Making music, buying music and trying not to get ripped off

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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What colour is a lazy streak?

So what is happening of late. Well I went through a spate for a short time of finding lots of collection pieces on Ebay for a very reasonable price. For two weeks I was struggling to keep up with the flow of reasonable priced items on offer, and then with a bump just stopped. This wasn't from a single source but from all over the place, from the UK, from Europe and even from the US with a decent postage amount. Why the sudden peak of items and then hardly anything again, I have no idea.

Needless to say that my usual roller-coaster ride of interest and then general annoyance with myself and this stupid idea of doing this collection has made it's usual route of peaks and troughs. At the moment I'm in-between moods. Trying to persuade myself what a wonderful thing it is to collect such wonderful music and respect such great artists and then thinking that perhaps I should be slapping myself around the back of the head with a very large wet haddock for taking such a journey on in the first place.

I'm generally a lazy person. Being lazy and sitting on my fat arse is the major default setting for me. After being at work all day, the ONLY thing I want to do when I get home is sit in a nice comfy chair. Perhaps I may be persuaded to switch the TV on, maybe I will browse the interweb, but mostly it's pastimes that involve sitting. I reckon my brain also has the same desire. My brain also goes to work all day and wants to just go home and relax in a bowl of comfy warm mush. Even while writing this, my brain has had enough of working for the day and wants to just do as little as possible. That's not actually easy for me, I have a brain that never shuts up or winds down, I'm mentally on the go all the time, so my brain also nags me to just slow down a little by doing as little as possible. This of course includes doing this blog, or updating facebook, or joining in on a forum I'm a member of and, of course, all the other things I want to do generally in my life, such as sending an email to a friend and just staying in touch.

So now that I've put myself through a bought of flagellation and got my brain in gear (but still with fat arse firmly planted on sofa leather), what have I accomplished or found out since I last posted so very long ago. Well in the news......is the soon to be released 4AD book by journalist Martin Aston. Called "Facing the Other Way, the Story of 4AD". Set to be released on September 26th 2013, it will be the first official account of the label we love. Focusing on mostly the first 20 years of 4AD's history, it has the prestigious boast of having the cover designed by Vaughan Oliver and will also be available as a limited edition with 2 CD's of some of the labels musical history. Info here : 

As a warning to all those looking to try and pre-order the the book, be aware that Amazon do not have copies of the limited edition on order to sell to pre-orders made on Amazon. Amazon may get some copies if the publishers don't sell all the limited editions and have some left to pass on. I fell into this trap with Amazon before when they list something they may likely never get their hands on......so buyers beware.

On a slightly different note, I've started to notice a pattern of reprints of cassettes. I say reprints because they are not official re-releases, but an obvious sign that the originally made stock has run out and new batches of cassettes manufactured. Cassettes are really easy to spot because of the change in cassette design during the eighties. In the early eighties, cassettes were solid colour plastic, usually white or black, occasionally other funky colours to match the general colour of the album design but the coloured ones are much more rare. By the mid eighties though, a new fashion for seeing the workings of a mechanical object became desirable, the watch makers Swatch being one of the trendier items that everyone wanted which showed the gears and workings of the watch behind garish cheap clear plastic.

Cassette manufacturers such as TDK followed this fashion through, showing the tape wound up on the spools through clear plastic. Pretty soon, you couldn't get a cassette tape that wasn't trendy and see through and I suspect that 4AD had the same issue when ordering new stock. So there are distinct and obvious signs of a reprint of early eighties releases on cassette. This Mortal coil and Cocteau Twins albums are the first that I've noticed and I'm sure there will be more to be found.

So if you are interested in getting original cassettes for early eighties albums, stick to the solid colour plastics and not the clear.

I'm a Total Wanter

I have been spending the last couple of weeks adding my want list to Discogs. On Discogs, as well adding your collection by picking out each release that you have and adding it, you can also compile a wish list, or wants list.

I have kept away from this for quite a while, as being a paranoid person (and rarely disappointed with that viewpoint on life) I didn’t want to add to the market how much a release may be sought after. By this I mean, on each release you can see how many people have added that release to their collection. You can also see against the same release, how many people want the item. It’s seems logical that this is a good indicator of worth. If more people want the release than have the release, then of course there is a demand for it and demand increases price. The greater the difference, the most likely effect on price it will have.

If 200 people are marked against the release as having it in their collection and only 10 have marked the release into their want list, demand is low and plenty already have it. The price therefore will most likely be relatively low, or at least varied. On the other hand if on another release only two people have it marked as in their collection but 100 have it added to their want list, the demand for the release is very high and the prices from the traders will most likely reflect this. This isn’t set in stone, but as a general rule it makes sense. Traders with no idea of what they are selling, can easily base a price on this demand alone

So you could say that using the want list on Discogs may actually work against me. By adding items to my want list, I tell the trader before I even start shopping, how desperate I may be for each release. I had to weigh up the advantages before I was willing to go ahead with this. The advantages are having a full database, safely offsite (so I can access it anywhere), of all the items I am still going to have to get. It also gives me the advantage of seeing which traders I can buy from that have multiple items that I want, which then reduce the packaging costs, which would be spread over multiple buys (generally the more you buy in one go the cheaper the collective packing and postage is).

