A New Startup Will Send You One Vinyl Record, and a Cocktail Recipe, Every Month
In a world where every music-streaming service under the sun is battling to bring tailored or infinite playlists to your earbuds, the last thing you’d expect is for a new company to say, “Hey, how about just one vinyl record per month, period?”
But that’s exactly what music startup Vinyl Me, Please is offering. The service, the brainchild of two vinyl enthusiasts in Chicago, handpicks a record every month, pairs it with a piece of art and a custom cocktail recipe, packages it “like a birthday present,” and delivers it to your door. The aim, the founders say, is to help people who are interested in vinyl avoid feeling overwhelmed when first building a collection.
The guys formed the idea in June 2012. Co-founder Matt Fiedler had received his dad’s record player for Christmas and didn’t know where to start.
“I love music, but walking into a record store was, like, really stressful for me,” Fiedler told Yahoo Tech. “There was so much to pick from that I didn’t really know what to get. I was almost paralyzed with trying to start my collection.”
His co-worker and future roommate Tyler Barstow felt the same. They reminisced about the times when famous labels would run their own music clubs. But, when they looked, they couldn’t find anything like what they’d heard about available now. So they decided to start their own. After consulting with some friends in the music industry, they launched the site in January 2013.
The two worked from their living room, pruning a list of vinyls that Barstow describes as “essential albums for your collection and really worth your time to sit down and listen to from beginning to end.” They began with only 10 subscribers, obsessing so closely that they called each member every month to offer one-on-one personal music consulting.
“It was like having a personal stylist for music,” Barstow said. “Every month we would talk to each of our customers on the phone and make them a playlist. After we made it up to about 150 subscribers, we had to stop that.”
Each selection process begins with a discussion among Barstow, Fiedler, and a group of their friends who work as producers or licensors, or who work at record labels. They focus on varying their selection by genre so that someone doesn’t end up with, say, five soul albums in a row.
The two are equally thoughtful when it comes to drink pairings. To go with last month’s record by punk band Diarrhea Planet, they recommended a Dixie Car Bomb, which consists of bourbon whiskey, butterscotch schnapps, and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. For a Courtney Barnett record titled “Avant Gardener,” they partnered with Seattle Distilling Company to create a custom “tomato gardener’s martini.”
A year and a half after its launch, Vinyl Me, Please has amassed a small, dedicated group of about 600 subscribers, whose ranks are growing at an average of 25 percent per month. That volume, according to Barstow, has given them the power to start working with labels to reissue and customize records that have long been out of circulation, like Thelonious Monk’s “Paris, 1969.”
“Each of our orders now are essentially triggering a re-pressing of the record, which just means that now the copies of the vinyls we’re sending out are ones you can only get through Vinyl Me,” Barstow said.
Previously, those kinds of exclusives were granted only to local stores for events like Record Store Day (coming up on April 19). But don’t get Barstow and Fiedler wrong: They remain very loyal to their neighborhood vinyl shops.
“We sort of jokingly say from time to time that if we find out if any of our customers have given up on their local record store because of us, we’re going to whoop their ass,” Barstow said. “Local record stores are extremely important. We don’t see ourselves as any kind of replacement.”
Month-to-month subscriptions to Vinyl Me, Please will cost you $27 a month; three-month subscriptions go for $75; or you can sign up for the one-year plan for $274. It’s no $10 Spotify subscription, but for anyone who doesn’t know where to start with vinyl, it’s not a bad price to pay for a human touch.
If you’re interested in subscribing, you can check out this link, which skips the site’s usual waiting list and brings you straight to the sign-up.
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