I note with interest on the recent International Record Store Day website that our area of Melbourne has the highest concentration of participating stores in Australia by a huge margin.

International Record Store Day store finder.

This probably is a postcode 3068 phenomena, and this inner Northern area of Melbourne is indeed becoming dangerously hipster. The born again Vinyl scene has caught the eye of academic institutions; we had RMIT in here the other day filming a documentary piece of research on the rise of the LP record. Brett made sure Magic the Papillon put in an appearance on an otherwise human dominated video ...

The BBC has been watching record sales and have gone so far as to categorise the different types of new gen record lovers into eight different types of collector.

The one thing that is lacking from this scene is large scale directed commercial exploitation ...

Increasingly we have seen the new era of media connectivity on the internet via social media and forums et al to be a fertile ground for astro-turfing and classical disinformation bombardment. Astute organisations of sufficient resource have been utilising this to mold public opinion in the cause of their own ideology and or marketing aims often unconstrained by sensible criteria of coherence and consistency.

So in this world of institutional media contrivance Coca Cola is a healthy socially contributive source of natural goodness, plain cigarette packaging is bad for the small business man on the street, the mining tax will cripple the Australian economy, climate change is not anthropogenic, Obama is Hitler, and Tony Abbott has become our prime minister ...

The resurgence of vinyl sales didn't happen because the buying population was told to do it, it didn't happen by the contrivance of an ingenious guerrilla marketing campaign, it didn't happen either by social media or by blue sky technocrats redefining our media ecosystem for the second decade of century twentyone ...

In fact other than a few musicians, studios, small shops, and old fashioned Hi-Fi manufacturers, there is no one making a significant commercial benefit from vinyls rebirth as a primary source of quality recording for the music enthusiast.

One has no doubt that in fairly short order marketing organisations will attempt to ride the back of this wave ... it may though that they have found it hard to find reins to steer it with though, as it seems to be derived from a powerful undercurrent of real disenchantment with how not only music, but also musicians have been treated by the digital dissemination of their product. Also I would argue that these particular very intelligent and high information level consumers that are choosing vinyl are amongst the most intrinsically resistant to the tactics of those aforesaid marketing organisations.

As a minor parallel I note that the newly resurgent cafe racer scene that was contemporary with vinyls rise and was an expression of disgust at the formulaic and dysfunctional chopper that had become a creature of Reality TV and bad American taste ... think Orange County Choppers ... now the Cafe Racers have themselves begun to appear on Reality TV shows and have been taken up as a motif for a new wave of fashionable retro clothing. See Bullshit Hipster Bike Videos for examples of how this otherwise worthy and creative endeavor has been perverted for the purposes of selling things we don't need.

As yet then the Vinyl movement not been overtly infiltrated by any marketing institutions and it remains a pure example of a consumer directed anti marketing phenomena. Perhaps the whole thing is just too damn geek for any advertising slickster to understand. That is why it leads me to a sense of optimism that not all things of our commercial acquaintance are being controlled by the lower moral authority of high end social marketing techniques.

I do note though that records and players are showing up with regularity in a place on the mainstream where ten years ago it would have been completely unlikely. So in both the Sci Fi blockbusters of Oblivion with Tom Cruise and the latest Star Trek "into Darkness" the default manner of music playback in hundreds of years time is ... the LP Record.

Listening to Vinyl makes you better people ... Spoof