Sly Stone made a lot of essential releases. But what was his one "Essential" – capital "e" – record?
It's Andrew Winistorfer's job to decide, and then share the news with the vinyl collecting world. As the senior music and editorial director for Vinyl Me, Please, Winistorfer curates the company's monthly record clubs.
Winistorfer and the team at VMP lovingly and meticulously put together vinyl reissues that subscribers eagerly await – the five subscription categories are Essentials, Classics, Hip-Hop, Country and Rock. In case you are wondering, Winistorfer picked Sly's 1970 LP "There's A Riot Goin' On" for July's Essential release.
"This is obviously an essential record, it's his masterpiece," he told the Herald. "I'm constantly pinching myself that I get paid to be like, 'Hey, what are we doing with Sly and the Family Stone?'"
Vinyl Me, Please started in 2013 with a dozen subscribers who were happy to have fellow music junkies send them monthly mailings of great records. In months, VMP had a couple hundred subscribers. A few years later, that number grew to thousands, then tens of thousands during the pandemic
For those in their 40s and 50s, getting a bunch of records in the mail is a gleeful experience that harkens back to the days of Columbia House's 12 CDs for a penny (or rather, a penny now, hundreds of dollars later for you, or your parents). Trust me, the glee is still both real and intense – but now it costs $138 for three months, which gets your four LPs plus bonus stuff like exclusive art prints and essays about the releases. While VMP has plenty of Gen X customers, Columbia House nostalgia isn't fueling the company's explosion.
"The growth is in younger generations who have decided it isn't enough to just have their favorite album on their phone," Winistorfer said. "It's this opportunity to have this thing that you really love at your fingertips in a way that's not as disposable as everything else. It's a physical manifestation of your love for, say, this Tyler the Creator album and, no matter what happens with Spotify or Tidal or Apple Music, you will always have this record."
The clubs aren't just mailing ultra-hip, young acts like Tyler the Creator or bedrock artists such as Sly to customers. The vinyl resurgence is a fad beyond genre or generation – the format has seen 17-straight years of growth leading to 50 million LPs sold in 2022. Recent Essential releases include albums from Sublime, Kasey Musgraves, Death Cab for Cutie, and Stevie Ray Vaughan. Now Vaughan is amazing but he has never been hip.
"There was a moment where I wondered if anyone would like this Stevie Ray Vaughn record, what would people think of this random '80s blues album?" Winistorfer said. "Then the Stevie Ray Vaughn record sold out."
There is room in the vinyl boom, and the Essentials club, for Sly and Vaughan and a hundred other artists both obvious and obscure.
"What's really cool about us is that there is no algorithm," Winistorfer said. "An algorithm would lose the magic that we've captured."
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