Boys) kayo makikinig

Who knows di ba

[Jon Agner]

Boy,

OK, and I thought they were just there as display. Buti naman meron sila. At least those that can get to visit CJH can listen to these records.

Thanks.

Jon,

after our visit this weekend sa bahay namin(Baguio Boys) kayo makikinig

Who knows di ba

Better, no need to go to CJH

[KD]

From the New York Times:

Make 'em sing


The man who invented album covers
By DAVID HINCKLEY


Most people who have bought any musical recordings over the past 60 years might have assumed they always came in covers, or sleeves, or jackets, that featured a colorful graphic designed to enhance the lure of the music.

They didn't. Album covers had to be invented. This was a task that largely fell to a Brooklyn kid named Alex Steinweiss.

Before Steinweiss entered the business in the 1930s, most 78-rpm records, the only kind that existed, were sold in plain brown sleeves, flimsy pieces of paper with a large round cutout so the label would show through. If the record company was ambitious, it might list other releases on the paper, as a kind of promotional afterthought.

This changed slightly around 1935, when record companies began bundling several 78-rpm discs in one package, with a cardboard outer jacket. An "album," this was called. But even then, to keep costs down, companies would mostly just stamp the name of the artist on the front.

Then in 1939, Columbia Records hired Steinweiss, a 22-year-old design whiz kid, to become its art department.

Technically, Steinweiss would recount in his 2000 autobiography, "For The Record," that he was hired to create catchy ads and promotional posters for store displays. But he had his eye elsewhere. The company was wasting its greatest promotional opportunity, he argued, by blandly stamping a name on the front of albums. They looked like tombstones, he said. Why not make 'em sing?

So he invented the album cover.

His bosses liked his designs from his very first project, a Rodgers and Hart collection. But what sold them wasn't art, it was numbers. After he redesigned the cover for an album of Beethoven's Ninth, sales rose 894% in six months.

That won him the green light to create cover designs for everything from Bartok to Broadway to Bessie Smith.

His designs were influenced by the art schools with which he had worked, but they were also his own: stylized images with clean lines and bold colors that often exaggerated some feature to highlight what Steinweiss, himself a deep fan, felt was the essence of the music.

For an album of boogie-woogie piano, he drew a keyboard played by two huge hands, one black and one white - a subtle but unmistakable acknowledgment that boogie-woogie brought together both sides of a racially divided country.

For a Kostelanetz recording of George Gershwin's "Rhapsody In Blue," he drew a small piano under a small street lamp, with a huge silhouette of a city skyline towering behind.

He did all this, moreover, with tools that were as primitive as 78-rpm records. Steinweiss worked with rulers, T-squares, pencils, paste and glue on a drawing table. He could use photographs only sparingly because they were expensive to reproduce, and printing technology severely limited his color palette.

But he didn't care. He knew exactly what he was doing because he'd been working up to doing it all his life.

Steinweiss was born March 24, 1917, on the lower East Side, the son of Eastern European immigrants who moved to Brooklyn when his father, Max, became established as a women's shoe designer and mother Betty as a seamstress. Max immersed young Alex in opera and classical music and in 1930 he enrolled at Abraham Lincoln High, where his visual-arts teacher was Leon Friend, a key figure in galvanizing a generation of graphic designers who would one day define the look of everything from pop culture to advertising.

Friend's students were known as "The Art Squad," and after Steinweiss graduated from Lincoln and then Parsons, he became one of the bright lights. He worked under various design stars and became somewhat well-known, though hardly rich. By the late 1930s, he was making just $30 a week, barely enough to support himself and his new bride, Blanche Wisnipolsky, whom he married in 1938 after a six-year courtship that began when they met at Brighton Beach.

Columbia hired Steinweiss as part of a bold marketing push that included selling 78-rpm albums for $1 instead of $2. Steinweiss' bold designs, the label hoped, would get this campaign noticed.

It did, though he soon turned his brush to a more-urgent cause: winning World War II. After he enlisted, the Navy decided he would be more valuable behind an art table than an anti-aircraft gun and he spent the war in New York turning out informational and morale-boosting posters.

One showed a group of black Navy recruits with the message: "Advance through training: Skill commands respect." Another said: "Hands off the Americas," and showed the body of a bloody-handed Nazi hanging from a scaffold.

When Steinweiss returned to Columbia after the war, engineers were finishing up the development of 331/3-rpm records, which soon would be sold in 12-inch jackets, which for his purposes simply meant a bigger canvas.

