[Normally, my Friday posts consists of playlists from my weekly CHIRP radio show. However, I'm traveling a couple of times in March, and a sub is taking over my regular shift those two weeks. So instead of a Friday playlist post, during the two weeks that I'm traveling I'll be posting the papers that I delivered on record collecting and the vinyl resurgence at two separate conferences last year. The first of these papers was presented at MIDSEM 2009 in Minneapolis.]

Preamble / By Way of Introduction

This paper represents a component of my research into vinyl record fairs and vinyl record collecting, work that has been ongoing for close to three years now. I was first drawn to record fairs as a burgeoning collector, but my research interest in records has grown beyond the phenomenological aspects of the consumption and collecting of musical recordings. Indeed, the question “Why do people collect records?” I find to be unsatisfying, if not because the answers are simple then because there are simply too many of them to be useful for a broader understanding of the forces at work.

Instead, I’m interested in what we can learn about music recordings as commodities in contemporary Western society through the study of record circulation; that is, the buying, selling, and collecting of records. What types of value and capital inform the exchange of musical recordings? To what degree are these processes of exchange dependent upon the subjective lived experiences, emotional lives, and individual interactions of and between individuals? And finally, in what ways can these subjectivities inform responsible research into musical cultures and communities?

This morning I will focus specifically on the experiences of record dealers—the collectors concerned with finding that mythical “compilation of every good song ever done by anybody” alluded to by the band LCD Soundsystem will have to wait patiently for the next conference—and my proposal, drawing from anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s concept of commodity value, is that the exchange of records at record fairs is structured and disciplined by a broad confluence of mutable values, which differ from record to record and from dealer to dealer depending on their individual circumstances, their expectations of their customers, and their business philosophies. My findings are based on ethnographic research at Chicago-area record fairs conducted over the last three years, a number of interviews with record fair dealers and organizers, and a survey of 30 vendors at a record fair in April, 2009.

On Record Fairs / Ethnographic Moment: On a Sunday Morning

Record fairs (or record shows) are regular events in which dealers rent a table from the organizers to sell vinyl records, CDs, and music memorabilia to the general public. Customers typically pay a modest admission charge for one day, an entire weekend, or exclusive “early bird” or “preview” shopping (usually the two hours before the fair officially opens). This format gives dealers the opportunity to a) forego the time and expense of operating a retail establishment, and b) cater to a wide variety of potential customers, due to the geographic disbursement; the customers benefit from the ability to shop from a number of different dealers in a single location.

The fairs usually take place on weekends at conference centers, and at 7:00 AM on a mild November Sunday morning, the Holiday Inn in Hillside, Illinois, is hopping: it’s early bird admission time at the bi-monthly Hillside Record Fair, and while some vinyl dealers are still loading in and setting up their displays, collectors have already lined up at the door, happy to pay $10 for the privilege of two extra hours of shopping before the standard $3 admission starts at 9:00 AM. Or so I’m told by the dealers—I’m not there that early, but when I do arrive at 10:30, coffee in hand, people are already leaving, arms loaded with vinyl albums and singles. A dealer later talks to be about the early bird collectors: “these guys show up with their lists, they know exactly what they want, they find it, and they go home.”

At 10:30, however, the room is still full, and I can barely walk down the aisles of tables to look for my favorite dealers, let alone elbow my way to the record bins themselves.  I’ve been to this record fair before, but not in over a year and a half, and I’m surprised by the number of people here. John, the organizer, tells me that attendance is higher than normal. This surprises me—given the turbulent economy and the approaching holidays, I expected a lower turnout—but John explains that the previous fair two months ago took place during a torrential downpour that flooded the highways and parts of the Chicagoland area. “Barely anyone came out in that storm,” he says, “so I imagine they’re making up for it today.” There seem to be more collectors than this explanation justifies, however, and Ken, a dealer who also organizes fairs in Indiana and Michigan, agrees—he says that attendance jumped by 25% at his last fair.

The suburban record fairs are fairly subdued events: they take place in stale hotel conference rooms, dealers talking with each other or familiar customers, the low background din of conversation periodically broken by someone testing out a record on a portable turntable or an announcement over the PA, most customers lost in the steady rhythm of flipping quickly through boxes of records. A suburban hotel is perhaps not the most romantic location for a vinyl record fair, but record fairs are perhaps not the most romantic of musical events: unlike the large majority of musical events, record fairs are seemingly choreographed to be as banal as possible. They’re essentially temporary flea markets where grown men and women—many with much better jobs—sell records to strangers with whom they share affinities, interests, and values.

