It's so very hard to concentrate. After the rush of the build up to the year end last year, a lot of other things went on hold while I shopped frantically to get my wantlist down below 900 items. Since the new year my concentration has gone back to the neglected stuff, which included my best mate Andy and I creating some music again under our old band name Personality Crisis.
While that has been great, the 4AD music collection has suffered in the meantime. Pickings at the moment seem quite thin on the ground. There seems to be little to nothing coming from record fairs, but that seems to be nothing new. Ebay has become swamped in the last year or so with newspaper clippings, full page magazine spreads and promo photo's being sold, that it takes so much longer to sift through the listings.
5 years ago, an international search on ebay for the word 4AD would bring back around three to four hundred items. Today, searching for 4AD on ebay worldwide, 8,279 items are listed. This has doubled in the last year alone. While there are a few non 4AD items in there, such as vehicle parts and old coins, the vast majority is the 4AD label. On a search you can filter this down, but I have found that sometimes the best bargains are to be found where items have been either wrongly listed, or listed with little detail that the filters could easily take out.
Occasionally, confronted with these huge and growing numbers, I change my default sorting and have a quick look to see what is at the top of the price list. This weeks shock is a seller asking £879.88 ($1298) for a Pixies DVD. How much??? There's nothing special about it, the same one can be found for £1.56 with free postage. I can only assume that the seller has put the decimal in the wrong place, although even at $12.98 it's still overpriced.
Of course, a larger number of listings, means more choice and greater availability, which is a good thing. It just means that more time is needed to get around the newspaper clippings, the bad rated sellers, the sellers that charge a fortune for delivery etc etc. I try and not to go above the ten pounds mark, as there are a lot of overpriced stuff that starts to fill out the listings above ten pounds. Still, there are some lovely gems to be found even now.
On another note, I have noticed that I'm getting quite the collection of secondary items again. These are items I have bought and haven't been as stated by the seller and I end up keeping them even though I already have a copy because the seller just writes them off instead of paying for the return postage. I also have some duplicates because of my own arse ups, buying something and not thoroughly checking that I already have it. I think I will have to kick myself into gear and get these given away to some wanting reader for free. How about it, anyone intersted?
I have also been meaning to compile a list of some interesting 4AD uk release tell tale signs on here, which I must do very soon. Signs such as the introduction of barcodes, see through cassettes, re-release on CD etc. There are some interesting changes on the uk 4AD releases which can be helpful to define an original from a re-release. That would also mean that I need to kick myself up the bottom to rummage through my collection to find and accurately publish my findings to you all. I shall get onto it
Signing out for now, please check out my music page on Facebook and post an opinion on there if you wish.....
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Showing posts with label Personality Crisis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Personality Crisis. Show all posts
Wednesday, 18 March 2015
Wednesday, 18 February 2015
I'm going to stop sleeping, I need more time
I've lost a little momentum over the last couple of weeks. I managed to get the wantlist down below 900, even though I missed my own deadline for the end of the 2014 year.
My concentration has been diverted into the excitement of creating some new music for the first time in over ten years and the work is coming along nicely.
On Saturday I visited the nearby city of Derby to go to a record fair being held in the city centre. The fair was organised by VIP record fairs who hold some larger fairs down in London on occasion, so it was a good chance to see if the traders who work with VIP are any good and may give me incentive to check out one of the larger London fairs one day.
The record fair was quite small, held in a church and had around 20 traders. I just happened to start immediately on a stall that specialised in newer music... punk, new wave, indie and alternative. He had loads of stock, lots of really interesting stuff. It took me about an hour and a half to go through his entire stock. About half way through my search, the vendor started to chat with me and I told him what mostly my 900 item list consisted of which is mainly non-uk 4AD releases, to which he replied "goodness me, the standard UK 4AD issues are difficult enough to come by of late, you won't have much luck with the foreign releases". My heart slumped as I finished off looking through his stock. He was right. There wasn't a single thing at the whole fair. I would have come away empty handed if it wasn't for finding a sealed re-release of The Cure's album Disintegration that I needed to buy as the picture disc I have sounds awful under the needle.
