Digital music be damned, vinyl is on a comeback. Plenty of reports published previously in Music Times have shed light on the continuing growth of the vinyl format among music listeners and a new company is looking to take advantage of it, by sending subscribers several records a month in the mail, much like how Netflix previously specialized in sending DVD's through the mail. The company, VNYL, just reached its Kickstarter goal this week (becoming one of the first projects this year to find funding in the popular music category), according to Rolling Stone.
A monthly subscription costs $15, which gets the purchaser three vinyl records sent to them on a monthly basis for trying out. If one of them is a winner, users will have the opportunity to purchase it for a modest fee (comparable to buying at a store) of between $8 and $12. In order to ensure that you'll be getting demos in line with your personal taste, users will select hashtags such as "#danceparty" or similar and VNYL staff will choose records accordingly. If the user doesn't feel like keeping any of that month's haul, they can ship them back via pre-paid shipping, again like Netflix.
Founder Nick Alt was a member of Vinyl Me, Please, an online club that sends members an "essential" album on a monthly basis (to keep) for $27.99. Alt took that idea but made the price lower and the number of records sampled higher (although "Vinyl Me" does have pretty good taste...giving out The War on Drugs' Lost In The Dream and R.L. Burnside's Too Bad Jim during 2014).
"It's amazing," Alt told Rolling Stone. "There are so many people who got turntables for Christmas, and they're people that clearly didn't grow up with physical music like I did. I can't be any more thrilled that people who are in their 20s and teens, who basically started with iTunes, are coming full circle and buying records again. It's so cool to me."
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