“I Heard You Have a Compilation of Every Good Song Ever Done by Anybody”: Subjectivity, Exchange, and Interaction at Record Fairs

Midwest Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology

MIDSEM, Minneapolis, Minnesota, May 15, 2009.

This paper’s title is taken from a song by LCD Soundsystem.

Abstract

Record fairs are regular events where dealers rent tables from the organizers to sell vinyl records, CDs, and music memorabilia to the general public. The business pressures and costs facing record fair dealers are varied: they must negotiate large temporal and geographic intervals to cater to collectors of many genres, navigating between a continually discriminating level of connoisseurship on one hand and a consistently shrinking secondary market for vinyl records on the other, with little promise of financial profit. These pressures differ according to dealers’ individual circumstances.

Vinyl records in the 21st century, while regaining a small degree of popularity, remain a niche market, mainly attracting DJs, younger fans of underground popular music, older consumers dealing in nostalgia, and record collectors of varying levels of discretion. Each of these classes of customers has different motives and goals when shopping at record fairs.

Dealers’ business practices are flexible and mutable, according to their individual circumstances and the expectations of their customers. These business practices can’t be accurately modeled by rational choice arguments, as anecdotal and quantitative evidence suggest that the retail market for music recordings as a whole will continue to shrink in the foreseeable future. Instead, we need models as flexible and mutable as the business practices themselves. Through ethnographic research at Chicago-area record fairs and interview data, I examine the different expectations—both of record dealers and collectors—that can help us examine the subjective, one-to-one economic interactions that make up the lived experiences of the record fair event.