Digging for vinyl

Call me a soulless old fart with no sense of whimsey or joy of discovery but I don’t like vinyl fairs.

For those of you who don’t know; vinyl fairs are event usually held in something like a local town hall or church where sellers will rock up with crates of vinyl and look to sell it to people.

I am not a sardine thank you very much

The ammout of space this takes up in considerable as each one of the vendors comes with at least a dozen Really Useful Boxes full of vinyl records. Tables and tables of them all around and trying to get between them is a pain. The people who organise these events are not the kind that splash out on large venues so they are squeezed in.

I am not in a position to throw stones here but the last time I went I was not the largest guy there. I suspect enjoying music doesn’t burn much in the way of calories. So you are always rubbing up against someone to get around, then you have the issue of the boxes themselves.

I have often thought this about multiple venues for expos as well but there comes a point where the venue is so packed that it detracts from the experience. Less sellers or a bigger venue would’ve been nice.

Long arms are a must

Reaching to the back of some of these boxes you will need to find an additional foot of arm. I can see why the boxes are used, they are great for travel, they stack and are the perfect size of 12 inch records. But if you have 2 of them in a line, good luck getting to anything at the back.

Then you have the whole stupid mess that is music genres. What the heck is “Easy Listening”? Meanwhile “rock & pop” is about 60% of the boxes. Some vendors had the sense of mind to try and introduce some more organisation. Such as decades within large genres.

All for naught

Metal, the genre I was looking for, was usually small, so flicking through the box or two wasn’t too bad. But I didn’t find much and some records were there that were questionable (not sure Meat Loaf is metal).

The biggest blow I found after going to multiple tables is that you cannot find much for any band that was founded since 2000. I wanted to get some Linkin Park or maybe Daft Punk but fat chance. You need to be thinking about the 80’s. I suspect anything newer is being sold by shops.

I may go to the next one I see advertised but until then I am going to stick to Ebay, the search feature is a god send.