Marked prices for used records depend on a number of easily definable qualities: the quality of the record itself, the quality of the record sleeve, the relative scarcity of the record, the release history of the record (that is, if it was ever discontinued, how many times it’s been repressed, what record labels have issued the record, etc.), and any extraneous anomalies—if the record is a promotional copy, signed, or accompanied by some other relevant memorabilia, then the price will be higher. Larger social trends and tastes also affect the price of a record—a new release can spark interest in an artist’s back catalog, as can a reappraisal of a given genre, label, scene, and so on. This collection of qualities demonstrates Appadurai’s argument that commodity value is actually a confluence of values, including the social history of the commodity type, the cultural biography of a given instance of the commodity, knowledge of the commodity’s production, and even the knowledge required for appropriate consumption—knowledge that, as both Appadurai and Will Straw remind us, can itself be a commodity. It is this confluence of values that helps explain two different copies of Blondie’s self-titled debut record: a 1976 very-good white-label promo copy on Private Stock, their first record label, costs $12, while a 1977 repress near-mint stock copy on Chrysalis Records only costs $5.

Despite the availability of price guides and grading standards, these marked prices are by no means universal. I generally tend to browse through different dealers’ records for the best marked prices before committing to a purchase, knowing that dealers are more likely to offer me a good deal if I’m buying multiple records or have bought from them before. Looking around, I can tell that I’m not alone: there are plenty examples of bargaining, haggling, and trading, both among dealers and between dealers and customers—and it’s already clear that value is flexible:

• “The more you buy, the lower the prices!”“Everything is 50% off the marked price.”
• “Are you making deals?” “Depends what it is. If I’ve had it for a while, then we can deal.”
• And at the Roving Eye tables later in January, the dealer has signs up that say “Buy 2, get 1 free! Buy 5 or more, take 50% off!” When I ask why the deals, he replies: “Well, it’s a sale day… Yesterday’s snowstorm, playoff football, the economy, whatever I can do [to sell these records].”

While browsing his records later in the afternoon, I spend half an hour talking to Roger, one of my favorite dealers who does brisk business in $1 and $2 metal and rock records and loves to tell stories about concerts and former jobs. He has a copy of Appetite for Destruction marked at $25, and I’m amazed at the price, knowing that I paid $5 for the same record at Hyde Park Records just a few years ago—but a lot can change in a few years, and with the excitement over Chinese Democracy, the first album of original Guns N’ Roses material in 17 years, Roger hopes to sell their first album (over 20 years old now) at a premium. He good-naturedly dodges my questions on dealing records, but points out with disdain the dealers who have already started to pack up. “I’ll probably be alphabetizing my records until 4:30 [30 minutes after the fair ends],” he says. I ask Roger and his neighbor, Jack, how they decide which records to bring to each fair. “You just gotta learn your shows,” Jack says. Roger agrees, and refers to the different audience he expects to encounter at the annual record fairs organized by the Chicago Independent Radio Project, or CHIRP: “At your CHIRP show I bring a lot of punk and new wave and do just fine, but I see guys who bring more 50’s, 60’s pop stuff and do well here, but they don’t change it up for CHIRP and are disappointed.”

On Record Dealers / Interviews and Comparisons

Based on this brief glimpse into the record fair, we can already ask a few big-picture questions: Why are these dealers willing to give up their Sunday to sell records, a business that—based on all the deals being made—doesn’t appear to be consistently profitable? What types of fulfillment do they get out of these interactions? Are they collectors first and dealers second, or vice versa? If they are collectors, why are they even willing to sell their records at all? What does a dealer consider when pricing a record?

As I suggested at the beginning of my talk, there is no single answer to these questions—indeed, the answers differ drastically from dealer to dealer, and potentially from moment to moment. However, we can get a sense of the various experiences and viewpoints through interviews and surveys. The surveys help quantify these experiences, and while I certainly won’t suggest that we can make essentializations about trends in dealers’ motivations, I do believe that responsible research can help us understand the range of subjectivites that dealers face and negotiate.

Take Richard, for example. He’s primarily a collector who has been shopping at the Hillside show for a decade before deciding to sell records. In an interview, he mentions a conflict between selling records and maintaining an emotional attachment to the music, and notices that this may actually make him less effective as a dealer: he suspects that the younger dealers with steady business throughout the day sell their stock inexpensively because they lack an emotional attachment to the music and are much more business oriented, but he sees that long-time dealers with high-priced collectable records clearly have a passion for music yet attract few customers.

Richard’s specialty is ’70’s rock, and while he’s interested in jazz and classical, he’s more attached to the music that he identifies with his youth. His search for the best way to profit off of his records reflects the larger conflict behind his decision to sell records in the first place:

“I’m a corporate manager of a department of 45 people… not really the most exciting thing in the world. And so I’m getting up there, almost 47 years old, and kind of have those thoughts in the back of my head of, ‘Okay, what could I make work if I wanted to do something I totally really enjoy…’ I wanted to kind of dabble in it, so I thought, ‘Well, here, this dealer table for $45 is an easy way to see what it’s like…’ It gives me an experience that’s not costly and not big on the investment side. And I already had a lot of inventory… I had been buying on eBay some lots of LPs, usually ’70’s rock genre because that’s what I know.”

