On the first full day of my weeklong stay in Los Angeles, I strolled down Melrose Place alone, aimlessly looking for any store to catch my attention. After walking for nearly an hour without stopping, I spotted The Record Collector. The Record Collector has been an LA music staple since 1976, and is owned and operated by the long-winded Sanders Chase.
Sandy, for short, is a polarizing business owner who seemed to be absolutely positive about everything he believes he knows. It was obvious that I was his first customer of the day; once he began his lecture there was no stopping him. Our conversation began on hip-hop, and Sandy’s assumption that it is fad that’s not here to stay, but soon evolved into a discussion about the cyclical nature of the music business, and what LP’s mean to it.
“People buy quality…CD’s have no quality at all….but CEO’s who don’t know their ass from their elbow convinced the world that they needed them based on convenience. This couch potato mentality made the music business lazy, and lead directly to it’s unraveling” said Sandy.
As Sandy continued his soliloquy, a question was planted in my head. Were CDs a fad, or is Sandy so stuck in his own world that he was unable to grasp that the way the world chooses to consumes music is continuously changing?
“Coca Cola added bullshit to their formula, and had marketing honchos convince the world it was what the people wanted. New and improved means they fucked up the original recipe” Sandy exclaimed.
Today’s vinyl revival does not say that CD’s are pieces of shit, and that digitalization of music is ruining it’s sound. Only those that are myopic in their consumption of music, like Sandy, hold this to be true. What the music businesses focus, and now desertion, of CD’s says is that humans are stuck in cycles where we want what’s new, but once that gets old we will continuously grasp what was previously comfortable to us. Once old becomes old, we want it to become new again.
In 2013 vinyl is cool again. Best Buy, Costco and Walmart all offer LP’s now that the trend has come full circle. Finally people are coming back around to Sandy and The Record Collector, but not for the reasons that he thinks is so. The vinyl resurgence isn’t based on the higher quality of sound that Sandy swears by, but instead is based on the human nature of never being fully satisfied with what we’ve got. Once record companies fully re-embrace vinyl, it will slip back through the cracks of society and be replaced by whatever technology consumers think is cute at the moment.
Though I didn’t agree with everything Sandy said, he made me think long and hard. Music will always be here, but those who grasp to the formulas in which we consume it are the ones who are fucking up the recipe.
- | The Record Collector | Relating Squiddo
//