More Entries in Our Thinking About Records Series
John Stossel wrote a piece about prediction markets shortly after the 2022 midterms, explaining why prediction markets are still a good thing even though many of the predictions for the election that were made there did not come true. His take:
Bettors [may be wrong, but] at least adjust their predictions quickly.
Last night, while clods on TV still said “Democrats and Republicans battle for control of the House (CBS),” those of us who follow the betting already knew that Republicans would win the House.
Historically, bettors have a great track record. Across 730 candidate chances we’ve tracked, when something is expected to happen 70% of the time, it actually happens about 70% of the time.
That’s because people with money on the line try harder than pundits to be right.
As you can imagine, this last line was music to my ears.
We’ve built our record business on the fact that we have the experience, the expertise and the staff needed to find the best sounding pressings of many of the most important recordings of all time, from Dark Side of the Moon to Kind of Blue and everything in between.
And, as everyone knows, we charge a premium price for our Hot Stamper pressings, often ten and twenty times their “market value.” This has been known to confuse and upset some people.
But can we charge more than our customers are willing to pay and still be in business after 37 38 years?
Some people must think they are getting their money’s worth, at least, that’s what some of them tell us.
We have to back up our opinions and our descriptions with actual records that deliver the sound we say they will, or we would have gone out of business a long time ago. You can fool some of the people all of the time, etc., etc.
Guaranteed?
This is in sharp contrast to the audiophile reviewers who tout one new record after another with no guarantee whatsoever that you will find anything like the superior sound they spent an endless number of words describing when the record finally ends up on your turntable.
Where do you go to get your money back when the record doesn’t have the sound they told you it would have?
If it’s Heavy Vinyl, there is nowhere for you to go.
If it’s a Hot Stamper, you send it back to us and we refund your money.
We have to be right almost all of the time if we are going to be successful in the record business. We charge a substantial premium for records that look very much like other pressings, with little in the way of collector value. If we were wrong more than a small fraction of the time, buyers would quickly tire of the hassle of returning our records.
There is nothing special about our records other than the way they sound. If you are looking for a particular pressing because you think it will sound better than others, you don’t need us to find it for you. Go to discogs. The specific pressing you seek is sure to be up there and a whole lot cheaper than ours.
We get paid to find out what the best pressings are, and we do that through a process we developed called a shootout.
If you think you already know what the best pressings are, you can save yourself a lot of money not buying our pricey Hot Stampers. How you would come by this information without doing time-consuming and expensive shootouts, using stacks and stacks of copies, refining your understanding over the course of many years, even decades in some cases, is a question best answered by those of a less skeptical nature.
The long and the short of our success can be summed up in three words: we try harder.
There is money on the line. We cannot afford to be wrong.
Back to Stossel:
They also adjust quickly when they see they’ve made a mistake.
Ah, yet more music to my ears. The 109 entries in the live and learn section (as of 2024) means that, unlike 50 million Elvis fans, we can be wrong, and we make no attempt to hide the fact.
We make mistakes and we do our best to learn from them. We adjust quickly.
We do not want to lose a customer by sending him a record that is not as good as it should be.
If you want to predict who is more likely to be right about the sound of any given pressing, the guy with money on the line is your man. That’s us.
Also, we have a big advantage over our competition. We’ve actually played the record we send you, so we know how good it sounds. They haven’t played theirs, so they’re the ones who are stuck with the worst option imaginable: guessing.
This has been yet another entry in a series of posts that fall under the heading of the big picture.
Further Reading