Richard is struggling to find a niche as “the ’70’s rock [dealer] that’s got clean records and they’re fairly inexpensive,” yet in our discussion, he also makes clear that it’s his passion for and personal history with music that have prompted him to try record dealing as a new pastime. As a new dealer, he’s constantly evaluating his prices against those dealers who appear to be doing the most business. It’s not obvious who’s making more money: dealers with bargain records that attract a steady stream of customers or dealers with premium audiophile records that can cost ten times as much but attract far fewer customers. Ultimately, he decided to change his strategy to better attract bargain hunters; at the next fair, he saw both a five-fold increase in gross sales and greater interest in his premium records.

At the Hillside fair, Richard has a single table with about a dozen boxes of ’70’s rock LPs. Ken, on the other hand, has four tables piled with records representing just about any genre you can name—practically everything except for classical music, electronic dance music, and new releases—half of which he’s never even listened to. While Richard is participating in a new pastime, potentially supplementing his executive salary through a couple of fairs, Ken attends between 40 and 45 fairs every year, sometimes selling at two fairs in a single weekend, and relies on his profits to supplement his retirement income. He even started organizing record fairs regularly in four Midwest cities since his retirement in 2004. For Ken, then, the material stakes are higher—he simply can’t afford to make business decisions purely based on emotional attachments—but when I ask him why he stays involved, he waxes poetic:

“It’s the sickness. The record collecting sickness. That’s what we always tell people. People are just kind of obsessed. I’ve been interested in music ever since I was a kid, I enjoy it, it’s fun, it’s something I enjoy doing, so I just keep doing it.”

On Vinyl Records / Vinyl Fetishism and the Public Consciousness

One might think that such a “record collecting sickness” is anachronistic in 2009, but it is assuredly not. While many dealers sell recorded music in other formats (such as cassettes, CDs, and DVDs) and other memorabilia (such as magazines, posters, and toys like Beatles bobble-head dolls), the vinyl record—a format long considered untenable by the mainstream music industry—has proven to be surprisingly resilient since being surpassed in sales worldwide by the compact disc by 1990. At the time, popular music scholar Dave Laing suggested that “there is no likelihood of a reprieve for the vinyl LP.” Yet, as the LP turned 60 years old in 2008, recent articles in mass media outlets such as The Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, and The New York Times trumpet the format’s resurgence in popularity:

• The Boston Globe, June 2, 2008
  “Vinyl Goes from Throwback to Comeback”
  by Jonathan Perry
• Chicago Tribune, October 5, 2008
  “Vinyl Spins to the Forefront Again”
  by Greg Kot
• The New York Times, August 31, 2008
  “Another Spin for Vinyl”
  by Alex Williams

Further confirming these journalistic “trend” features are the experiences of employees at Reckless Records, one of Chicago’s largest independent record stores. In an interview, an employee named Michael tells me that their customers now buy a lot more vinyl than when he started two years ago. From his perspective, the biggest thing to promote new vinyl sales is the recent practice of record labels including a coupon to download legitimate MP3 files with each new record. CDs are more convenient and easier to rip to a portable MP3 player, but customers can now purchase the digital and vinyl for a single price, which is often cheaper than the CD. “New vinyl sales have skyrocketed like crazy,” Michael tells me. “The main thing that people listen to are iPods, but the vinyl has the cool factor, and people are starting to rediscover it now.” The store’s clientele has shifted accordingly: no longer are only specialists and collectors shopping for vinyl—now that it’s in fashion, everyone’s interested. Furthermore, as the vinyl record re-enters the mainstream popular consciousness through such marketing techniques—and the newspaper features previously mentioned—music consumers aren’t just limiting themselves to new releases. Says Michael:

“When people are just starting out, they just want vinyl. It’s like, oh, what can I get for cheap? They’ll buy anything… If you can get a record for fifty cents, if something looks neat… I’m not saying these people are going to keep it, but when you’re just starting out, and records are cool, you buy anything. I remember doing it, I bought boxes, you know, 100 random LPs—cool! You don’t have anything, so you’re looking for everything.”

One of the effects of this shift is an increase in demand that is directly resulting in an increase in the market price of records. Michael, again:

“Records that would have gone for nothing… you know, Fleetwood Mac records that we couldn’t get rid of for a $1 are now all of a sudden $4.99, $5.99 records. We’re having to watch ourselves. This [record] sold in a day for $6, [next time] we should make it $7! But wait, whoa whoa whoa—it’s inflation. You gotta be careful about that kind of stuff, so we bring the prices back.”

