| The responsibilities that artists are left to shoulder in this era are unprecedented and inhumane. |
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 | | Tyler, the Creator at Outside Lands, San Francisco, Oct. 29, 2021. | | (FilmMagic/Getty Images) | | |
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| rantnrave:// |
Vinyl, the Creator
Pop charts are weird and if anyone deserves to benefit from the weirdness, why not TYLER, THE CREATOR, whose Grammy-winning CALL ME IF YOU GET LOST returns to #1 on the BILLBOARD 200 this week, 10 months after debuting in the same spot and five months after falling off the chart completely. It wasn't the Grammy for Best Rap Album, which wasn't awarded on the main telecast, that did it. It was vinyl.
Tyler first teased the possibility of a vinyl release of "Call Me If You Get Lost" almost as soon as the album was released last June, and it isn't out of the question that that's when the album was sent out to be pressed onto vinyl. Vinyl turnaround times have ballooned in recent years, thanks to factors including inadequate pressing plant capacity, a shortage of vinyl pellets and a flood of orders from major labels jumping on the vinyl trend. "Turnaround times for vinyl [are] currently leaning towards the length of a human pregnancy," JACK WHITE said a month ago in making a public plea to the three major labels to build pressing plants of their own.
"Call Me If You Get Lost" had reappeared in recent months on the Billboard 200, and had been bouncing around the chart's bottom half. As of a week ago, it was officially the 120th best selling album in the US. Twenty other albums, two of them by TAYLOR SWIFT, had hit #1 since its lone week on top of the chart. And then the vinyl arrived, just about the length of a human pregnancy after the album's original release. It was a double vinyl album, available exclusively on Tyler's website for $35, and some 49,500 people snapped it up in a single week. According to Billboard, that's the biggest vinyl sales week for any hip-hop artist, as well as any solo male artist, since SOUNDSCAN (now LUMINATE) began tracking sales in 1991. The album's streaming numbers were down from the previous week, but those vinyl sales count a lot more than streams in Billboard/Luminate's chart formula.
So on this Monday after RECORD STORE DAY we can officially report, for the 19th or 20th time, that vinyl is back. We can also note some irony in that timing. Since the vinyl is exclusive to Tyler's own site, no record store benefited from this particular vinyl bonanza. Record Store Day and record-setting vinyl week coincided but didn't meet.
Also Charting
In Slate, chart watcher CHRIS MOLANPHY explains why songs that debut at #1 on the HOT 100, such as JACK HARLOW's "FIRST CLASS" and HARRY STYLES' "AS IT WAS," may not prove as durable as songs that take longer to find their way to the top. "Songs that move quickly up the Hot 100 or even enter at No. 1," Molanphy writes, "may not be legacy hits. They are drafting off a prior success"... And in Billboard, JIM ASKER explores the problem that long-charting country radio hits, like DUSTIN LYNCH and MACKENZIE PORTER's "THINKING 'BOUT YOU," can cause for country labels. Since commercial radio playlists tend to be small, a long-running hit can literally block another song's path to substantial radio play. "When we leave songs in heavy [rotation] for 18 months," programming exec RANDY CHASE at SUMMITMEDIA tells Asker, "the next 'Thinking 'Bout You,' 'Famous Friends' [by CHRIS YOUNG and KANE BROWN] and 'If I Didn't Love You' [JASON ALDEAN and CARRIE UNDERWOOD] die a long, slow death in the middle of the chart."
| | - Matty Karas (@troubledoll), curator | |
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 | | CBS Sunday Morning |
| | Mining music catalogs for gold | | By Kelefa Sanneh | | Correspondent Kelefa Sanneh looks at how music catalogs are becoming extremely valuable properties. He also talks with Graham Russell and Russell Hitchcock, of the band Air Supply, whose '80s hits, including "All Out of Love," are finding new life in unexpected ways. | | |
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 | | Zogblog |
| | Vinyl Records Are Sneakers Now | | By Zack O'Malley Greenburg | | Record Store Day means a superfan frenzy over a bevy of limited-edition drops. Sound familiar? | | |
 | | The New Yorker |
| | John Darnielle Wants to Tell You a Story | | By Helen Rosner | | The Mountain Goats front man and novelist discusses art as labor, the value of religious faith, the beauty of Chaucer, and, more or less, the secret to happiness. | | |
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 | | Pitchfork |
| | What Does It Take for a Band to Make Sustainable Merch? | | By Quinn Moreland | | Organic vs. recycled cotton, water-based vs. plastic ink, $5 vs. $25-for most touring musicians, eco-conscious T-shirts are an unsustainable investment. A band shirt wont make or break an artist's bottom line, but it sure can help in the dismal economic landscape that is the indie music industry. | | |
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| | Notes On A Unified Theory Of Pusha T And billy woods | | By Gary Suarez | | Pusha T polarizes hip-hop heads. Ye loyalists and Drizzy devotees stay largely entrenched in their starf***er camps, forming hardened positions about the G.O.O.D. Music president based largely on factionalization and less on substance. Outside of those comically predictable circles, a longstanding debate over the erstwhile Clipse rapper's status persists. | | |
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| what we're into |
 | | Music of the day | | "Remorseless" | | billy woods | | From "Aethiopes," out now on Backwoodz Studioz. | | |
|  | | Video of the day | | "Vinyl Nation" | | Kevin Smokler and Christopher Boone | | Kevin Smokler and Christopher Boone's lullaby to the vinyl industry is now available via video on demand. | | |
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| Music | Media | | | | | | Suggest a link  | | "REDEF is dedicated to my mother, who nurtured and encouraged my interest in everything and slightly regrets the day she taught me to always ask 'why?'" |
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