It was a fine Saturday in August when 95bFM put its records out for sale, but there were clouds gathering. Even those who accepted that the influential student radio station had bills to pay – most notably about $150,000 in transmitter costs – had qualms when the sale was announced. The station’s library of vinyl records hadn’t been heard a lot on air over the past couple of decades, but it was in some sense the heart of the place, the family silver. The precious New Zealand collection was ruled out of sale, but it could well have still been a grim morning.
What transpired was more like a wholesome community event. At one point, the queue to get in stretched out along the landing of the Auckland University Student Association (AUSA) building, down two flights of stairs and into the quad. Inside, women in their early 20s stood shoulder-to-shoulder with silver-haired men, flicking through the 6000 records in the bins.
A father and his young son talked to a TV news crew about passing on the love of vinyl. A mother and daughter beamed after paying to “adopt” two albums deemed essential, which would stay in the collection with a note bearing the donors’ names and any message they wanted a future DJ to read on air. Several donors dedicated their purchases to departed friends. Others lined up to pay for armfuls of records to take home.
It was an illustration of a cultural trend: in an era when music is on our phones and in the cloud, everywhere and nowhere, records are bringing us together.
The vinyl revival is real enough in mater-ial terms. In 2007, sales of records in the US, which had been declining for years, ticked up to just under a million. The following year, sales nearly doubled. In 2021, vinyl sales overtook CDs for the first time in 30 years. US vinyl LP sales will top 23 million this year if the trend from the first six months is maintained.
One woman leads the way. Taylor Swift’s 2022 album Midnights has become the first vinyl LP this century to sell more than a million copies in America. It’s modest in comparison to the days before streaming and CDs, but it’s one in every 25 records sold.
“There’s no denying that Taylor Swift is responsible for a massive amount of vinyl sales – it’s just a phenomenon,” says Grant McCallum, the buyer for Auckland-based Real Groovy Records. “And people who buy Taylor will also buy Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, or Dark Side of the Moon.”
Those albums are all available on streaming services, which now account for about 90% of our music consumption. But there’s something different about the way we’re consuming music on vinyl.
Chris Hart, the owner of Real Groovy – whose 1000sq m Auckland store is the largest in the country, and possibly in the Southern Hemisphere – says vinyl is about 70% of his business and shopping for it is increasingly a shared experience.
“We’re seeing people coming in with their parents or their children and shopping for records as a shared family experience,” he says. “Girls and boys getting information from their parents about albums – and the parents would be listening to some of what the kids are into.”
Record fairs
The crowds first formed around World Record Store Day, which launched in 2007, the year the vinyl revival began. In 2023, record fairs, where fans gather to buy and sell, are sprouting around the country.
Domanik Nola convened the bFM Vinyl Appreciation Society, the group of station alumni and young volunteers who sorted, priced and cleaned the records over months before the sale – and also laid down what would not be sold. She sells at most of Auckland’s record fairs as Miss Dom’s Vinyl.
“We always had the sort of grey-haired vinyl buyers, but what’s happening now is that mums and dads have been listening to vinyl at home and the kids start to have a connection with vinyl as well. So now they’re coming to the vinyl fair. It’s a different sort of community event, which is so positive.”
Brian Wafer shuttered his legendary New Plymouth record shop Ima Hitt in the mid-90s when small traders were finding the market was dying. These days, he says, “I just carry on picking up records I want, quitting the ones I don’t want. That’s all I do. It’s good fun.” He’s also behind many of the record fairs that have launched in regional centres in the past two years, including in Whangārei, Napier and Raglan.
“When people say, ‘Hey, we should have one,’ I say to them, ‘Do it,’” he shrugs. “And then I think, bugger it, I’ll do it.”
Some vendors offer new records, but mostly it’s about rediscovering the old. Some traders are selling from their own collections, others have picked up lots via Trade Me.
