Shellac should do this. Steve?

nicholas wrote:The label I work for already does this wonderful vinyl+mp3 business, and we're currently thinking of eliminating the coupon for people who buy directly from us. The idea would be this:

You order, we confirm order, we email you a code to download the mp3s while you wait for the vinyl to arrive in the mail.

The advantages, we think, would be in that sense of instant gratification, the lack of which still keeps me from buying alot of things online. Plus, we could offer mp3s for older albums that weren't pressed with the coupon inside the sleeve.

What do you guys think? Worth the hassle?

that is the biggest hurdle on this whole deal. sub pop does it great with a coupon inside the album that expires the moment you use it. of course, that coupon costs money to print and insert. i'm trying to figure out the best way to go about this. thankfully, i work with a lot of brilliant programmers (my day job) and have hired one to help us out.

"downloading" is not illegal. acquisition of copyrighted music for which you have not paid the rightful owner of said copyright is illegal. of course, one could argue that buying a used cd would then be illegal, unless record stores are paying bmi and ascap and all that. they may be, i don't know.

andyman, the question you ask is what constitutes "fair use."

for example, i own tortoise's "millions now living will never die" on lp. sounds amazing. i want to listen to it at work. so i download the mp3s. so long as i only use it, for personal entertainment only, it is perfectly legal. some attorney's might get paid HUGE bucks to argue otherwise, but it would be seen as fair use by most judges and juries, i think.

I think this is a great idea. Count me in.

Mp3's and vinyl will not change color when played, however.

Great marketing technique for a shitty product.

Kinda like washing one's hands with shit-covered soap....kinda.

Crap.

Pure L wrote:I think this is a great idea. Count me in.

Mp3's and vinyl will not change color when played, however.

Great marketing technique for a shitty product.

Crap.

the comments are the best part.

All I can say is, 180 gram vinyl and at the very least 256mbps VBR mp3 encoded with LAME...

JDanger wrote: To me it seems like once you are at a point in life when you can afford a nice turntable, needle, amp, pre-amp and a decent set of speakers you could probably double down on both formats without it really feeling a sting financially. But you shouldn't have to.

I'd argue upgrading-as-you-go is friendlier to the consumer in the long-run. Uprading allows you to get more out of something you already own, as opposed to buying your whole collection in a new format and purchase a fancy new player . If you spring for a device for your turntable (www.hagtech.com/ripper.html, build it yourself for $99.00 plus parts), you can make digital copies and not worry about the double down.

JDanger wrote: When I was younger I had this crappy record player that played records fine but I never found the sound superior to CD's at all. In fact vinyl seemed very, very inferior.

I would agree that CDs are not without their advantages, but calling them very superior to vinyl is not true. Factually speaking, they are smaller, easy to copy and present a sonic "clarity", but these "advantages" are conditional: compactness implies one might be inclined to carry their whole music collection on their back. It's just as easy to dismiss them as dinky. The clarity-of-sound issue is a dubious advantage, unless you can refute the criticisms of CDs consequently sounding two-dimensional, thin, and cold. The encoding technology if compact discs, making them so versatile, also completely dates them. Remastering? Super-Audio? Why?

Andyman wrote:

Brinkman wrote:What I wonder about is is listening to mp3s of albums I no longer own. Is that unethical?

If you lost/broke your copy then it seems decent to listen to the mp3s. If you sell the album on (which is an unethical act in itself, right?), you forfit the right to listen to those mp3s.

Right. The Honor System. I had a car with a cassette deck and had no problem listening to mix-tapes friends made me, as well as dubs of CDs I no longer owned. While I think you may be ethically correct, if I were to agree with you, I'd be a hypocrite.

When the label provides a coupon/code or whatever for a digital version, everyone's happy, and everyone is allowed a method to behave ethically. When the labels rerelease albums in new formats at artificially inflated prices, consumers get sick of the cat-and-mouse charade and thus a market demand exists for a way around it, for better or worse.

It would be a great idea. I think almost everyone now in Europe and North America can use broadband (at least through internet cafes, universities, friends, relatives, etc.).
Instead of mp3 I'd use a lossless format (flac is the best one, in my opinion) because If I buy a record I deserve to hear the whole audio stream, with all its frequency components.

Enclosing the CD with the vinyl (as Shellac did ) it's also great but I think it would cost more and it would probably generate more waste.

I agree with your choices. I've always purchased the record over the cd. It sounds good, gives you something tangible to hold after spending your money and serves as a great canvas for visual art. After dumping all of my cd's into itunes, though, I realized that most of my favorite music is on record. What I've been up to lately is recording my vinyl in garage band and transferring those recordings to itunes. (I just run a rca cable out of my stereo, into a mixer, and 1/8" into a G4) Nothing fancy, but it's a bit tedious, and the benefits outweigh the effort. This helps preserve the records' life(fewer Sundays picking up records around the apartment) and allows me to play old 7"s anywhere. If you really want to get into it, you can even filter out some of the pops that normally fuck up the listening experience. I've got this Belle and Sebastian recording that has four or five awful pops in the intro to "This is Just Another Rock Song." In soundtrack, you can filter the noise out and make some unlistenable music enjoyable again. I should be done transferring in about thirty or forty years but it's fun anyway.

I find them cold and they fail to get me hard unlike getting home with a fresh piece of vinyl, putting it down, pressing on, turning the volume up to just too loud and dropping the needle, letting the warmth fill the air in the room like a sandstorm and waiting for my wife to come in telling me to turn it the fuck down. Yeah, instead of that I'll sit on my laptop and take one of my favourite things in life and ruin it.

I love my rituals, and I'm not going to invest in an expensive PC and speakers to go along with it so I can disconnect with the outside completely and listen to music that sounds slightly or much worse than CDs and wax do. There's literally nothing broke there, it's like downloading your favourite film to your fucking mobile phone so you can watch it on a two inch screen with these tin-can speakers.