Geez, I haven't popped in since before Christmas, and look what is going down.
I have a few thousand lps, 45s, 78s, Edison discs and maybe a couple of magazine insert flexi discs. I also have a Bobby Sherman cardboard disc from the back of a Post cereal box. I play them, collect them, buy them, and sell them at record shows and on ebay. I never stopped buying them, and for years had a blast snapping up discs that used to cost an arm and a leg back in the late 70s. Prices fell hard in the CD years. Now they are really as popular as they were in the early 90s. Tons of younger kids have turntables and are getting into vinyl (younguns refer to them as "vinyls" which is strange) and I have been doing a nutty side biz selling turntables too.
I also have CDs, and don't argue about the durability factor. Sure there is the odd disintegrating CD, but for the most part they stay fine, or the stray abused one needs a buff out. They do break, they do get scratched and ruined, but they sound fine. Being an anal music guy I get pissed off royally at bad remixes, or just wrong mixes used on CD reissues. But that is why I kept a lot of lps when I got CDs, and I avoid Rhino comps. To that end, there are a lot of lps that I have in both stereo and mono. Lp's are a fun thing to have and collect, and there is a growing market for sales. If I get some beat stuff at a yard sale, I donate it.
But I also have come to grips with the sad state that CDs are a victim of their own success. They are a digital storage medium, and when you think of them that way they are - as most used music stores have discovered - worthless. You can bounce the files off of a factory CD onto your hard drive, ipod, or another CD or DVD. You don't have to compress them into mp3, but for a lot of the crap out there it really doesn't have any musical loss. Plus if you have bootlegs, no loss. So, faced with the double whammy of them rapidly becoming worthless from a used standpoint and that so much is available as down-loads legally or not, I have stopped buying CDs. I avoid them now. I keep what I have, and use the ipod.
Whenever I travel, I make a point of hitting a local record shop, and I am a sucker for a Goodwill or SA. I haven't seen a decent used guitar or amp in one in ten years. But I pick up $50 discs for a buck almost every week. So, to that end I have shifted focus from used basses to vinyl and stereo stuff over the last ten years. For vinyl it is a lot like used guitars 20 years ago - stuff is out there for cheap. Last year you could score clean copies of stuff like the tri-color Reprise Hendrix discs and Kinks discs for $25-50. Now they are double. Check out the closed prices on original Chuck Berry discs. When he dies? Whoa.
If you want to find good vinyl in the midwest, there is going to be a used show in Des Moines in March. That one is decent.
MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR!
