Syntaxed

It's only ten days old, but already, 2008 has claimed its first victim, according to Tom and friends. On first appearances, it suggests more doom and gloom for that tiny part of the worldwide music industry that electronic music accounts for, but as Tom points out, this development is part of a necessary bloodletting process rather than something more sensationalist. Like Pipecock, I'm still a vinyl buyer and, as he suggests, high vinyl prices have meant that non-digital consumers have become far more picky about their purchases. It's a fair point: ten years ago, when I didn't even have a quarter of the disposable income that I do now, I bought far more records. Maybe that's because there were a number of great underground music stores in Dublin at the time and it had also something to do with the fact that at the time, I was on a journey of discovery, educating myself about electronic music. Nowadays, I am more inclined to only buy fewer records (always online too: I love Hardwax, but I will always miss that personal touch, when a friendly buyer - yes, they do exist - will pull out a rare gem from under the counter that never made it onto the shelves), but I make sure to choose more astutely, making sure that these are timeless records, music that I intend to come back to in ten years time and still love. Of course music, like art, fashion or literature is beholden to a set of cylical circumstances: as Tom also points out, the same kind of shake-up will inevitably affect digital distributors in the year ahead, with the result that digital collectors will also become more picky. In the meantime, here's a question for users of services like Beatport, etc who were originally vinyl collectors: do these websites' lower prices mean that you find yourself buying more music - or do you buy the same amount and save yourselves more money? I'd be interested in hearing your answers...

Comments

[antonio_pt]

I have recently bought Traktor Scratch, and I can say that on my current gigs I'm playing 60% vinyl vs 40% digital. I'm still buying vinyl records, but mainly the ones that I think are really worth the 12€/record from Juno. The integration of the digital medium on my dj-gigs definitely doesn't mean I'm buying more and more digital files (as I tend to think/find that all of the really, really good records are vinyl-exclusive), but it has definitely helped me saving some money, specially when there are records with one good track between 3 or 4 uninteresting ones. When this happens I usually go for the Wav file.

As Tom as pointed out before though, sites like Beatport or JunoDownload should definitely exercise some kind of quality control. The amount of shitty, digital-only releases that are coming out is soooo over the top that even my prog-loving neighbor is releasing digitally (yes, totally true).

I sincerely hope that vinyl never goes away though but I'm also wishing it doesn't become some sort of luxury exclusive to well-paid jocks that demand grapes & hookers everytime they dj abroad.

[antonio_pt]

Plus I should mention that the possibily of always carrying a digital copy of your most cherished and/or played records is a definite plus. Saves you from wearing out your expensive collector items and also saves you from a lot of back pain ;)

[gmos]

guys, you should really make the effort to support your local stores when you can. I buy online a lot, but I still check out the record shops around Dublin when I can. Interestingly, I often see good records in the local shops weeks after they are already unavailable from the main online retailers.

local shops for local people!

[b0b]

I'm buying eclusively digitally since 1 year and I'm extremely picky on what I buy. I hate buying individual track and most of the time I'm buying whole release but it has to be very good, somewhat timeless as described in the blog post. Note that I'm not spinning in public so I have no obligation to buy the latest trendy stuff and tons of it. And listening to techno/house/etc since 1990, I've become picky picky and just even more picky.

I agree that the bigger digital record stores like Beatport should do a minimum of quality control. Hopefully some smaller digital shops like whatpeopleplay do it already and I hope we'll see more sites like it in the future that feel much much more impersonal than the gigantic beatport with it's 300K tracks, 95% of it you can forget.

[b0b]

hmmmh above I'm meant "much much less impersonal". Typing too fast ;)

[tom/pipecock]

i have long since given up on the idea of buying records just to have more. i already have a shit ton, more than i could play out regularly even if i was touring the world constantly. so it just becomes about "what is REALLY necessary to have?", and that is enough to keep my habit spread out over many genres and many years without buying crazy tons of records.

i think every deejay (necessarily) goes through a period of buying lots of "filler" type jams as they try to increase their collections and find their own sound. now that those newer cats can do that all digitally, it will help to kill off even more of the fodder vinyl market. in a way this could have a really good effect on people who are thinking about picking up deejaying and see the high quality of shit coming out on vinyl as well as the neat aspects of doing things in the analogue domain and it could breathe more life into it. i know at the shop i work at, i've had more than a few younger kids coming through recently saying that theyre just getting into deejaying and that they specifically WANT to play records not CDs or computers. another friend of mine who is in his 30's is just buying some tables now, he's been a record head for a long time but now he is going to try to take it outside the listening domain. he hit record time in detroit over the christmas holiday and went crazy on their techno and house sections ;)

[kuri]

I just got Serato about a month ago and although I have initially spent a fair bit of $ on downloads I am now finding it harder to locate good tracks to purchase. I've taken to trying to encode some of my vinyl, but takes a fuck load of time/effort. I'm a little worried about the fact that so much good underground detroit house never makes it to vinyl so I probably still will be buying some 12"s. I do like the fact that I can purchase a EU release for a fraction of the price it would cost me to have it shipped from Hardwax/Clone. Distribution in the US is pitifull so I was having to pay to have stuff shipped over, which is not cheap.

