Money For Nothing and Your Chicks For Free: The Update

It wasn't but a week ago that I asked the question, is the bubble about to burst? And just yesterday, the news breaks that Sony will be opening their own vinyl pressing plant and begin pressing their own catalog.

That's right folks, the same company that helped popularized and mobilized cassette tapes with their Walkman and co-developed the CD format which arguably contributed to the steep decline in vinyl sales in the 90s is now wanting to press the very format it tried to make extinct just because it is profitable.

I said it a week ago regarding vinyl outselling digital formats;

"Corporations take note of this type of information. And, doing what corporations do, they figure out how to make a metric shit-ton of cash from it. As a result, we get a bigger market to pick from which is typically good for us consumers."

But, being the critical thinker I am, I also asked the questions:

"If everyone, meaning the millions of fish in the ocean, is manufacturing vinyl, how long will it be before the manufacturing behemoth produces more than the consumer can pay for? How long before the first manufacturer shutters it's doors? How long before our local record stores have more vinyl on their shelves than they can sell. How long will the consumer interest in vinyl support this micro-economy? Does it all come crashing down when our next recession hits?"

What is not known is Sony's entire business plan around vinyl. We know they are going to pressing vinyl, but what we don't know is if they will be pressing only new music released or if they will be pressing their back catalog as well.

If Sony focuses on releasing new music and music from artists that came into popularity after CD and digital formats became a super power, artists like, Katy Perry, Hillary Duff, Chevelle and others, they might do fine as the vinyl market is not flooded with the likes of Katy Perry.

But, if Sony begins reissuing their back catalog of artists that were popular, and mass produced on vinyl in the pre-1990 era, from artists, like Jimi Hendrix, Bob Dylan, David Bowie, Judas Priest, Paul McCartney and Santana as a few examples, they could end up destroying their business plan before it gets off the ground.

This is because new vinyl retails for between $15 and $35 (for the limited colored vinyl releases, I have seen some new vinyl as high as $80) these days. But many of the artists with extensive catalogs that were mass produced before 1990 are already saturated and available at a low cost in the vinyl market. Quality original pressings or reissues can be had for as low as $2 an album and as high as $20. Averaging, based on what paid for my collection of 800+ albums, I paid around $2.41 per album. In come cases, I paid as much as $60 (Metallica's Hardwired box set), but in a lot of cases I paid ZERO.

I got my original pressing of Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited for free, so why would I pay even $20 for it? Because it's a new? Because it's limited? Because it's RED? While I am sure there are consumers in the market that fall for that limited, colored or new is better, I am not one of them.

What the future holds in not clear. I don't know if this announcement by Sony is the needle that will eventually burst the vinyl bubble or not, as only time will tell. But I am sure of one thing; new vinyl costs consumers a lot more money than older pressings that are currently flooding the market and consumers are unpredictable and strange in their shopping habits.

Now I need to go spin my Highway 61 Revisited.