Who Gives a Shit About Vinyl Subscription Services?

Last week, the internet collectively lost its shit when it remembered that vinyl subscription services were a thing. At the heart of all this hubub was a fresh-faced Kickstarter project by the name of VNYL. Marketing themselves as "Netflix for vinyl," they were widely-lauded by everyone from Gizmodo and Consumerist to Do Androids Dance and inthemix. If praise was beer and the internet VYNL's cup, it wouldn't have a hope in Oktoberfest of being finished. As of writing this, founder Nick Alt has received 777 backers and more than tripled his funding goal of $10,000. This is all well and good, but is it anything new?

Insert record-scratch sound effect here. The answer is no.

Since 2013, a similar service called Vinyl Me, Please has upped the ante by including your monthly record with (and I'm not making this up) a piece of album-inspired art and a cocktail pairing recipe. Turntable Kitchen turns the oven up to 11 by including a digital mixtape, premium ingredients, and unique recipes with each 7" record. Then there's the house and techno-oriented That Special Record, which regrettably does not come with a cocktail pairing or dinner, only platters of wax. Jack White (of The White Stripes) also runs a subscription service called Vault through his label, Third Man Records. If none of these services are quite what you had in mind, Feedbands deals exclusively in first-presses and allow their subscribers to vote on upcoming albums. iTunes, eat your fucking heart out.

As unique as all of these services are, surely they must be the first of their kind. The internet only recently became developed enough to allow for startups like these, right? Again, the answer is no.

In the 1950s, major labels were faced with a conundrum: how could they attract customers in rural areas, far from physical record stores? Mail-order companies (once a lifeline to North America's small towns) were beginning to look at the record industry as a new cash cow. By catering to homes far from local record stores, they were beginning to scoop up hard-earned cash that the labels wanted for themselves. After deciding that they'd be damned if they'd let that happen, Columbia Records formed Columbia Record Club. The records it sent out to subscribers would be at least six months old (in order to appease retailers fearful of competition) and new members even got their first record free. Columbia House was such an enormous success that the following year, Columbia moved their distribution center from NYC to a location near their manufacturing plant in Indiana. By 1963, its revenue accounted for 10% of the recording retail market.

RCA and Capitol started their own mail-out services too and all three continued to evolve throughout the years, offering combinations of reel-to-reel tapes, eight-tracks, and cassettes. Though Columbia Record Club was eventually lost to the world following a series of mergers, aquisitions, and market decline, the concept of vinyl subscription services continued to live on.

Those old enough to have lived in the 80s and 90s may also remember famed Seattle label Sub Pop's Singles Club. Launched in 1988 with Nirvana's "Love Buzz," it grew to a respectable 2000 members before fizzling out in 1993. With the rise of CDs and alternative radio, it too lost its purpose.

The overarching themes in all of these services was that they were a way of propping up the vinyl industry and capturing customers outside of major cities. So where does this leave current-day subscription services? The simple problem with VYNL and similar services in general is that they don't fall in line with the vinyl ethos that brought the industry back to life. Nielsen reports that vinyl sales grew in the US in 2014 to 9.1 million, up 51% from the year before. People buy vinyl because they care about the experience of going to a record store (or in some cases, Whole Foods), because they care about hi-fidelity audio quality, or because they're 20 an need something to pin to their dorm room wall. This isn't like CDs; it isn't a matter of clinging to old habits to save a dying industy. Vinyl exists because people choose to fulfil their own personal audiophilic needs. Yes, subscription services are theoretically convenient, but no marketing strategy, however trendy its hashtags, can satisfy those sonic urges quite yet.

Ziad Ramley is on Twitter: @ZiadRamley