Do you ever wonder if people are speculating on vinyl purchases from less popular artists/groups?
Just suggesting that new artists may have a smaller fan base so those who see them (and another few dozen) as potentially successful might be hedging bets on vinyl they’ll never play but could sell at a bit profit down the line for rare items.
Others I know disagree, but I actually think many of those donating items to charity will be quite unaware of the value of rare items - these ‘business minded’ charities will be happy to sell you piles of poor quality vinyl for a quid or two, but anything remotely valuable or ‘classic’ is now priced at silly prices for local shops. I know they sell the expensive stuff online but it seems pretty unlikely that the average punter browsing a local charity shop is going to drop several hundred notes on an album that just randomly happens to be there. I find it all very odd.
OK, I’ll show my ognorance, what is it?
Why are so many of these labelled gift aid? Does that mean that non ‘cash’ donations are eligible for that too?
I do find it amusing that people spending thousands on cables and tens of thousands on hi fi equipment are baulking at paying £25/35 for a record to play on it.
It’s a bit like buying a £100,000 sports car and moaning about the cost of petrol.
Any rare collectible will command a high price and any collector who wants that rare item and who has the means will pay the most eye watering prices. Look up the prices paid on discogs for rare vinyl.
I’d do that!
(But I wouldn’t buy such a car new car new, rather If I were to have bought such a car I’d be likely to have paid no more than a third the price, maybe a good bit less.)
Indeed AC same as cash donations to say the DEC - worth 25p on the pound.
Individuals are limited to 4X the tax they paid in that Tax Year so Rishi & Co can Gift Aid a helluva lot more than most of us. Not sure how on earth HMRC can or do track it tho - most people will donate to a number of different charities and I don’t believe personal Gift Aid numbers are common.
Bob,
I can see where you’re coming from but the issue here is that most of us would agree that when you have access to a top flight turntable, streamer and CD player you are basically going to get roughly equivalent quality sound from each.
Tidal is the cheapest option - I could stream Daisy Jones and many other things on that without specifically paying anything.
CD is around a tenner for that album - you get a physical disc you own, all the artwork and all the lyrics for that and you can easily transfer it to a personal media player, a NAS for streamed replay or any other location of your choice.
The vinyl is £35-£40 and frankly I think at that level it’s questionable value for money really.
Also it’s worth bearing in mind that most of us buy many albums a year and want to build or extend a collection on our chosen format of hundreds of favourite albums.
To buy say 50 albums a year on CD costs around £500 - a manageable sum for many people
To buy 50 vinyl LP’s a year at £35 each costs £1750 - that’s £150 a month which is starting to sound like quite a lot to many people
To achieve a collection of 500 CD’s is around £5000, while to build a collection of 500 vinyl LP’s is going to set you back £17500 - that is a heck of a lot of money out of the family budget.
You comparison with the sports car thing isn’t really correct. If you run a sports car you simply have to feed it petrol to use it and all the petrol stations charge basically the same price. If a petrol firm set up which was charging 3.5x as much as the others (the way vinyl costs 3.5x as much as CD) they wouldn’t stay in business very long because nobody would go there!
So I think my suggestion that the record companies are exploiting the excess demand for vinyl and pricing many consumers out of the market quite deliberately is I think a fair one.
The only hope is that more pressing plants and lacquer cutting places may eventually set up and supply may more closely equal demand, until then I think we’re stuck with the price gouging.
Alley_Cat, I totally agree there are certainly opportunist speculators out there who are doing just as you suggest. Also Discogs while a great resource for tracking down old records has I think pushed prices higher because it has enabled everyone to see how much things are selling for and to match or exceed that price with their offering. It used to be quite difficult to find out what a record was worth, now it’s all too easy. In short there are now very few bargain records around on vinyl anymore because all record shops price to the Discogs level (plenty on CD though! 
The thing that is odd to me is that second hand vinyl stores are now charging say £15-£20 for a bog standard copy of say Fleetwood Mac Rumours in average condition, pressed in the 1980s and you can go and buy a brand new 180gm vinyl copy in HMV for £17!! I get why the original 1977 USA or UK pressings might command high prices but I just can’t see who in their right mind deliberately pays more than new for a very commonplace 80’s pressing of the album…
JonathanG
It’s how quickly prices rise that gets me … this was £32 on grey vinyl when I bought it last June from the same place 
J - I think some care with emotive words is required here, as what you’ve outlined isn’t ‘gouging’ IMV, in that the product isn’t one with an inelastic demand e.g. like basic foodstuffs, drugs etc, where simply ‘pricing-up’ by a monopoly supplier to achieve what’s sometimes termed ‘super profit’ is morally dubious from a societal & regulatory perspective. As you outline, you can access the same content through different delivery channels too – unless you think I must buy that new vinyl pressing at any price 
Or are you suggesting that some of the supply chain parties are ‘gouging’ due to very limited production sites & capacity?
Faced with limited production resources and across the board input costs increases, one would expect prices to rise – but not perhaps 40%? In relative terms, vinyl is the most expensive medium to produce and deliver to market. Whether there is some strategic intent from the recordcos remains to be seen e.g. the top brass may be saying we need an enhanced return from the vinyl market, not just trying to exploit demand – unless you’re inside the organisation, one doesn’t know.
What will become clear in time though is how elastic the demand curve is for new vinyl, which falls as a highly discretionary consumer purchase – and consumers vote with their £ & $'s in these things. Unfortunately, these things have a lag, with the ‘in the middle’ retailer bearing the risk of buying-in stock and then being unable to shift it – and if they discount it back to say $30 (v MSRP $35 per the YT vid), they’ll likely to making only $1/2 per sale (v ~$5 now). Last I knew the recordco didn’t accept returns!?