Once again I was walking away disappointed, except for the fact that a couple of the traders actually did have some interesting stock (for a change). I had also planned to check out the local 2nd hand record shop in Derby, but was disappointed to find that the stock there was very typical, badly stored and overly priced. I always find it soul destroying when perusing through stacks of easy listening, soft rock and mass produced pop albums, knowing that which each finger movement the reality of finding anything remotely alternative is extremely slim. I was about to give up when I noticed a small stack of tape cassettes and among them the album Pod by the Breeders. I knew I had it already, but I thought "What the heck" and decided just to have a quick look as you never know.
To my surprise it was the Spanish release! What the bright blue hectum's rectum is a Spanish Breeders cassette tape doing in among the dreary selection of Derby's yesterdays? I've no idea, but I snapped it up. At least I wasn't going home totally empty handed.
Moving on, in the last couple of weeks I've been having second thoughts about using Discogs. Many of the people I know either steer clear of Discogs because of it's reputation, or did use it and got put off and now stay away from it. Discogs is a great online tool, a tool I would love to use more but struggle to use to it's full at the moment because of time constraints. As you know, I'm spreading myself thin, between the book I'm attempting to write, this 4AD project, my Tuesday night album listening, being a husband (I would be an idiot to live in a bubble), trying to lose weight and now the resurrection of writing music again with Personality Crisis. I also feel the need to fit in my love of movies and Formula 1 racing when I get the chance. There's no complaining here, if I didn't enjoy these things, I would be stupid to spend time on them.
What I'm trying to say is that while some Discogs users would happily spend many hours a week on the site, I have my limits. So getting hassled to keep going back on and add or finely correct a submission starts to get quite annoying. I try and put in the bares bones of a submission if it doesn't exist, I think it's important that if a release is missing from Discogs and I have it, I have a responsibility to add it to Discogs. The problem is, is that there are too many superior users that think only a 100 percent, fully submitted and entirely correct submission should be allowed, all or nothing. As well as that, a user should submit a full submission with the full understanding of every rule and a full knowledge of every Label, Company, Artist and technical knowledge of how the industry has worked for the past 100 years and that the responsibility of a submission is solely down the to original submitter.
Needless to say, my judgment doesn't seem to be good enough and bowing to someone else's judgement isn't good enough either on Discogs. So I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place and getting to a point where I just feel like using Discogs for what I can selfishly get out of it, which goes against my nature in an environment that supposed to be for sharing and for the greater good. Oh well
This last week has seen my best friend Andy and I putting the last few touches on our new song under the old band name Personality Crisis. This has meant that I have also been working frantically to get a Facebook page up and running and some of the old songs onto Bandcamp for folk to download. That also means designing a cover for the new song and some extra little titbits like banners etc. As I've said before, this takes time away from other things, so my 4AD shopping has suffered lately. It has been many years since I last tried to promote the band online, probably ten years ago, and so much has changed. The market is saturated and I wonder how a young new band can get themselves heard nowadays. And of course, there's so much time needed to devote to it properly, I don't think I can give our music the attention it deserves, which is such a shame, as what we do is so good. Oh oh, the modesty alarm is going off......
My concentration has been diverted into the excitement of creating some new music for the first time in over ten years and the work is coming along nicely.
On Saturday I visited the nearby city of Derby to go to a record fair being held in the city centre. The fair was organised by VIP record fairs who hold some larger fairs down in London on occasion, so it was a good chance to see if the traders who work with VIP are any good and may give me incentive to check out one of the larger London fairs one day.
The record fair was quite small, held in a church and had around 20 traders. I just happened to start immediately on a stall that specialised in newer music... punk, new wave, indie and alternative. He had loads of stock, lots of really interesting stuff. It took me about an hour and a half to go through his entire stock. About half way through my search, the vendor started to chat with me and I told him what mostly my 900 item list consisted of which is mainly non-uk 4AD releases, to which he replied "goodness me, the standard UK 4AD issues are difficult enough to come by of late, you won't have much luck with the foreign releases". My heart slumped as I finished off looking through his stock. He was right. There wasn't a single thing at the whole fair. I would have come away empty handed if it wasn't for finding a sealed re-release of The Cure's album Disintegration that I needed to buy as the picture disc I have sounds awful under the needle.
