Huddled around boxes of albums of the best soft rock from the last thirty years, a dozen middle-aged men and women talk and chat outside the Gorbushka market on a Sunday afternoon.
You may not be able to distinguish them from the few customers who drift over to buy a hardly played album of Richard Clayderman’s hits, but vinyl, once the much-loved format of devoted music lovers in Soviet times, is back.
Sales of vinyl have doubled in the United States and Europe in the last two years, and the Russian market is no different.
Interest is increasing in Russia, said Pavel Yeroshev, owner of Zvukovoy Baryer, or Sound Barrier, the largest vinyl store in Russia. The store has almost 100,000 records in its collection, with prices ranging from $10 to $10,000, and sales are strong.
Vinyl was once a niche market for aging music fans who refused to convert to a new technology. But young artists, especially in the indie- and rock-music scenes, have embraced the old technology, with many groups releasing partly or only on vinyl.
Vinyl lovers swear by the sound and quality of the format, infinitely superior to that of the compact disc, never mind the squeezed-down sound of an mp3. “It is alive and warm,” said Yeroshev.
The golden age of Soviet vinyl was in the 1970s and 1980s, when Melodiya, the music company that held a monopoly on the record industry, could produce 30 million copies of one album in factories all over the country. Approved Western artists, such as Abba, Cliff Richards and Smokie, were also produced.
?€?It was an interesting and at the same time exotic hobby for crazy music lovers like me. A record would cost 50 or 60 rubles, more than half the average monthly wage,?€? said Lev Shprints, a vinyl and antique collector who has a collection of more than 2,000 albums, mainly from the 1970s and 1980s.
With prices so high, record collections were considered big if you had more than 30 albums. People would swap records, and a small black market emerged amongst the most avid music lovers.
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Creative Commons
Vinyl lovers swear by the format, saying it is far superior to CDs and mp3s. |
Record collectors had secret meeting points on Sundays to exchange and sell records, just as they do openly today.
?€?Raids were common,?€? said Shprints, although the police never destroyed the seized goods. ?€?The police would take away the records and then you could find them again at the next Sunday?€™s meeting.?€?
Melodiya stopped printing vinyl in the early 1990s, and so far have no plans to return, said spokesperson Alla Borisova, saying it is too expensive.
Still, the last 10 years have seen an increasing interest in vinyl, helped by the club music boom, with DJs preferring records, which, unlike CDs, can be manipulated. At least one Russian electronic label has now moved over to just vinyl.
It is not only records that produce such devotion.
Inside her ramshackle flat on the outskirts of Moscow, Olga, a seller at Gorbushka who has thousands of records in her collection, points at a huge wooden speaker the size of a fridge. It was made in the 1950s in the United States; it cost close to $10,000, she said.
The record player is as important with vinyl fans in Moscow, who rave over U.S. and Japanese players made in the 1970s and 1980s.
?€?Modern players, unless they are ridiculously expensive, are hopeless,?€? said Yeroshev.
Olga gets her husband very carefully to place a record of melodramatic 1970s rock on the 1974 Akay player he and Olga are selling for $300.
His eyes glow with enthusiasm as the guitars kick in. ?€?Listen to the sound,?€? he said.
Vinyl collectors, then and now, also love the whole package of the record.
?€?It is also the ‘Apple,?€? said Shprints, referring to the sticker in the center of the record. ?€?The record sleeve and the whole design of the record makes them a work of art.?€?
And for some, records are an investment.
?€?They are not expensive, but the number of copies is limited and a priori they will become antiques,?€? said Shprints. ?€?I can imagine that in 30 years, they will be sold alongside Matisse and Shishkin paintings.?€?
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