By now, every label had followed Columbia's lead and given their albums designed covers. Steinweiss began to freelance, and in 1954 he left Columbia. He worked in music, advertising, magazines and other design areas before retiring in 1972 to concentrate on his own art.

He was still around when album covers were downsized to compact disk and cassette covers, which he and other connoisseurs felt negated much of the impact. But, meanwhile, it helped build and sell the modern music biz.

Originally published on November 3, 2005

[marcus]

nice article KD. very informative.

[KD]

From The Detroit News:



Motown vinyls grow in popularity, price

by Nathan Hurst

DETROIT -- The smooth, soulful sounds that epitomized the Motor City's music culture during the height of its golden age are making record stores here the center of a worldwide scramble to snap up the hits of yesteryear the way they were first recorded -- on vinyl.

Even in today's digital age where people increasingly tune in to their music with gadgets like the iPod, a growing number of enthusiasts both young and old say Detroit's rich musical past is best heard on the LPs and 45s that for decades recorded the sounds of the times.

Ironically, Motown music's following has waned in the city itself. But record sellers say a healthy interest from collectors across the nation -- and abroad -- has made the vinyl pressed here decades ago a hot commodity, with many rare records that once sold out of car trunks for quarters going for up to thousands of dollars today.

Take a once little-known hit like "Why Can't There Be Love" by crooner Dee Edwards. The 2 minute and 41 second track failed to make a big splash in the United States when it was released in Detroit decades ago.

But soul and funk-focused DJs in Europe have seen such a demand for spins of that little 45 in recent years that what was once a relic in many Detroit attics now commands up to $1,000 in good condition. Jimmy J. Barnes' "I Think I've Got a Good Chance" is also a highly valued collectible.

Those are just some of the gems customers can find at Detroiter Brad Hales' unassuming People's Records and Collectibles, on the corner of Second and Forest in Detroit. It's a store where the staff is young and the sounds are old.

Hales has seen the surge in demand for Detroit sounds since he went into business in an old brick apartment building three years ago. There, underneath a haze of incense, Hales and his crew of connoisseurs help customers peruse the mind-boggling selection of music seared on the big vinyl and shellac discs.

Customers there and at other vinyl shops throughout Metro Detroit are snapping up the wax impressions of Motor City music rarely heard on American radio.

A musical hotbed

Sure, hits from big-name groups like The Temptations and The Four Tops still draw buzz from beginning collectors. But the real treasures at Detroit's record stores are the tracks cut at the hundreds of independent studios that once dotted the city.

"Detroit in the 1960s was known as this incredible bastion for all things music," Hales said. "The public schools had music education K-12. It was common for these really talented groups of young musicians to get together, cut a track or two and sell the records around the city. That's the stuff that really sets Detroit apart."

Tunes to move to

Hales has one general rule for what records command the biggest prices: if you've heard of the artist, it's going to cost less.

Rarities like the 45s from Edwards or Jimmy J. Barnes' "I Think I've Got a Good Chance" can cost willing collectors a small fortune.

Hermon Weems, one of the men who helped many of those Detroit musicians rocket to success in their days, said records from the city's best musicians had a simple formula that has kept them popular.

"If it didn't make you move, it wasn't a hit," Weems said wryly over a rum and Coke.

Weems worked as a writer and producer for Smokey Robinson and the Jackson Five at a number of labels in Detroit. He went to Cass Tech high school with jazz great Alice Coltrane -- "She was a pretty young thing," he recalled -- which was then a bastion for the city's young creative musicians.

It was from there that Weems, 69, and many others behind the Motown sound built their giant webs of contacts, which included greats like Alice Coltrane, Miles Davis, Jackie Wilson and Yusef Lateef.

Those greats quickly rose to stardom, but they were only a part of the music scene that collectors now want to get their hands on.

[KD]

I just noticed tonight that the new TV commercial for Close Up Spa Moisture toothpaste involves a boy and a girl meeting in a record store. Yes, a store that sells vinyl LPs! Were my eyes fooling me?

I wonder if the brand manager or the ad agency creative guy is an audiophile/WS member...

[zetroce]

I just noticed tonight that the new TV commercial for Close Up Spa Moisture toothpaste involves a boy and a girl meeting in a record store. Yes, a store that sells vinyl LPs! Were my eyes fooling me?