Wafer has “a couple of ideas” as to why there are so many sellers. “One would be that people who’ve been holding on to stuff because they think it’s going to be worth money one day need to cash up and pay the rent. There are the young ones who’ve gone into JB Hi-Fi and bought everything that they could get out of the special bins in the past couple of years and they’re now selling at record fairs or on Trade Me and Facebook. People have bought them thinking it’s going to be a goldmine. There’s no sure-fire goldmine and records certainly ain’t it.”
JB, the only retail chain to sell vinyl (the Warehouse quit years ago), has a surprisingly good, if occasionally baffling, range. The very busy local Facebook group Vinyl Lovers keeps a list of smaller surviving retailers – places where they might know your name – from the Sound Lounge in Kerikeri to Rock’n Rolla Records in Invercargill. Most, including marquee names in Auckland such as Southbound Records, Flying Out and Marbecks Records, buy and sell second-hand vinyl alongside new ones. One reason for that is that new records have gone up sharply in price in the past three years and most of us won’t come in every week if it means spending $50 to $80 on an album.
Chris Hart is adamant that, allowing for inflation, new records are no more expensive than they were in the 1970s. But Real Groovy buys and sells more old records than anyone else – thousands of them. Some are traded in-store, others are acquired locally as lots and about 6000 at a time are imported from the US. Typically, says Hart, an American seller will have found a large lot (there are YouTube channels devoted to this), has picked out the most valuable records and is selling the rest.
“It’s much better to spend a bit of time selling the $500 record than it is trying to sell 50 $10 records – it’s 50 times the labour. That’s the big thing about buying any kind of secondhand collection – it’s raw materials that we buy, and we apply a lot of labour to it. Ultrasonic cleaning the records, re-sleeving them, spending time pricing them.”
Tracing tracks
There was a time when Hart had more than 100 secondhand copies of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon taking up space in the basement. These days, if one comes in, it’s cleaned up and put out in the bins for $60. Overseas collectors have driven prices for vintage New Zealand releases – notably from the early Flying Nun catalogue – into the hundreds of dollars.
In general, says Hart, tidy copies of classic rock records will sell readily, “but for any good recording of good music, there is a market.” Good quality classical stereo recordings from the late 50s and 60s “are worth quite a bit.”
But an old record is ultimately worth only what someone is prepared to pay for it and Real Groovy has systems to determine what that price is. Every record with a bar code is tracked in and out and the time it takes to sell is noted.
“If it sells in less than a week or two, we might put the next one up by five bucks,” Hart explains. “If it takes more than three months to sell and it sold for $19.95 instead of $29.95, which means it had a $10-off sticker on it, then we’d just do the next one at $19.95. We’re grooming the prices all the time.”
Albums that still don’t sell join the bulk lots in the “letter code” system, which makes price adjustments even easier. The last time the Listener was in Real Groovy, half a dozen bins of albums with a “C” code were going out for a dollar each, having started out at $10 or more. The possibility that there is still gold to be found is central to the vinyl culture of “having a dig”.
Among the reasons that new records have gone up in price is the production squeeze. When the vinyl market died, so did the pressing plants – New Zealand’s last big plant, operated by EMI in Miramar, Wellington, closed in 1987.
McCallum says there are about 100 pressing plants operating worldwide “but only about a dozen of them have the capacity to press good quantities”. This has created a new kind of rarity – a 3- or 4-year-old record might be collectable simply because the label got a production window, pressed 1000 copies and decided it was too hard to go back again after they sold out.
No part of the global chain is more tightly squeezed than the production of lacquer discs, which are inscribed with the recording, then used to make the metal stampers that records are pressed with. When Apollo Masters Corporation in California burnt down in early 2020, the number of lacquer plants in the world was reduced to one, operated by the much smaller Japanese company MDC.
Local pressing
It’s all part of the reality for local companies that want to press records. Auckland-based Loop Recordings works with a New York-based vinyl broker, which negotiates production contracts, and has most of its pressing done with a company in the Czech Republic. The lead time on pressing a record is at least three months.
