I head over to Amazons new vinyl area http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vinyl-Albums-Music/b?ie=UTF8&node=520022 and start to browse through the hundreds of albums available. I find a few bands that I know, but the LPs available are ones I have on CD. Most of the stuff here, I start to realise, is bands I’ve never heard of. I start to listen to them, the great thing about MySpace is that nearly every band has a page on it, and on those pages you can usually listen to a few of their songs and over the course of a full day’s browsing, I find 20 bands I have never heard of before that I want and have five on order:

Major Lazer – ‘Guns Don’t Kill People… Lazers Do’ @ http://www.majorlazer.com/

Big Boss Man – ‘Full English Breakfast’ @ http://www.big-boss-man.com/

Cobra Killer – ‘Uppers & Downers’ @ http://www.myspace.com/cobrakiller1

Jaqee – ‘Kokoo Girl’ @ http://www.jaqee.com/

Haushka – ‘Ferndorf’ @ http://www.hauschka-net.de/

Other records I am looking at getting are albums by Holly Golightly, Pete Molinari, The Budos Band, Timber Timbre, Fight Like Apes (who have an good cover of Lightsaber Cocksucking Blues by McKlusky on their MySpace page), Rilo Kiley, Justin Townes Earle, James Yorkston, Hot Hot Heat, Fabienne DelSol, Errors, Them Crooked Vultures, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, LCD Soundsystem and The Beastie Boys.

After some investigation I find this site http://www.needles-and-spins.co.uk/ which has helpful FAQs on how playback from records work, that you need to amplify the signal from a record deck using a phono pre-amplifier before you run it into a line input on a normal amplifier. Then I started looking at the ranges of turntables available and found some that were pretty expensive like this one http://www.continuumaudiolabs.com/caliburn.html that retails at around £115,000.00 and some were pretty cheap, like this one http://www.ionaudio.com/ionttusb which retails for about £60. Obviously, I’m in no position to pay a whacking great big amount of money for one, but I want something semi-decent.

So I decided on this one http://www.project-audio.com/main.php?prod=debutphusb&cat=turntables&lang=en which I picked up for £259.00 from http://www.getinthemix.co.uk/ although they had a sale on at the time. It has a phono pre-amplifier built in as well as a USB connector so you can direct record any vinyl to a computer – something I probably will never do but it’s nice to have it. That’s quite an expensive thing for me to buy, so I don’t have any money left over for an amplifier or speakers, so I am planning on running this into a little Behringer mixer and outputting through a set of JBL ‘Creature’ speakers until I have some more funds.

I’m sure audiophiles will probably be throwing their hands up in horror at this which leads me on to…

I don’t enjoy music that way – I either sit and listen to it, or I put it on when I have friends round – those friends go through my CD collection and they say “What’s this like – can we listen to it?” and I say “Yes” and I change the CD.

So I have CD’s. Quite a few of them. Not a massive collection, but a fair sized collection. They have their disadvantages though. People (other than me) don’t put them back in the right case. People borrow them and don’t give them back. They get dirty and do that “da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da” thing and then no amount of cleaning can seem to get rid of it. The very worst thing of all is the skip button. I hate the skip button. If you use the skip button, at any point, you are not listening to the album. Sometimes people start an album from track 5 or 6 and then we only listen to half an album. Sometimes people skip various tracks throughout the CD. This means you are not listening to an album!

Albums are a whole thing – a unified presentation of a musician or bands work. That musician or band thought long and hard about how to arrange their songs and in what order. To randomly skip around or skip half of it means you are just not getting the full effect. Listening to an album is a cumulative experience. Yes, there are some songs on there you may not like, but these are the songs that will grow on you or you will learn to understand their place in the track list.

So I don’t like the direction that the presentation and distribution of music is heading in. I’m not completely happy with the current format I’m using. I fancy something different. I’m buying a record deck.

Yes, in regard to the last point, they are. Music sales are indicating a trend in which CD sales are decreasing each year (although they still make up the bulk (80%-ish) of sales) while digital downloads are on the rise, in fact some stuff is download only like ‘Nighttiming’, a great record by Jason Schwartzman as Coconut Records.

Try as I might, I just can’t buy into MP3 downloads because, honestly, what are you getting? What am I going to do with it? The only MP3 player I have is my Sony Walkman phone, but I’ve only bothered to put some music on it once and that was a pain because first I had to rip the CD’s, which took all day, then I couldn’t find the fucking lead to connect the phone, then it wouldn’t work and I had to install drivers, then it didn’t pick up meta-tags properly because I had all the songs in individual folders instead of one big folder (and don’t be fooled, I’m not a technophobe, I work in IT support and do quite complex stuff at work) and then, when I finally got it all working, I listened to stuff on the train for a few weeks… and then stopped. Why? Because I am not a Walkman guy. I don’t listen to music when I’m out and about. It’s just not one of my habits.

So what else do you do with MP3’s? Burn them to CD and play them on your stereo? That means all you have is a copied CD that you have paid for. So why not just buy the CD in the first place?

So the fact is, MP3s are worthless and that is why there is so much piracy. There was a series of documentaries on the BBC narrated by Robert Webb (of Peep Show) which looked at the cultural developments during the noughties, one episode covered MP3 and there was a guy on there saying how a survey of teenagers indicated that they were not prepared to pay for music downloaded in MP3 format. Full stop. They had no intention of ever paying for music. Why should they? Like I said, what do you actually get? You get nothing, just a throwaway file. Whoops, I deleted it, never mind, download it again.

Now I used to really be into Nirvana when I was 15 (which, incidentally, is the age at which any self-respecting teenager should be really into Nirvana), I had the T-Shirts, I was in a Nirvana cover band, I grew my hair long, my nickname at school was ‘Kurt’… you get the idea. Anyhoo, these articles gave me a massive and pleasant swell of nostalgia and I thought “I’d like to listen to that record, but to do that, I’d have to buy a record player, and that’s quite a lot of outlay for a single recording”.

Then I read more about vinyl and found lot’s of articles like this http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1702369,00.html (you can find more by googling ‘vinyl is coming back’) that talk about a resurgence of vinyl sales based on RIAA figures. These actually breakdown to indicate that vinyl has something like 2.3% of the total music sales, but that this market share has risen each year since the start of the noughties, so it’s not such a rosy picture as the article would have you believe, but I did learn that most new records are released on vinyl (if not domestically then certainly in parts of Europe and Asia), that they usually come with an MP3 download voucher so you can get digital copies if you want for free and that Amazon have recently opened a huge vinyl sales area on their website. So if someone large like Amazon are carrying vinyl and are investing into it, they must want a piece of that 2.3% market share, so as long as I can get stuff on vinyl, why not buy a record deck so I can get a copy of that newly re-mastered In Utero?