There could be other influences too e.g. whether catalogues have been bought-in, and ‘returns’ need to be made – but the same thoughts apply.
Hi Jonathan. You make very valid comments. When I buy new cd’s say from Chandos they would be say £11.50 each but if you are collecting classical music from certain musicians or conductors you normally have to buy second hand as they would be out of production in which case the average price is say £3 - £5 from Discogs, Amazon or eBay. I get a lot of great cd’s from charity and National Trust shops generally at 50p each. I like having the cd’s with their booklets and even 40 year old cd’s nearly always play perfectly. So for an average of say £5 per CD it is affordable for me being a Yorkshire man with short arms and deep pockets!
Happy Listener,
I take your view on board and fully accept that vinyl is almost certainly the most expensive medium to produce (I have no specific figures to hand) and I do accept that the shortage of cutting and pressing capacity will have caused everybody in the chain to put their prices up. I should be clear I am absolutely not blaming the record shops here, I actually don’t know what the margin on new vinyl is (does anybody know?) but when Warner’s and Universal simultaneously put prices up on many titles from £25 to £35/£40 literally overnight then I am afraid I do smell a rat!!
There are a number of record store owners on youtube moaning about these price rises which suggests the price increases are only going to give record stores pretty much the same margins but on lower volumes of sales. I read somewhere that global demand for vinyl is around 350m units while current production capacity is 160m units so my guess is that the record companies have raised prices to bring the two closer into balance (and to make exceptional profits in the process…)
I did find an intriguing new company being talked about called ElasticStage. If they really can deliver what they are proposing, then this sounds like it could be the answer to a prayer for the whole industry - better sound quality, lower cost manufacturing and the ability to literally make vinyl on demand. Intriguing…
Can they deliver??? If everything they say is true I think they’re going to very successful/rich indeed!
RWC - Sounds like the National trust is proving a big asset for your collection!! I will certainly investigate further.
Brg,
JonathanG
Hi JG,
There does appear to be a very large rodent here – and it would be interesting to know what market shares the likes of Warners, Universal & Sony have, and whether in overall market terms, they define as being an oligopoly i.e. within this limited market they may be/can exercise influence, which they cannot exercise in a fully competitive open market, even to the point of concert pricing and exercising monopolistic behaviours — which US consumer legislation hates. Sadly, individual artistes and access to their output won’t play here.
I wonder if some major retailers will push back on these increases, especially if their absolute margins have been pegged(?), which is a nonsense, as there cannot be the expectation of selling the same units through – and market sentiment (e.g. the hipsters perhaps) can be very powerful here.
This will take a while to play out…probably c.18m’s.
In real inflation-adjusted terms, LP’s are often cheaper than in the past. It could be that the forum demographic like myself, remember buying albums when they were £2-4, whereas the younger “vinyls” buyers have been used to paying more “21st century” prices.
This has translated into optimistically higher prices in the second-hand market as well.
I am very selective now with my occasional vinyl purchases, and buy more, albeit not many, CD’s than vinyl. Even here, second-hand prices seem to have risen.
Whether this trend will continue is debatable, I feel: the market (fashion and disposable income) may well decide.
Dear Jonathan G and Bobthebuilder,
I agree with the initial points made by both of you regarding the pricing of LPs. In the final analyiis, we pay fairly daft prices for our gear, so we might also choose to pay fairly daft prices for LPs, even if CDs and streaming might offer similar quality. None of it is entirely rational or logical.
However, Bob, you introduce another issue - that of the “rare collectible” LP. Here, my earlier comment about very expensive LPs which “will never be assulted by a stylus” pertains. Of course, I’m not inside the mind of someone who would pay £1,000 for a 20-year-old record, but I suspect that owning such an artifact is not only about the music. There is a different process going on here and it’s not just about something so mundane as “investment”. We only have to look at the art world to see what can happen.
Da Vinci’s painting Salvator Mundi is the most expensive painting ever sold, at $450 million in 2017. Intrinsically, it has little value - oil paint on wood and little bigger than two LP covers, but that’s missing the point. The execution of the image is sublime, but not 450 times better than a picture selling for $1 million. It’s not entirely clear where the painting is now, but secure storage in climate-controlled conditions is likely. This is common with many ultra-expensive works of art and other “collectibles” - to some people, owning it is more important than seeing it and, in this case, a future increase in price is probably unlikely.
Sometimes we refer to our “collection” of LPs, or CDs, but the concept of “collecting” can be taken to extremes by the well-funded or the passionate and their reasons for doing so are sometimes disconnected from the original function of the item. Consequently, I suspect that ultra-expensive LPs, paintings and even vintage cars, aren’t meant to be listened to, displayed, or driven!
Best wishes,
Brian D.
I remember watching an episode of the Antiques Roadshow featuring a young man in Horsham who was known to a friend.
After his father had died they unearthed in their quite humble house hidden away one of the finest and greatest collections of silver ever seen on the Roadshow and as the story emerged the father had kept the family in poverty whilst collecting the silver.
He must have collected, stored and looked at the collection in secret there was though a happy ending as the collection was sold and the family where made very comfortable.
Tell me about it how about a single LP Mobile Fidelity ‘Thriller’ Michael Jackson
124 GBP for a lyric sheet and a blank piece of white paper! plus the sound doesnt seem any different to my 2014 180g copy or my original remastered CD. or how about the Eagles ‘One of Those Nights’ 150 +or the Steely Dan back catalogue
About time we stoppped being ripped off
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