I had a trip down memory lane this week. I did something I haven’t done for 40 years.
I went into a record shop, I was like a kid in a sweet shop. It was packed floor to ceiling with vinyl records over the years.
Then I got thinking, what has driven this rise in popularity in vinyl ( the shop owner was considering moving to larger premises ), it’s really old technology, easy to damage ( ask Sally ) and not very portable, have you ever tried to play a record in your car ?
I am old enough to have a record collection. Then along came CDs , more expensive but , allegedly , indestructible ( my daughter proved this not to be true ) and they sounded better if you kept them in the freezer. The sound quality was on a new level .You could hear the bus going by outside the studio on the original remastered first Beatles CD . You could also get extra tracks on a CD , all the stuff the artist didn’t think good enough to make the original so it was worth paying the extra for????. Then along came along the Midi Disk , even better sound , but that disappeared without trace. Up to today when a music track is just a digital file on a streaming platform which you don’t own.
So what are we buying when we buy a vinyl record? We pay around £25 for a 12 inch piece of vinyl, 30 to 45 minutes of music and if we are lucky a piece of art work and some story about the album, plus the lyrics. To have access to the same album from a streaming platform we can pay £10 per month ? and have access to more music than we will ever have time to listen to.
So what are we paying for when we purchase a vinyl album? Its clearly not the music because we can get that at a much cheaper price from a streaming platform.
That got me thinking about your business, what are your customers really buying from you ? Is it what you think or is it something much more valuable and you could charge much more for your product or service.
What is your vinyl record in your business?