In 1987 Big Black released a CD compilation called The Rich Man’s Eight Track Tape with the following admonition printed on the face of the disc: “When, in five years, this remarkable achievement in the advancement of fidelity is obsolete and unplayable on any ‘modern’ equipment, remember, in 1971, the 8-track tape was the state of the art.” Though CDs have hardly gone the way of the eight-track, it’s hard to argue that they’ve earned their longevity—whatever advantages they may have offered in 1983, they’re a crap format now.
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The only defensible reason to buy CDs these days is an attachment to music-as-artifact—every so often you see one with really beautiful packaging. But on that front they lose out big to vinyl, which offers album artists a much bigger canvas and sidesteps the annoying problem of fragile jewel cases and CD spindles. If you’re going to own music you have to lug around, vinyl is the obvious choice—even if you don’t respond to LPs as totemic objects, like so many record fiends do, you have to admit that their creamy analog sound beats the hell out of digital reproductions. (That’s right, I said it.) CDs don’t do nearly as much to justify the physical space they require.
This week Flameshovel is putting out Make Believe’s Going to the Bone Church as a vinyl LP and an unlocked MP3 download—it’s the label’s first release that won’t have a CD version at all. This, according to Flameshovel cohead James Kenler, is the way his label might end up releasing everything. One camp of consumers, he says, “doesn’t see any innate value in consumable music at this point. So these people steal music, rip from their friends’ CDs, or don’t really have any strong feelings about the aesthetics of the CDs they do purchase.” He admits that this is a generalization, but it fits more than a few people I know who own huge hard drives full of music and haven’t bought a CD since Napster happened. “The other extreme,” he says, “is that you have someone who cares to the utmost level about the packaging, and they’re the ones who are going to continue to buy music no matter how they do it, and they’re interested in a more tangible connection.” Kenler’s strategy is to cater more to that second set and worry less about people who wouldn’t be giving him money anyway.
It helps that the extremely uncommercial artists on FSS’s release schedule appeal pretty much exclusively to an audience that takes its music seriously—not too many trend hoppers will be checking out the gnarly melted-down black metal of Wrnlrd or the eerie electroacoustic experiments of Haptic. Adams hopes to earn the loyalty of that audience with a subscription service that rewards them with goodies like nonalbum music and posters. “The big advantage in the model that I see,” says Adams, “is the opportunity to have a direct relationship with customers. I can send music directly to them digitally; I can offer special bonus items (both physical and digital) that they can’t get anywhere else.”
