According to the New York Post, Best Buy is going to start selling vinyl:
The consumer-electronics giant, which happens also to be the third-largest music seller behind Apple’s iTunes and Wal-Mart, is considering devoting eight square feet of merchandising space in all of its 1,020 stores solely to vinyl, which would equate to just under 200 albums, after a test in 100 of its stores around the country proved successful.
Vinyl sales are up, while CD sales shrink more and more every year. The world just keeps getting weirder. Good luck to them. But I’m guessing the mom and pop record stores aren’t too pleased with this news… Or maybe they are: the more anybody can do to get people interested in purchasing music has got to be good news, right?
Via Billboard.
So Best Buy is going to sell vinyl. Good news, if you’re looking for a copy of the new Rihanna, Creed, or High School Musical on a resolutely non-portable medium.
I doubt what they’re going to sell is that kind of dreck. It will be more reissues of old albums that most of us have already bought once, twice or three times before.
Plus new Radiohead, REM, U2, and other “alternative” bands on major labels and well-distributed indies.
This is pretty fascinating – vinyl returns to retail. But for how long? Is the resurgence of vinyl a fad, or has it become a perennial?
For what it’s worth, in the past 6 months I have sold 2 turntables on CL to dorky college students who didn’t understand the very concept of analog. The one guy wanted to know how the needle read the “bits.” But for some reason they want records.
Grooves, bits, tomatoes, tomahtoes. It’s all magic.
I hope you’re right. But last time I was in BB, they had zero copies of the new Decemberists album and about four cases of Il Divo. I guess we’ll find out what kind of a marketplace the vinyl nerds can create.