Will VinylHub Do for Record Stores What Discogs Did for Records?

The weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year’s are the busiest of the year for Discogs. Flush with Christmas cash or gifted a turntable, buyers and sellers flock to the online retailer to both fill out their collections or inaugurate them. It’s a nice bit of synchronicity that this holiday period coincides with founder Kevin Lewandowski’s launch of the site in November 2000, the spike in sales serving as a yearly reminder of the persistent demand for music in physical formats and Discogs dominance in that sphere.

15 years on and with Discogs firmly entrenched, the company has recently dipped their toes into cataloguing the brick-and-mortar stores they seemingly displaced with VinylHub, a nascent platform with implications for vinyl-hounds all over the world.

Launched in late 2014, VinylHub attempts to compile all of the planet’s record stores, a natural application of Discog’s urge for completism in the physical realm. Within five months of going online, it was the largest record store database in the world. “It’s like Discogs, for Record Shops and Record Events,” touts the tagline on VinylHub’s front page.

In general, VinylHub lacks the search and metadata filters that make Discogs navigable – there’s no way of searching by specialty and city lists are populated by plenty of defunct stores. However, the haphazard navigation doesn’t feel so distant from what Discogs must have been like upon its debut.

Speaking to Ronald Rich Jr., Discogs marketing program manager, a clearer picture of the company’s intentions for VinylHub comes through. “We were looking for how to expand Discogs and what’s next outside of the realm of cataloguing the world’s collection of music,” explains Rich, whose speech is refreshingly absent of marketing jargon. “We were doing a bunch of events, talking with sellers and helping them get on board with Discogs. How to get their inventory in, inventory management, all those sorts of seller pieces. Through that firsthand contact it came up: is there any way for me to tie in my actual store to Discogs?” Like the experience of getting turned onto a record via a prickly clerk or what’s playing on the store system, it took personal contact with the sellers, typically separated by hundreds of miles, for Discogs to increase this physical focus.

At the moment, VinylHub seems more suited for sellers than buyers, although that should change as functionality improves and mechanisms are added to encourage more granular searches. Also seemingly inevitable – reviews and ratings for individual stores. If Discogs is the Library of Congress for vinyl, VinylHub has the chance to be Yelp. “We’re definitely testing what the comments would be like on each individual page,” confirms Rich. “Imagine if you’re looking for a local record swap in Glasgow…VinylHub is going to be a research tool for all those events in that area. ‘What are the good events? Where do I need to be?’ That’s what we’re trying to get to.”

Connecting vinyl lovers with stores where they can feed their addiction is a logical extension of Discogs. The pleasure of a digital digging experience, however, only goes so far. For as many people who complain about the deleterious effects of Discogs, there are equal numbers embracing it, and VinylHub, even just a little, will continue to perpetuate the existence of vinyl as a physical and social medium to be sought after. A physical product often demands a physical environment to experience it in. You’re better served using Discogs to track down a specific need, but if you’re seeking to discover music in a real-world setting, the database provided by VinylHub has more potential than anything to best provide that access.

Questions persist regarding what experiences VinylHub neglects even in its breadth of access. While in Paris I visited Victor Kiswell, a vaunted collector who runs a rare record business out of his nondescript apartment in the 9th Arrondissement. Kiswell’s stock is devoid of new releases and the prices reach eye-popping levels of indulgence. The experience was unorthodox – I was the sole shopper, sitting in Kiswell’s living room and making sure not to confuse the “private” and “for sale” sections of his unmarked Expedit shelves while he offered to brew tea. At one point, his young son came from school and Kiswell fixed him a snack while I perused a pristine version of Miles Davis’ Live-Evil double LP.

Kiswell’s shop is an alternative to the traditional record store model, to be sure, but in any case, it’s not listed on VinylHub. What is VinylHub, particularly lacking in stores outside of Europe and the U.S., overlooking by including so much while still only representing a tiny sliver of the possibilities for enjoying vinyl in 2015? There’s the worrisome potential that it contributes to a general flattening of the landscape, where there is no differentiation between stores or their holdings beyond geographical location.

Ultimately, VinylHub is only a year old. Discogs took 15 to get to where it is today, and the laundry list of positives associated with Discogs still outweigh the negatives. VinylHub opens the world, even partially, and hopefully there’s more to come in the years to rival even Discogs’ exhaustive completism. It remains to be seen if VinylHub will be subject to so much alternate championing and consternation 15 years in the future. For now, it’s a welcome source of information, impressive in scope despite its limitations as vinyl continues to assert itself as an in-demand medium long after its expected expiration date.