[kuri]

I just got Serato about a month ago and although I have initially spent a fair bit of $ on downloads I am now finding it harder to locate good tracks to purchase. I've taken to trying to encode some of my vinyl, but takes a fuck load of time/effort. I'm a little worried about the fact that so much good underground detroit house never makes it to vinyl so I probably still will be buying some 12"s. I do like the fact that I can purchase a EU release for a fraction of the price it would cost me to have it shipped from Hardwax/Clone. Distribution in the US is pitifull so I was having to pay to have stuff shipped over, which is not cheap.

[mikebee]

tom is right about the bloodletting - the industry ballooned in the late 90's and early 00's and now that it can't sustain its size it needs to cull the herd, so to speak. from a professional standpoint, syntax did a decent job but weren't quite as hands-on as i've come to expect as the standard for buyer-rep relationships. still, they carried things i couldn't get anywhere else and had a vast selection. they'll be missed, but only slightly.

[James]

Ah, that's bad news about Syntax. They got our label off the ground a few years back and actually payed us. Unlike Forced Exposure, which unfortunately seems to be the last man standing in America.

Great post & good question about purchasing habits....

Given techno's built-in commitment to technology, all of the hand-wringing over vinyl always strikes me as odd.

I had a reckless affair with Beatport a few months ago when I first found it - I bought lots of random tracks based solely on abusing the search feature ("Are there any songs named after Chinatown?" etc.). Sometimes I discovered great new music sources (CMYK records, Clink) but more often that not I soon realized that the 30-second snippet was no way to evaluate a track. All told, I probably bought about 20 tracks only to discover that a crap piano synth or vocal sample (or worse yet, a saxaphone) kicks in later.

A few nagging questions cooled my relationship with Beatport: how are their charts determined? The algorithm seems screwy and weighted heavily towards the tracks with "ads" (unless their ads are really really effective). And who is determining the Classics?

Anyway, the relationship has cooled, although I use it from time to time to pick up a hi-res copy of a song that I downloaded from a blog...For a curated selection, you can't beat Other Music.

MP3s have me buying a lot more music overall, although my vinyl-habit is gradually shifting towards CDs. I'm tired of ripping vinyl for work and transit, which is where I do 90% of my music-listening.

[Kenny]

Personally speaking ive always been picky as i never had any money since i started collecting (until recently), and i was never bothered with wanting to own thousands of records. of course there are some i look back on and wonder what i was thinking, but i still find that i play records i bought 7 or so yrs ago at the drop of a hat. one thing with some djs - more so now with in the digital age - is this obsession with brand new tunes, which is a load of cock. Ive found though sadly that the shops in dublin are only so so these days, and while i will always try and support the local shop im moving online in the next couple of weeks. im really not looking forward to not being always able to listen to full tracks before purchasing, and will never stop going into the local stores as there is always random records one may never think of listening to online. When i visit a different city, its first thing on my agenda, to do some digging.

Im not remotely interested with going digital, but i do know of one friend who uses beatport, and he finds his method is he buys a bunch of tracks then puts 'em on the i-pod and listens to em all the way through, and will find that some actually suck and just dump 'em. its a strange luxury to be able to have cause they are cheap. ive also found myself having the vinyl version which has a killer flipside that he doesnt, just cause the main tune was what grabbed him. the idea of having a slow burner on the flipside is something digital users seem to miss out on a lot.

[Chymera]

I buy digital and I buy more than I use. I still keep tracks in my cart for a month and listen to them over and over again while deleting some before making my final purchase. It's funny how I still have about a 50% success rate. But then I was bad when buying vinyl too and I've offloaded about 500 in the last few years to friends and second hand shops. So at least with digital I'm not losing as much money. I hate browsing blindly though. I usually start with an artist or label, and work backwards through both the artist's releases and the label's releases, cross sectioning through other related artists too. Some of the larger, more established labels on Beatport, the ones that started out as and still are vinyl labels, are adding their back catalogues also, which is great. I've replaced all my old music man 12"s for instance with the digital versions. While vinyl does sound better by itself, recording vinyl in is very dependent on your deck, needle, cables and mixer, and invariably loses some of the tones which I've noticed when playing my ripped vinyls out through serato.

