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Wednesday, 30th July 2008

Marcus Berkmann on Travis Elborough's nostalgia for LP records 

Money, though, is at the heart of this story. When the Columbia recording company released its first batch of LPs in 1948, they cost $4.85 each. These were what marketing men would now call ‘premium products’. By comparison, when Decca started manufacturing record players for the new format in the UK a couple of years later, the cheapest one cost £9. Maybe it was a similar business model to Gillette’s: charge bugger-all for the razor, but make them pay through the nose for the blades.

By the time I started buying albums in 1977, they were still relatively expensive: £3.99 was the going rate for a chart album in Our Price, which rose apparently arbitrarily overnight to £4.31 when the government of the day slapped VAT all over them. In the same year my Penguin paperback of P.G. Wodehouse’s Aunts Aren’t Gentlemen cost me 65p. A fiver for an album was normal in 1980, with cassettes about 50p cheaper. (And blank cassettes were much, much cheaper than that. I suspect that in every household where fortysomethings lurk, there is a cardboard box full of tapes of other people’s albums which you can’t quite bring yourself to throw away, even though you no longer have anything to play them on.)

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