Once again I was walking away disappointed, except for the fact that a couple of the traders actually did have some interesting stock (for a change). I had also planned to check out the local 2nd hand record shop in Derby, but was disappointed to find that the stock there was very typical, badly stored and overly priced. I always find it soul destroying when perusing through stacks of easy listening, soft rock and mass produced pop albums, knowing that which each finger movement the reality of finding anything remotely alternative is extremely slim. I was about to give up when I noticed a small stack of tape cassettes and among them the album Pod by the Breeders. I knew I had it already, but I thought "What the heck" and decided just to have a quick look as you never know.
To my surprise it was the Spanish release! What the bright blue hectum's rectum is a Spanish Breeders cassette tape doing in among the dreary selection of Derby's yesterdays? I've no idea, but I snapped it up. At least I wasn't going home totally empty handed.
Moving on, in the last couple of weeks I've been having second thoughts about using Discogs. Many of the people I know either steer clear of Discogs because of it's reputation, or did use it and got put off and now stay away from it. Discogs is a great online tool, a tool I would love to use more but struggle to use to it's full at the moment because of time constraints. As you know, I'm spreading myself thin, between the book I'm attempting to write, this 4AD project, my Tuesday night album listening, being a husband (I would be an idiot to live in a bubble), trying to lose weight and now the resurrection of writing music again with Personality Crisis. I also feel the need to fit in my love of movies and Formula 1 racing when I get the chance. There's no complaining here, if I didn't enjoy these things, I would be stupid to spend time on them.
What I'm trying to say is that while some Discogs users would happily spend many hours a week on the site, I have my limits. So getting hassled to keep going back on and add or finely correct a submission starts to get quite annoying. I try and put in the bares bones of a submission if it doesn't exist, I think it's important that if a release is missing from Discogs and I have it, I have a responsibility to add it to Discogs. The problem is, is that there are too many superior users that think only a 100 percent, fully submitted and entirely correct submission should be allowed, all or nothing. As well as that, a user should submit a full submission with the full understanding of every rule and a full knowledge of every Label, Company, Artist and technical knowledge of how the industry has worked for the past 100 years and that the responsibility of a submission is solely down the to original submitter.
Needless to say, my judgment doesn't seem to be good enough and bowing to someone else's judgement isn't good enough either on Discogs. So I feel stuck between a rock and a hard place and getting to a point where I just feel like using Discogs for what I can selfishly get out of it, which goes against my nature in an environment that supposed to be for sharing and for the greater good. Oh well
This last week has seen my best friend Andy and I putting the last few touches on our new song under the old band name Personality Crisis. This has meant that I have also been working frantically to get a Facebook page up and running and some of the old songs onto Bandcamp for folk to download. That also means designing a cover for the new song and some extra little titbits like banners etc. As I've said before, this takes time away from other things, so my 4AD shopping has suffered lately. It has been many years since I last tried to promote the band online, probably ten years ago, and so much has changed. The market is saturated and I wonder how a young new band can get themselves heard nowadays. And of course, there's so much time needed to devote to it properly, I don't think I can give our music the attention it deserves, which is such a shame, as what we do is so good. Oh oh, the modesty alarm is going off......
Friday, 18 March 2011
Added Links
Added a couple of links today. The first is a link to my record collection at discogs. This is in process at the moment. I still partially through putting my collection on there. I've concentrated on my non 4AD stuff first, then when I get to my 4AD collection I will spend more time making sure that all the submission already on this site are absolutely accurate.
The other link is to my band's site on Myspace. My band is called "Personality Crisis" and along with my fellow band member and best friend we recorded a few songs during the late 90's and early 00's. Let us know what you think. (You can download the tracks for free). I may at some point in the future also add the link to the other band I played for "13 Candles". I played for 13 Candles for two years in the 90's.
So I shall continue to expand my discogs data for now and come back to you soon.
The other link is to my band's site on Myspace. My band is called "Personality Crisis" and along with my fellow band member and best friend we recorded a few songs during the late 90's and early 00's. Let us know what you think. (You can download the tracks for free). I may at some point in the future also add the link to the other band I played for "13 Candles". I played for 13 Candles for two years in the 90's.
So I shall continue to expand my discogs data for now and come back to you soon.
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