More On Record Dealers / Surveys and Motivations

Now that consumers are interested, now that prices of used vinyl are inflating, it would seem like there’s at least a little bit of money to be made in the used record market. My survey of record dealers supports this: at a recent record fair, the majority of the respondents reported that they expected to make at least $250 in profit that weekend:

The large majority has seen business either stay the same or increase in the last year, despite the recent economic downturn:

For the most part, dealers sell records at a few fairs every year—some, as many as 20—and travel over 200 miles to do so (one survey respondent wrote in that in 2005, he flew to Japan with his stock to sell at a fair there):

As I mentioned earlier, many of these dealers have much better full-time jobs: many of them have professional careers in fields as diverse as education, health care, hospitality, IT, manufacturing, and publicity. Most of them have an income of over $35,000 per year, and almost two-thirds of them make at least $50,000. The actual record selling makes up for a relatively small portion of their annual income: of the record dealers who answered the question, over 75% say that this doesn’t even account for 10% of their annual income.

It’s pretty clear that these dealers don’t make a huge income selling records at record fairs. Then why do they do it? The responses to that survey question can be categorized into common themes. Some dealers are definitely focused on the business aspect:

• “Buy low, sell low.”
• “Buy low, sell high.”
• “I sell records I would want to own at prices I think are fair. I play everything before I sell it.”

Others want to promote vinyl and music in general:

• “[It’s my] hobby, [I] love records, [and the] vinyl format. Good music!”
• “[I] encourage the purchase and use of vinyl.”
• “I love records, especially older, rarer ones, which are primarily what I sell.”
• “[I like to] find great music & turn people on to it”

A few value the practical benefits of dealing records:

A couple derive nonspecific fulfillment:

One final record dealer profile while help illustrate these perspectives, and help demonstrate that they’re perhaps not incommensurate with each other.

Rob is a co-owner of a record store near Illinois State University, and has been dealing records at shows for three years. At the store, they sell plenty of low quality, dollar-box LPs to college kids that aren’t as particular about details—the new collectors who’ll buy anything—and guaranteed high quality, high value records to serious collectors who have come to respect the store as a good source of high quality LPs. Rob and his partner look at the record show as a venue to sell the middle range of their stock, usually 15–17 boxes of $2 LPs—their goal is to sell records for which they don’t really have room for in the store, and purchase premium records to stock the store.

Rob and his partners have a good business model: their capital investment is tied up in the premium records, which they’re able to sell at the store consistently, and the stock he brings to the shows are pure profit. Unlike Richard, he’s not emotionally invested in the records he sells—they’re coming from the business, not from his personal collection—and he’s also not materially invested at the level of Ken, as he has a full-time job: the store and the record shows are more of a hobby. He recognizes that some dealers do this for a living, but he can’t bring himself to treat this activity as seriously as they do—for him, it’s more about having fun than it is a source of income.

Coda / By Way of Conclusion

I hope it’s clear that record dealers negotiate many different tensions and pressures in the activity of participating in record fairs. I’ve introduced you to three different dealers—Richard, Rob, and Ken—and given you a larger picture of trends among dealers and in the resurgence of vinyl records in general. I also hope it’s clear that the mutable confluence of values which discipline and structure exchange and interactions at record fairs varies widely from dealer to dealer and from moment to moment, indicating to me that in the particular case of records, commodity value itself can never be statically defined.

In other words, value is not a quality, but a trajectory—a trajectory dependent upon a number of different qualities, phenomena, and associations which can and do vary between individuals and communities. According to Appadurai, this trajectory is dependent upon changing social contexts over time—even taste itself, as we learn from Bourdieu, is in part socially-determined. This argument goes a long way towards understanding how different record can carry different values at different moments, but it doesn’t capture all of the variables. Indeed, Appadurai’s model is limited by his insistence on the social life of commodities. Both the retail price of a new record and the price guide value of a used record are socially-determined values, and certainly it’s imperative that we take into account social context when discussing these types of values. Yet, commodities have lives other than the social—real, imagined, and virtual—that are associated with subjective, individual lived experience. These associations are best contextualized and understood by individual agents, constitute qualities whose significance falls outside the purview of society, and hence comprise value trajectories that are not just socially-determined but also determined by individuals and individual lived experience.

So, what does a dealer consider when pricing a record? I don’t intend to suggest that we need to catalog and taxonomize all of the individualized motivations, philosophies, and practices surrounding record dealing, but I do think that as ethnographers, we have a responsibility to take into consideration and even privilege lived experiences such that our discourse and theoretical models more accurately depict the subjectivities of interactions and exchange present in musical life. This point becomes more clear the more I recognize that individual record dealers have varying motivations for their interactions with each other, with their customers, with the recording industry, and with the vinyl records themselves.