As Vinyl Records Boom, New Delivery Services Get in the Groove
A handful of companies are making sure that music lovers have access to the records they want—and the ones they don't know they want.
Photo: Getty Images
2017 proved to be a watershed moment for the music industry, which can’t seem to go a decade without one. A report from BuzzAngle found that a whopping 377 billion songs and albums were streamed, a 50% increase overall, and that downloads fell dramatically. If people seem less and less interested in actually buying and owning the music they listen to, one of the small saviors has been the continued increase in vinyl sales. As Billboard and Nielsen Music reported, more than 14 million records were sold in 2017, a 9% increase that accounted for almost a quarter of all physical music sales.
Plenty of factors are driving the renaissance of what was once considered a dying medium, like turntables popping up for sale at Bed, Bath & Beyond and LPs hitting the shelves at Barnes & Noble and Urban Outfitters. One small but important driver has been the rise of vinyl subscription services, online outlets like Vinyl Me, Please and Vnyl that send members one or more albums each month for a fee.
Read: 10 Classic Rock Albums You Should Own on Vinyl
The appeal of these services isn’t hard to grasp. For folks looking to amass a vinyl collection for the first time, it removes a lot of the guesswork about what titles to pick up. And for already addicted music junkies, it’s a good way to keep up with new artists and get reissues of older titles. The added bonus (other than the superior sound that vinyl has always offered): These special subscription versions are often pressed on colored wax you can’t get anywhere else.
The biggest name in this growing marketplace is Vinyl Me, Please, a Colorado-based company that started sending out records to a small handful of subscribers in 2013 and now has nearly 30,000 people on the rolls. In that time, it has gone from simply collaborating with labels to buying a batch of LPs wholesale to helping fund pressings of new and older albums, including the first vinyl edition of Fiona Apple’s debut album Tidal and the recent release of St. Vincent’s Masseduction. “We were all passionate about this idea that vinyl, as a format, drives a certain type of listening that’s different from digital,” says Cameron Schaefer (pictured left, courtesy of VMP), a former Air Force pilot and one of the co-founders of Vinyl Me, Please. “As a medium, it pushes people to sit down and have music at the forefront versus just the background music. So we decided the idea of sending people one album a month that they take an hour out of their lives and engage with was super interesting, and counter to the music-discovery culture that was starting to dominate with every day, every hour music being thrown at you.”
That’s reflected in the records that Vinyl Me, Please has offered to subscribers (not to mention the ones it recommends on its web site). With some notable exceptions, the majority are wide-ranging, widescreen albums such as Gorillaz’ breakthrough Demon Days, or recordings that contain subtleties often revealed only upon close listening, like Sorcerer, Miles Davis’s 1967 masterpiece, or the post-rock supernova that is Explosions in the Sky’s The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place. To aid in the contemplation, Vinyl Me Please also includes a cocktail recipe with each release.
As the company has grown, so has its ability to put ever more vinyl in people’s hands. After Vinyl Me, Please had been rolling for about two years, some subscribers started leaving comments wondering if they could get additional records included with their order.
“It was kind of mind-blowing at the time,” says Schaefer, “because I think we were amazed that people were paying us for one record. It hadn’t occurred to us to maybe sell more. We decided to put together a Google form with five to 10 titles on it that we could source and our members could check off which ones they wanted. We had to manually go in and charge their accounts for each one. After three or four months, when we were selling something like 3,000 records a month off that form, then it was, like, ‘Okay, we should make an online store.’”
“Vinyl, as a format, drives a certain type of listening that’s different from digital,” says Cameron Schaefer, one of the co-founders of Vinyl Me, Please. “As a medium, it pushes people to sit down and have music at the forefront versus just the background music.”
Gradually, VMP began offering genre-focused subscription options, including one for rap and hip-hop and another for soul, blues and jazz lovers. Right now, those are only available to current members, but Schaefer says they’ll be open to the public in a few months. Those new options reveal the slight flaw in VMP’s system: the assumption that each subscriber has the same tastes that the company’s curators do. There is the option to swap the monthly record for a different title, but even then the selection of replacements lacks a sense of adventure.