I lost all sentimental connection to my physical record collection when the guts of it was robbed 6 years ago. I bought back most of the good ones but my vinyl buying gradually slowed down. I'm not concerned with owning the physical thing now. Just hearing it.

[tom/pipecock]

"I lost all sentimental connection to my physical record collection when the guts of it was robbed 6 years ago."

that is about the only scenario in which i could see me no longer being a vinyl person: if my collection got stolen or burned in a fire or something like that. i couldnt replace shit and start over.

[Ronan]

I don't really get this whole idea that Beatport has too much bad music or it's harder to shop there or whatever.

If a record is shit, don't buy it! Let others buy it, big deal.

Most of the time I know what labels and artists interest me. When I'm browsing I still find, even on Beatport, you can pretty easily dismiss labels based on artwork/track titles etc.

I also use the DJ charts occasionally as it's somebody else's filter. Again, you can always tell the DJs who really spend time on their chart and have interesting stuff other people aren't playing.

I really despise when an artist puts all their own tracks in their Beatport chart.

As for the obsession with new releases, I hardly think that's a new thing, it's been part of dance music and all music for years.

Just because there's enough techno made now that people can be purist/traditionalist so very comfortably that doesn't mean that the present is to be ignored, not least when there are so many great records coming out.

Plus part of being a DJ is having records people don't have, whether new, old, rare, or whatever else.

I don't really get this idea of buying music you intend to come back to in 10 years time either. I mean how on earth can anyone have any idea what they'll want to listen to in ten years?

Ten years is a lifechanging amount of time, any guess would most likely be wrong, unless of course you've decided to listen to the same type of music for the rest of your days.

[tom/pipecock]

"I don't really get this whole idea that Beatport has too much bad music or it's harder to shop there or whatever.

If a record is shit, don't buy it! Let others buy it, big deal."

when nonsense makes up 90+% of what you have to wade through, it is not fun to go through it. i know this from looking through distro lists for years and going shopping in stores that had no clue what they were buying.

"Most of the time I know what labels and artists interest me. When I'm browsing I still find, even on Beatport, you can pretty easily dismiss labels based on artwork/track titles etc."

same with going through any format, but that doesnt make it any less annoying. it really is nice to see less derivative crap records out there as there is little money to be made doing that.

"I also use the DJ charts occasionally as it's somebody else's filter."

eh, a deejay has many reasons to be political about their choices. a knowledgable shop staff much less so.

"As for the obsession with new releases, I hardly think that's a new thing, it's been part of dance music and all music for years."

but it is now that it seems to be approaching almost drum and bass levels of fanaticism in techno and house music. and we can all see what that attitude did for drum and bass.

"Just because there's enough techno made now that people can be purist/traditionalist so very comfortably that doesn't mean that the present is to be ignored, not least when there are so many great records coming out."

i'm still not so sure about all these great records. there's lots of glowing talk about records that cant hold my attention for 30 second sound clips, that's for sure. it doesnt really have to do with anything about "purist" or "traditionalist", unless by that you mean that it is pure and traditional to only listen to good music. in which case, thats a tradition i plan on holding on to, no matter what the trends tell me to do!

"Plus part of being a DJ is having records people don't have, whether new, old, rare, or whatever else."

but what is more important, having a "different" track that sucks, or playing another good record that other people are playing? there's not much wiggle room there for me, if i'm out and someone is playing silly records, i'll just leave. it doesnt matter how exclusive that record theyre playing is.

"I don't really get this idea of buying music you intend to come back to in 10 years time either. I mean how on earth can anyone have any idea what they'll want to listen to in ten years?

Ten years is a lifechanging amount of time, any guess would most likely be wrong, unless of course you've decided to listen to the same type of music for the rest of your days."

i still listen to music i listened to 10 years ago. i still listen to music i listened to 20 years ago. the more time i listen to music, the better i am able to separate nonsense trendy filler crap from the essential timeless material. it doesnt even have to be new music, there are trends that are popular now amongst cosmic/balearic types in the old records that they play that i know wont stand up once the hype of this moment passes.

when a musician makes a serious emotional statement with their music, that doesnt get old. dance tracks have always been at a disadvantage in this regard because of the fact that many people making the music suffer from the same misperceptions that dance music haters do: it's just fiddling around with a drum machine, its just clicking around with your mouse, it's all about what is good for people on drugs on the dancefloor, etc. they just wanna ride the wave of popularity and get girls and drugs and party or whatever. that is all bullshit, and thats why so much techno and house ends up being worthless once whatever the hyped scene the tracks came from fall out of favor.

techno and house are no different from any other kind of music in this regard!

