Why vinyl?

I'm curious, does anyone (who was around at the time) believe that $8.99 equals $30.99, regardless of what an academic estimate of money is?

It doesn't seem the same to me at all, and I used to buy a lot of records. Let's not deal with the 1980s LP inflation due to the cost they wanted to ring out of us as they introduced the cash-cow CD format...

Gregg

Greggdeering,

Using the Bank of Canada inflation calculator $9.00 in 1985 is equal to about $16.50 today.

New vinyl toady an be pricey because its still cottage industry and lower volume than in the 70's-80's. In terms of dollar for dollar, new vinyl will likely always be more pricey factoring inflation than it was in the 70's and 80's. Just not as much is sold even though vinyl is enjoying a resurgence.

While I know much specialty vinyl is 25-50 bucks, don't forget Sundazed for instance, at 15-18 bucks for good sounding vinyl, also the last Van Morrison, Willie Nelson, and Bob Dylan were super cheap for the quality of the vinyl I got. Seems like Willie and Van Morrison were like 15 bucks or less.

Thanks for the responses, I don't begrudge 180 gram LPs selling at $30.00 a pop (so to speak) - that's the nature of the business today. I would like it to be less, but that's true for a lot in audio, I'd rather it was healthy and viable rather than cheap.

I just questioned the justification that $8.00 = $30.00, given how buying three records in 1978 felt and contrasting that with what buying three records does to the wallet now. I like the Bank of Canada number more, but I get in trouble when I start talking about "feelings" and currency value, but so be it.

As someone who collects mono records, I'm beginning to think I'd pay a premium for undamaged, clean 50's classical LPs (forget Jazz, my income would have to increase exponentially). I also have a hard time spending $18-20 for CDs.

Gregg

Ihcho, I buy a lot of new vinyl, as much of it in my opinion is very good. I also buy good old unopened vinyl, and mint used. I find life is to short for crappy beatup vinyl to experiment. Are people buying new vinyl, if you read my post early on in this thread, I talked about The RTI pressing pland, who has never seen the volume of backlog for vinyl. For instance they mention they have orders in house initially for 50,000 of the Led Zeppelin box 4 LP sets. This is after the CDs has been out for awhile. Obviously that is 200,000 lps to produce, so yes there are a few customers. This does not includes all the other labels. So is it more then CD, no, but I do not think anybody ever thought it would be. But it is growing at a fast rate, while CDs fall off year by year to MP3 downloads. To a point that maybe even now daily MP3's aquired in some kind of legal or illegal download are actually used more daily then CD for music play.