A little bit o’ downtime

Posted by Daniel Stout on Wed 28 Nov 2007 at 7:41 AM

I’m sorry if you saw the above message recently. The excellent webhost that powers this site had a bit of rare, unexpected downtime – on Cyber Monday no less. At any rate, things seems to be up and running again. Email is coming in. Email is going out. And my websites are accessible again.

In other news, I got my annual webhosting bill, and so I decided to bring back the advertising on the site. It was mostly unobtrusive, and frankly, it paid for my hosting bill and then some. This isn’t really a for-profit activity for me, but it’s good to have the lease on my web real estate covered.

I finally got the second wave of my Halloween 2007 CD mixes mailed out the week of Thanksgiving. If you’re wanting some good tunes from either This Is Not Dubai or Halloween 2007 and aren’t already on my mailing list, just drop me a line. It’s a pretty time consuming process to make mix CDs, but it’s definitely worth it.

In vinyl news, I’m seeing increasing numbers of albums with download coupons for grabbing an electronic version of the album in MP3 format. A bunch of the indies like Matador, Beggars Banquest, and Polyvinyl all seem to use the same service for the download capability. I had a download for Of Montreal’s Sunlandic Twins, but the .zip file was corrupted. The record label was quick to respond and correct the mistake – the file they had uploaded to their servers was in fact a corrupt file. I haven’t seen or heard of any other groups doing what Interpol did with their most recent album by including the actual CD with the vinyl copy. There is definitely a resurgent market in vinyl. The amount of re-issues and new vinyl coming out is amazing. The market for vinyl hasn’t been this good for at least 15 years. The ’90s were a dismal time to find new vinyl, but wow! ’00s, you’re great!

There seems to be two tiers in the new vinyl market though. Most of the new records I see at the record shop run $12 to $22 depending. But in the catalogs I get, there is a lot of older audiophile re-releases coming in at a staggering $30 or more a disc. Most of the $30 vinyl though is artists from the ’60s and ’70s, that is, older music for an older, wealthier consumer. These audiophile releases skew towards the bland stuff you’ve seen a million times, but at least in some of the ’80s and later vinyl being re-released there is a lot of quirky, strange stuff coming out. I mean, the world doesn’t need another Greatest Hits from Simon & Garfunkel.

What I’d like to know is who is today’s vinyl buyer? Is it 30s+ guys like me who have always had a turntable since the ’80s? Or is it the 20-something crowd, newly turned on to the groove of analog? But as great as their selection is, I don’t see many people looking though the vinyl at the Exclusive Co. It must be selling for them to have as large of a selection as they do, but who’s buying?

Besides vinyl, it’s also gotten really easy to find turntables. The current rage is turntables with USB connectors that you can connect to a computer. That’s an enticing idea. Pro-Ject has a phono preamplifier with built-in USB as well, if you’re looking to go a higher-fi route.

Tags: cyber monday · downtime · vinyl

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