[Ronan]

"there are trends that are popular now amongst cosmic/balearic types in the old records that they play that i know wont stand up once the hype of this moment passes."

won't stand up to who? do you mean these records somehow objectively "sound good" now and won't in a few years?

or that those who like them will tire of them?

the records themselves stay the exact same, it sounds like you're saying opinions will change.

And that's true, but the fact that some records will remain sanctified and free from trend or fashion for their entire existence says nothing about the records themselves, except that they are adored by a specific type of music fan.

Why should somebody look to the taste of others when deciding why they like a record?

As for the speed of dance music, if you listen to old Chicago records tons of them sound rushed out and like they were made to be "just a track". Some of the best ones sound this way (listen to those lyrics!)

Music or art being produced in a time intensive environment doesn't in the slightest mean it can't also be good.

Furthermore I enjoy hearing a record that sounds completely of its time, it tells you about that time, and not some grey middleground.

If you listen to an old country record from the 30s it sounds completely dated, but you wouldn't dismiss it for this reason. In fact it serves as a document of that time.

Acid house is the same. That music may sound great today, but the word "timeless" does not suit it. It sounds distinctly of its time.

[Ronan]

Also, you do realise that 90 per cent of "serious music fans" would use this exact same argument about "timelessness" to dismiss all dance music ever made? And it'd be just as illogical and rooted in subjectivity.

[Ronan]

But why argue with me, Richard seems (or seemed) to agree since he posted this before Xmas, in response to someone criticising his chart for being too of the moment.

"I wouldn't say any of the records on that list are that trendy - a lot of them are influenced by earlier house and techno but new production methods. Anyway, it's kind of a pointless what if question - who knows what'll be going on in 10 years?"

[Sotek]

I rarely buy vinyl nowadays, mainly because of the ridiculous prices most shops and mailorders charge. I'm happy with the convenience of digital and I also buy a lot more music now than I used to a few years ago..

[Sotek]

"I'm tired of ripping vinyl for work and transit, which is where I do 90% of my music-listening."

Same here. It's a pain in the ass.. and one more reason to switch..

[Kenny]

Yes, old chicago tracks sound of thier time, but they still have an energy and a heart about some of them that will last and last. There is music coming out now that will have that too. same way alot back then doesn't work now. but im with Pipey in that the longer i listen to music the better my bullshit filter is, and the less time I have for generic,derivitive music that is born from trends at the time (the likes of Dubfire) Thinking a record will have legs is never a certainty, but personally I can tell sometimes when some tracks will not be given a shit about a year down the line (by me anyways, sometimes its obivous for everyone). I'm just not bothered with buying music i feel i wont give a shit about in a few months, just so i can see a good reaction from a crowd for a couple of gigs. Obviously sometimes that doesnt happen, but hey nowt can be done about it.

[Ronan]

well, in the grand scheme of things, no dance music is given a shit about in years to come.

plus you know, in a few thousand years when we're all dead, none of it will be talked about.

[b0b]

"
well, in the grand scheme of things, no dance music is given a shit about in years to come.

plus you know, in a few thousand years when we're all dead, none of it will be talked about."

Some people want to enjoy the music they buy today with $$$ in a few month, years etc, so it's not unatural they enable the crap filter. With years of experience listening to various things, the crap filter becomes more and more accurate.
Now, nobody stops you of buying tunes for 1 week or 1 month of entertainment heh :)

[Kenny]

"well, in the grand scheme of things, no dance music is given a shit about in years to come."

It will of course matter to some people. Who gives a fuck about the "grand scheme" (whatever that is)

[Ronan]

erm...you obviously give a fuck about the grand scheme of things since you worry about how the future will regard the records you buy, rather than simply saying "what I think is the most important"

it's not a question of buying records for a week's entertainment.

the fact is, nobody (even you guys) can tell what records will survive the test of time, but given the lack of attention dance music gets in the mainstream media it certainly won't be up there with million selling album acts who've toured the world and been in the newspapers for their entire careers.

and that's the point, the system for venerating/remembering artists is in no way a foolproof process whereby the best work remains and what goes by the wayside is just chaff.

you might as well argue that the best records are the ones that sell the most.

the "best records" and the ones that stand the test of time are the ones you or I decide that we like in 10 years time. that could be any type of record.

if that wasn't the case why would people crate dig? why wouldn't we just say "classical music is the pinnacle of civilisation" since it's been around for so long?

a classical music snob could use the logic you guys are using here, the EXACT same logic, to dismiss every single record you own.