Friday, April 19, 2019

RECORD STORE DAY - WARPED HYPE

Morons grin and tell me, "Vinyl is making a comeback!"

Bless their pointy heads. (I'm referring to the MAN BUN they usually wear.)

No. It is NOT.

"Record Store Day" means even less than a trending Twitter topic like "Today is Peanut Butter Sandwich Day!"

Vinyl is very dead. It's dead even if an artsy band presses up a hundred copies of vinyl. The artsy band may be happy that their relatives, and a few dozen fans buy it up and they make maybe $5 a disc. That beats the chump change in royalties on an mp3 album version that Spotify and YouTube streams (giving maybe a penny per 1,000 plays). It's still nothing.

Most thrift shops don't even take vinyl anymore. (OR CDs or DVDs).

On eBay hapless sellers often can't sell their vinyl at $1 a disc.

"Record Store Day" is only good for a laugh:

The only thing more dead than vinyl sales is cartoon sales.

How many magazines buy cartoons anymore? The New Yorker? Now how many run FUNNY cartoons? That eliminates The New Yorker.

The cartoonist is right. Elitist assholes tend to pretend that vinyl sounds better than CD. They have no proof of this,but they give you that climate change declaration: "...it's warmer."

They also insist that scratchy surface noise is a GOOD thing.

They also apparently have nothing better to do than get up every 20 minutes and change the platter. (They do NOT use a record changer that stacks!).

I did a little editorial work on the cartoon. I figured the braggart would be a Millennial with a MAN BUN and a bit of a gut from buying "healthy" hero sandwiches and salads with a lot of creamy dressing and chunks of cheese.

I gave him a little pubic goatee. His gay friend (this IS a trendy cartoon, and we love diversity) got his skull elongated via Photoshop, to the dimensions of Jon Anik.

I know, you have no idea who he is. He's a UFC play-by-play announcer, and a good one. He just happens to have a freakishly elongated head. He's not bald, yet, but there's some kind of Millennial trend whereby if you don't have a MAN BUN, you go to the other extreme of a severe buzzcut (which you read about on Buzzfeed). It's making a statement. The statement is that you have a freakishly elongated head and are proud of it.

I also added a poster for the wall.

This is a close-up of it:

Status symbols. That's what RECORD STORE DAY is about. It's about calling attention to yourself for being ahead of the 33 and a third curve, and thinking outside the iPod.

Did you know there's such a thing as a RECORD STORE CRAWL?

A friend of mine sent me the link to a story about it. She was surprised. She's only casually involved in this insanity. She'll buy a new VINYL set on some old band, just to show she SUPPORTS the old band.

BUT...she buys from the old band's website. She doesn't go on a...RECORD STORE CRAWL.

The idea is for all the MAN BUN people to get in a MAN BUN VAN of some kind, pay $100 or whatever, get a free DRINK (or two), and then make the route from the one or two record stores still surviving in Manhattan to the one or two designated hip places in BROOKLYN.

The idea is to time this caravan so you arrive when there's an event going on...some has-been signing copies of a colored vinyl (excuse me, VINYL of COLOR) limited edition. The latest hip new artist might sing a SONG and do a SELFIE with you. This kind of thing:

Don't be fooled. This crap is NOT going to replace COMIC CON events and other nerd-centric activities. Buying action figures that don't actually move, and replicas of lightsabers, and pictures of chicks who appeared topless in "Game of Thrones," will ALWAYS have more status than overpriced VINYL OF COLOR.

Yes, there's a website for this, and a few cities are pushing it...

The fact remains...VINYL IS DEAD. More people will dress up as ZOMBIES and go to a Comic Con, than will EVER buy a new 180 gram VINYL copy of an old record by the original ZOMBIES.

Scary but true. Don't believe me? Less than 300 hits for a YouTube video of Colin and Rod looking over that LIMITED EDITION box set that just came out...

How come the numbers didn't ZOOM into the THOUSANDS after "RECORD STORE DAY" last week?

No comments:

Post a Comment