These new vinyl subscription services make no sense at all

If there’s one thing we learned in 2014, is that everybody loves wax again.

With vinyl sales soaring as digital downloads decline and CDs drop off the face of the earth, entrepreneurs are naturally moving into the market to try and make a buck. The latest trend to capitalise on the vinyl revival seems like an odd one, though –subscription services.

VNYL is billed as “Netflix for physical records”, but it has pretty much nothing to do with Netflix – it’s more like those lucky dip magazine subscriptions where you sign up to have a curated selection of new publications sent to you every month. With VNYL, instead choosing specific albums, you choose from one of its pre-defined categories, or #vibes, which include #betweenthesheets, #rainyday and #gamenight (what the fuck?).

As Music Mic reports, when you’re done with the record, you ship it back and get the next instalment delivered, but if you really like what you’ve been sent you can keep the record for as little as $12.

What we don’t get is why anyone would pay to temporarily hire music when they can access all the music they want online through streaming and cheap downloads. After all, people don’t buy vinyl to get access to music – they buy it because they want to own it, keep it, have it on their shelf or keep it in their record bag to play out.

But don’t listen to us – a similar service called Vinyl Me, Please, which gives subscribers a record and a commissioned art print and cocktail recipe (honestly) for $25 a month, managed to send out roughly 29,000 vinyl records last year. So not everyone minds giving their records back. Correction: It’s been pointed out that you get to keep the records from Vinyl Me, Please. So it’s really nothing like Netflix, and a lot more like that aforementioned magazine service, which actually sounds kinda fun.

Latest

Latest



		
	
Share Tweet