I wonder if the brand manager or the ad agency creative guy is an audiophile/WS member...

Hahaha, KD, pareho yata pinanonood natin!!!

Napansin ko nga rin, puro LPs. Is it a local advertisement or was just lifted from somewhere else?

[KD]

http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/ret ... arly_N.htm

The above referenced USA Today article is about personal finance and has nothing to do with vinyl. But the guy whose portfolio was being reviewed is a vinyl lover, so his article deserves mention in this thread.

[arnoldc]

Here's another one lately - http://www.smh.com.au/news/music/were-h ... 17972.html

"I'm finding that kids are starting to come back into the shop thanks to bands like Wolfmother citing their influences as Led Zeppelin, or similar," Thomson says. "There's also been a bit of an '80s revival - Duran Duran, Adam and the Ants, the Eurythmics - kids are coming in and buying them on vinyl."

Barry Scott, the owner of Egg Records, has also seen a surge in vinyl sales. "Business is fine," he says. "We also sell reconditioned turntables, and I sell one every week or two. It figures they're going to buy vinyl."

[redspecial]

http://www.usatoday.com/money/perfi/ret ... arly_N.htm

The above referenced USA Today article is about personal finance and has nothing to do with vinyl. But the guy whose portfolio was being reviewed is a vinyl lover, so his article deserves mention in this thread.

Gosh! The guy here is even holding a 1959 pressing of Miles Davis' Kind Of Blue! The back cover and the 6eyes mono label betrays him hehehehe....

[KD]

From the Los Angeles Times:

Some retailers give vinyl records a spin


Fred Meyer manager Dave Parker prepares to play the Beatles Abbey Road record at a display in the Portland, Ore. store.


By Sarah Skidmore, The Associated Press
June 10, 2008

PORTLAND, ORE. -- It was a fortuitous typo for the Fred Meyer retail chain.

This spring, an employee intending to order a special CD-DVD edition of R.E.M.'s latest release "Accelerate" inadvertently entered the "LP" code instead. Soon boxes of vinyl discs showed up at several stores.

Some sent them back. But a handful put them on the shelves, and 20 LPs sold the first day.

The Portland-based company, owned by the Kroger Co., realized the error might not be so bad after all. Fred Meyer is now testing vinyl sales at 60 of its stores in Oregon, Washington and Alaska. The company says it plans to roll out vinyl in July in all its stores that sell music.

Other retailers are giving vinyl a spin too. Best Buy Co. is testing sales at some stores. And Amazon.com Inc., which has sold vinyl for most of the 13 years it has been in business online, created a special vinyl-only section last fall.

The bestseller so far at Fred Meyer is The Beatles album "Abbey Road." But bands including the White Stripes, the Foo Fighters, Metallica and Pink Floyd are selling well, the company says.

"It's not just a nostalgia thing," said Melinda Merrill, spokeswoman for Fred Meyer. "The response from customers has just been that they like it, they feel like it has a better sound."

According to the Recording Industry Assn. of America, manufacturers' shipments of LPs jumped more than 36% from 2006 to 2007 to more than 1.3 million. Shipments of CDs dropped more than 17% during the same period to 511 million, as they lost some ground to digital formats.

The resurgence of vinyl centers on a long-standing debate over analog versus digital sound. Digital recordings capture samples of sound and place them very close together as a complete package that sounds nearly identical to continuous sound to many people.

Analog recordings on most LPs are continuous, which produces a truer sound -- though, paradoxically, some new LP releases are being recorded and mixed digitally but delivered analog. Some purists also argue that the compression required to allow loudness in some digital formats weakens the quality.

But it's not just about the sound. Audiophiles say they also want the format's overall experience -- the sensory experience of putting the needle on the record, the feeling of side A and side B and the joy of lingering over the liner notes.

"I think music products should be more than just music," said Isaac Hudson, a 28-year-old vinyl fan in Portland.

The interest seems to be catching on. Turntable sales are picking up, and the few remaining record pressers say business is booming.

But the LP isn't going to muscle out CDs or iPod soon. Nearly 450 million CDs were sold in 2007, versus just under 1 million LPs, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Nielsen says vinyl album sales could reach 1.6 million this year.

[bayonic]

... not mainstream but this is a short documentary on " the world's largest collection " ....

video here :
http://www.vimeo.com/1546186


got 3 million dollars ?
http://thegreatestmusiccollection.com/