 

Another advantage is having a database of wanted items that I can print off whenever and wherever required, send a link to a trader if they have a discogs account, or post an exported list  on a blog and beg for freebies. But the greatest advantage is having a market place where you know exactly what you are buying, and if you don’t get exactly what is listed, you have reason to complain and get your money back. This is one of the worst problems with ebay. As I have mentioned before, many traders on ebay just don’t describe what they are selling. Some listings on ebay are so sparse with their information that it isn’t always clear what the format is. So the chance of finding out what the catalogue number, country of origin, matrix number etc is, means sending messages off to the trader every time. At least with a listing against a wanted item in Discogs, I know the exact release that is up for sale and if there is any deviation in that with the item being sold, the seller will have specified it.

And yet another advantage, is seeing the selling history of previous sales of the same item. You can immediately see if a trader is ripping you off. And strangely enough many still try to charge extortionate prices. So there is a greater advantage to using the Discogs want list than holding it back.

I should get commission for this!!

The disadvantage is finding something new, which I have done many times on ebay. Discogs is limited to what other users have added, and doesn’t have everything on there. Traders can be quite lazy and if they don’t find the release they have, instead of creating a new release, they will stick their item against another release with a few comments on what is different about it. That is useless if the release they have put it against is an item you already have, it won’t appear against your want list. Another downer is not being able to add non media items such as posters, postcards, promotional items etc. So again as mentioned in a previous blog entry, these have to be kept separate, which is very annoying.

I’m still adding to my want list, so it’s still growing, but you can peruse if you wish, any donations gratefully accepted

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B2WD33dyuQdJTjJyY1BxQ1lUYnUyNUdoYU1QWDFzQQ

Ebay Tips

So what is my prize collection piece so far? I was very lucky a few years ago to see this come up on ebay, and to my surprise had very few bids on it. It is an RIAA (which is the Record Industry Association of America, that claims to represent American record companies) gold award for the single M/A/R/R/S Pump up the volume. This award is for the sale of 500,000 singles sold.

A friend of mine once told me how he was baffled by record fairs, because he would never sell his records. I’m equally baffled as to why some record company executive, producer, or whoever owned this award, would want to get rid of it. Only a few would have been awarded to band members, a producer and a record executive as far as I know, and I am lucky enough to have got one. M/A/R/R/S’s single of Pump Up The Volume was No.1 in the UK and America. It was released through 4AD in America under the label 4^th & Broadway. The award is for 4^th & Broadway, so 4AD never got a gold award in the UK directly for this single.

I have picked up a couple of tips when buying on ebay. Firstly, be patient. If you’re buying a Cocteau Twins 12”, you will easily find a standard edition priced at £30, but if you are willing to keep watch, you can also find the same release, same condition, for 99p. Secondly, use your mobile phone as an ebay alarm. I have a few items I am watching on my account, and I used to easily miss when an item was soon to be ending. Bidding on ebay is a bit like playing a simple poker game. Don’t show your hand until the last possible moment. If you bid days before the item ends, others will be more tempted to outbid you. So set the alarm for 5 minutes before the item is ending, then the alarm reminds you in time to think about what bid amount to put in. You can then forget about it for the rest of the day. I was always forgetting and missing the deadline. Another tip, try for item miss-spellings. I recently bought the cassette single by Lush called Scar for a cheap price. The font on the cover of the single looks like the single is called Sear. I searched for Sear and some muppet had put Sear instead of Scar on selling an item. So there were no other bids (as other buyers wouldn’t find it in a search) and I won the item for the lowest price, 99p again.

On another note, a nice fellow called Richard got in touch with me, he has a Modern English website and is putting a discography together and needs some pictures of Modern English releases to add to the site. This is the site

http://modernenglishdiscog.yolasite.com/

Have a look and, if you can help, send him an email.

Buy, Buy, Buy, bye bye

I started collecting music when I was 15 years old.  I lived in a village 5 miles from the nearest town and 20 miles from the nearest city.  The town had a really good independent record shop that had been around for years, but to purchase second hand records I had to wait for the rare occurrence of a record fair to come to town, or a market stall that only traded on a Thursday once a week.  It was a small town and for a while the small record fairs were enough.  But the more eccentric my music tastes became, the less likely it was that the local fair had anything I was looking for.

