Tucked away among the shops selling textbooks (” IAS tutorials on USB Drives: With free USB” ), jewellers and medicine shops, opposite the Balaji temple on bustling Avenue Road, is a small store that seems to specialise in bronze statuettes of Ganesha and Krishna. You might be forgiven for assuming it to be just another shop selling trinkets for the lost tourist, but Seetha phone Company (Since 1924) also sells gramophones and records. If you ask for turntables, or LPs for that matter, the shop assistant will take out a long steel key and lead you through a warren of side streets and up a dingy staircase to a small second-floor room. The room is packed with old LP records and players. “We sell hundreds of LPs, we have customers coming from Tamil Nadu, Andhra and Kerala as well, all making bulk purchases ,” he says.
Vinyl is back. Worldwide. For a medium that was written off 20 years ago — “End of track”, The Economist mourned in 1991— LP records have begun to see a resurgence. Sales of vinyl almost doubled in the US in 2009, and have been bucking the music industry’s downward slump, growing by 14% last year when overall album sales dropped 13%.
“I got hooked on to vinyl about five years ago,” says Adrian Cooke, a 38-year-old Bangalorean who handles Levi Strauss’ retail operations. “It was at my friend’s place. He had a Garrard 401 LP player and I was struck by the depth and clarity of the sound. I decided to get myself a turntable and picked up Garrard Zero 100 player for Rs 2000 at Lingarajapuram. Since then I’ve been collecting LPs,” he says. You get exposed to a lot of new music through LPs, feels Cooke: “I started off by collecting country music and rock and then moved on to jazz.”
Vazir Alli Minhaz is the proprietor of Habitat, a shop on Church Street that sells vinyl. Habitat initially started out as a gift shop and diversified into video cassettes and CDs, echoing Minhaz’s interests. “Habitat always targeted a niche market, one that reflected my tastes,” he says. Minhaz started selling vinyl last year. “I’ve been collecting vinyl since I was 16; I’m 64 now,” he smiles. “After a point, I realised that I had many records that did not bear up on repeated listening and it was in an attempt to prune my collection that Habitat started selling vinyl,” he says.
The collectors’ instinct drives several vinyl aficionados. Suresh Ramabhadran is a senior executive with a software company who has been collecting vinyl for nearly seven years. “My obsession with vinyl started when my father brought home a Philips turntable when I was seven. The first record I listened to was MS Subbulakshmi singing Bhaja Govindam — the one with a spoken introduction by Rajaji. The 70s and early 80s were a wonderful time for Carnatic music vinyl lovers. The advent of CDs and MP3s changed that, but there is nothing that equals the pleasure of finding a rare Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer performance backed by L Shankar and Palghat Mani in the dusty stacks of a second-hand record store.”
“I spend one day every week going around Bangalore, looking for vinyl,” says Jonathan Freer, a 28-year-old Bangalorean . Jonathan’s affair with vinyl started when he found his father’s old turntable languishing in an attic. He refurbished it and now has more than 500 albums.
“More than 50% of my records have were bought secondhand. It takes time to tell a good secondhand record from a bad one — I made a lot of mistakes buying scratched or warped records initially, but now, I just have to take a look and handle a record and I can tell if it is good,” he says. “I used to collect cassettes and CDs, and friends would always borrow and seldom return them. I don’t have that problem with vinyl,” he says, smiling.
According to Minhaz, the vinyl market is not large, but its fans are dedicated. “Some of them are tired of just downloading music. There are others who buy records without having turntables. Some of them buy records as an investment. And then you have the collectors.”
But vinyl collection is not cheap. “I spend anything between Rs 4000 and Rs 10,000 every month, and I’m permanently broke,” laughs Freer. Cooke says that a good condition Garrard turntable can cost anywhere between Rs 60,000 and Rs 1 lakh. “I started off with a Philips 312 turntable, like my father’s . Now I have four of them,” says Sridhar.
Record companies and retail stores have noticed. Lijin Varghese, head of marketing at Landmark, says that the chain started stocking vinyl after the record companies began imports last year. Since then, Landmark has seen a small but steady demand for vinyl. “Its usually classic rock or classical music that sells best. And our customers come to us with requests for specific albums which we then import.”
source: http://www.articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Bangalore / by Narayanan Krishnaswami, TNN / July 15th, 2012