Most artists want a vinyl version of each release, says Loop’s owner Mikee Tucker, adding that he’s not sure if they all should. Two Loop acts have done better than break even on vinyl: L.A.B., who also rule the streaming charts, have sold more than 10,000 records across their five releases, and Micronism’s landmark techno album Inside a Quiet Mind has passed the 3000 mark.
The latter is the model of a modern record: originally released in 1998, when there was essentially no vinyl, it was remastered, pressed on heavy 180-gram vinyl and given a handsome gatefold sleeve. The whole package matters. One reason Tucker takes his business to the Czechs is that “they know how to print on thick cardboard”.
That might change. Loop has just put its first record through the new pressing plant at the venerable Stebbing Recording Sudios in Auckland – an EP by dance music producer Sanoi – and Tucker is hoping that “Stebbing will nail it. They were the best CD manufacturer for years and they’ve put a lot of effort into it and we hope it feels the same quality as overseas.”
Stebbing has pitched itself as a level up in price and quality from Holiday Records, the unlikely Auckland startup that began pressing records in 2018 and is now producing more than 1000 discs a day, many of them releases from the back catalogues of the three surviving major labels, Universal Music, Sony Music and Warner Music Group.
The change in the music business has been so profound that the majors are now essentially data and marketing companies and no longer have the ability to distribute physical objects – all three now use the independent distributor Rhythmethod to get records to stores. The indies’ dedication to detail isn’t always present – when Sony re-released Che Fu’s Navigator on “pounamu green” vinyl in 2021, it didn’t bother with sleeve notes and left out tracks from the original CD that it couldn’t fit on a single LP.
It was out of step with a modern vinyl culture in which records are objects to be valued. But they are also to be played. Nola, like many of her friends, is particularly fond of 7-inch singles, which make most sense played one after the other – that is, by a DJ. She has collections for the occasion: a jazz set (she is a co-host of 95bFM’s Sunday jazz show), punk rock singles for punk shows, surf rock if she’s supporting her friends The Cthulus.
Open decks
Modern DJing is almost all digital now, but the reappearance of turntables in bars has fuelled another community connection: the open-decks nights. Arts sector worker Justine McLisky founded Singles Going Steady in Auckland 2019 after returning from London, where she was inspired by a regular event called SuperSevens. She now runs it at Bedlam & Squalor in Wellington and describes it as “a fun, social and democratic way to play your own records and not have to worry about being a professional or skilled DJ”.
It’s also an accessible way. It’s one thing to spend $400 on a decent belt-drive turntable at home, but two direct-drive DJ turntables and a mixer will start at about $2000 – and they won’t fit in the lounge.
The same formula – people turn up, put their names on the board, are shown how to use the turntables if necessary, and get to spend 15-20 minutes playing records to everyone else – has been taken up at Pt Chevalier’s Cupid bar, where the fortnightly Spin Class is one of its busiest nights, and Nola runs the Dominion Rd Vinyl Club, which kept its name after relocating to the Corner Store in Mt Eden Rd. In a scene traditionally blighted by male gatekeeping, it’s not unusual for the majority of the selectors to be women.
Nola would like to see more young people joining in, and often invites those she meets at the fairs. “I say, come and follow me on Insta, because I’ll post about it. We do it on the spot, usually. Then they’re locked in – and people do come.”
She’s hoping that the upheaval of the bFM sale will have a similar payback. The station’s financial sustainability plan is now well advanced and the records that went home from the sale – the station’s red tape around the sleeves a mark of provenance – are being played for the first time in years. And the rationalised collection at the station is now, she says, more accessible for a new generation of on-air DJs.
“It hasn’t been very inviting – the dust mites and the dust were disgusting and the New Zealand music collection, which was on the bottom shelf, was the dustiest of all. So yeah, we’re cleaning that now.”
Is there gold in your garage? Read Russell Brown’s guide to buying, selling and playing records.