When I was able to, I found out about the city record fairs and went to them.  The city fairs had more variety and rarer releases.  I got a short respite, as a beginner to collecting, rewards can be found easily.  When you first start out you don’t have any of the easier to find releases.  So, each record fair was exciting, as I would come home with bags full of records.  But, again, as the easier to find releases were purchased and each year my taste got more and more eclectic, even the city record fairs started to become tedious.  I live in the East Midlands in the UK.  This seems to be a dead spot in the UK for record fairs.  When there are record fairs now, there is NEVER anything of interest, and I always come home empty handed.  I like a range of different music styles and will pick up quite a variety of other stuff as well as the 4AD collection, but success in finding anything is non existent.

Whenever I go into the city or visit another town or city, much to the dismay of my long suffering wife, I have to check out the local record store, if there is one.  Again, this is disappointing in most cases.  Many record shops have thousands of records and CDs.  Very few of them separate the genres in any helpful way.  Years ago I would trawl through thousands of records quite happily and come out with loads of purchases.  But after a few years, I got to the point of sifting through thousands and finding nothing.  Now my patience is quite low.  You can tell within a few minutes if a record shop is simply not going to have anything of worth.  I tend to look through a block of records and when you see that all of them without exception are all very common releases, you know there’s little chance of finding anything at all in the whole shop.

I have mixed feelings about the decline in second hand music shops.  For some shops I have little sympathy.  For years the general second hand record shop has been a stuffy, smelly man cove.  Run by an old rock’n’roller or 60’s northern soul fanatic who loves to sit in a corner and read novels all day.  They barely give you a glance when you enter the shop, know little of what stock they have, unless it’s the 50’s or early 60’s music you’re looking for, put ridiculous prices on poor quality records because the price is high in the published guide and have a surprisingly little small amount of stock.  They then moan how they can’t buy or sell much anymore.

Personally, if I ran a record shop I would be BUYING off ebay and selling in the shop.  Any collector would pay a reasonable price for stock you wouldn’t normally find in a record shop.  Most record shops have the same records in stock, the length and breadth of the country.  I find bargains all the time on ebay and wonder why the remaining record shops aren’t buying these up!!

So, apart from a plan to try one of the big, big record fairs, I’ve just about given up on record fairs and record shops.  I’m forced to look on ebay.  The range, quality and prices are far better than any record fair or shop I’ve ever visited in 26 years (and I want to find a dream record shop or fair more than anything).  My prized 4AD collection piece I purchased on ebay and I would never have found it at a record fair or shop.  That prize will be revealed in my next post, along with a few ebay tips I picked up along the way.

I would love to read some of your experiences of fairs and shops and see if you have any better luck than I do with them

Will be back soon

The male obsession with collecting

I wonder what makes some humans collect? It’s a valid question, because sometimes I go through the self doubt phases and wonder why I’m doing this. Really I’m collecting pieces of plastic. But I have to remind myself that in a lot of ways music tends to be forgotten as a form of art.

If I collected Constable artworks, it would be a respectful hobby and collection (and of course very expensive) and I would most likely be asked to exhibit all over the world. If I had a collection of Henry Moore sculptures, the story would be the same. But for music, it’s completely different. It’s probably because these artists did one to a handful of the same piece and it is these that are collectable, not the reproductions of them that the general public could pick up.

If this is the difference, then surely music has a near equivalent. If a painting by Constable is the non reproduced master of his art piece, then I suppose the master tapes of a musicians recordings must be the “real” musicians art piece. A set of master tapes would be rather boring to exhibit though.

So enough of this mumbling, the last couple of days has seen me acquire the cassette tape mini album “Scar” by the band Lush. This was interesting, bought off ebay. It was a “Buy It Now” item with an expensive price, although this cassette is pretty rare, I’ve not come across it before. A nice feature on Ebay is the “Make An Offer” feature on some “Buy It Now” items. This was really helpful, as the vendor accepted half the stated price for it. So I suppose it’s always worth having a go.

I heard the band Lush on the radio in 1989 and was in love with the heavy guitars and soft vocals over the top. I then saw them at Crystal Palace Bowl supporting The Cure along with James and All About Eve. Lush where incredible and their music fitted a huge outdoor concert in the late afternoon summer sun. I then saw them a few months later at the Leadmill in Sheffield. Although this gig was ok, the cosy, sweaty confinement of the Leadmill was a completely different vibe and showed more of their indie pop / rock side than the hard rock / ethereal Lush that I fell in love with. The former was the musical direction Lush decided to go in later releases.

Although I’m collecting the first ten years of 4AD, I can’t help also picking up other stuff along the way, Like Lisa Gerrard’s “The Silver Tree” promo and a Dead Can Dance “Into The Labyrinth” promo. Lisa Gerrard is my wife’s favourite artist and kind of helps keep her sweet when spending lots of money on a stupid hobby.

I’m full of useful hints today aren’t I. See you later