So I admit, I dug my subscription to Vinyl Me Please which Cindy picked up for me for my Birthday last year. Six months of awesome colored vinyl and great music. The last one I picked up was Arctic Monkey’s

Which had smoke colored vinyl and an ashtray custom label.

It’s awesome. VMP takes albums and makes special editions of them with colored vinyl and special art and inserts etc. and it becomes collectible. This is not new of course. Barnes and Nobles comes to mind. They have been doing it for a while with their own special pressings.

The trend continues and is reaching less high brow establishments.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love Half Price Books, and I do purchase vinyl from there, but I do not consider them a strong vinyl marketplace, though they do sell a smattering of new albums since the vinyl resurgence.

But now this…

A special HPB pressing?

I know there are people out there that will love this. I just wonder though if vinyl is going the way of the baseball card.

Remember when baseball cards were a thing between you and your friends, there were like 3 brands and you traded with your friends and would look through their cards while mumbling… got it, got it, got it, need it, got it, got it….

Then came the BOOM of sports cards and suddenly there were 50 brands and instead of having 3 cards of a player there were 53 cards of a player and special cards of him too. It went way over the top and seems to have remained there.

I worry, not just because of HPB, that the exclusive pressings and box sets and colored vinyl and Record Store Day special editions are just fractionating the value and more importantly the fun of being a record collector.

Again, nothing against HPB.

When the Dollar Store in my area has a special pressing… I’m out.