Unhappy Returns, or, The Rebirth of the Negative Option in the Age of Vinyl Revival

For decades, the negative option was a vibrant, powerful business model. Here’s how it worked: Book or music clubs like Columbia House and Book-of-the-Month Club would offer you a slew of free selections (plus monstrous shipping and handling fees) on the condition that you bought some specified further amount at full price (plus more monstrous S&H fees) in the next few years. Since the clubs printed and pressed their own stock, their per unit costs were nearly nil, but the real financial engine was the monthly main selection. You’d get a card in the mail indicating each month’s title and artist/author, and it you didn’t return this card in 7-10 days to decline the selection, the club would ship it to you automatically. When it landed in your mailbox, you could return it for a refund, but you still got stuck with the S&H costs going both ways. Basically, the whole process put the onus on you, the subscriber, to let the club know you didn’t want product, and they made every part of the return process hellish by staffing intransigent customer service departments. Lives are busy and people lazy, and frequently it became easier just to pay for the stupid thing (even though a CD at full price after S&H could set you back over $25) rather than deal with the hassle.

Among its many other good qualities, the internet is responsible for mostly killing the negative option. With the web came far greater sources of curated content, leaving the clubs and their monthly catalogs seeming fusty and old-fashioned; plus, the negative option doesn’t work with digital files that can’t be returned, and the contraction of the book and record industries due to file-sharing (not to mention the clubs’ late-to-the-game attitude toward digital interfaces) cut the bottom out of the market for physical editions, especially music. Direct Brands, which gobbled up both Columbia House and competitor BMG, basically quit the music biz for DVDs a few years ago (no word on how long that will last), and while the Book-of-the-Month club once had two million subscribers, it now has a negligible impact on on the book world.

So it seemed like the negative option was dead, and all was right with the world. Then, this morning, I came across an ad on Allmusic for something called feedbands.com that offered “a killer vinyl delivered to your door each month.” Intrigued but skeptical, I clicked through.

Feedbands is basically a revived version of the negative option model, a monthly subscription service made possible only through the broad resurgence of interest in a physical medium. The deal is basically thus: Feedbands discovers “smashing bands and press[es] their unreleased records” on vinyl. You sign up, get your first record free (starting to smell familiar?), and then they send you a new record each month for just $19.95, plus shipping and handling (now the stench becomes overpowering). According to the site, if you “don’t like a record, don’t pay for it,” but of course by that point you probably already have the record and the onus is on you to get your refund (Glade Plug-ins, anyone?).

The delicious twist that Feedbands uses to make the negative option their own is that you don’t even get to taste what they’re sending you. You can’t listen to the bands first, something that undermines every good thing the internet has done for checking out new music. Why not? Well, it’s because Feedbands “wants you to experience our bands for the first time on vinyl—an experience we are striving hard to create. The last thing we would want is for you to hear the band for the first time streaming a low-quality mp3 of the internet.”

Perish the thought. Folks, I pride myself on being something of burgeoning audiophile, and while I don’t know all there is to know about the vagaries of audio engineering and record pressing, I can tell you that this 100% bullshit. In fact, there’s so much misleading information on Feedbands website that it’s hard to know where to begin. On the section that asks “Why vinyl?” they write:

Vinyl records are a lossless analog format which [ed: should be “that”; are they Brits? or do they just have poor grammar?] offers the absolute best listening experience.

Not entirely true. If you have a brilliantly mastered pressing of an well-recorded analog source tape played through a hi-fidelity sound system, there’s no question it will sound better than an mp3 ripped in 1994 at 128kps. But mp3s have been closing the quality gap for years, and much of what’s been released on CD or lossless digital files in the last couple decades performs as just well as a record if not better. This is especially true since most records today are pressed on recycled vinyl, mastered for a digital format, and listened to almost exclusively on crappy earbuds against significant background noise. The myth of vinyl as the format par excellence comes mostly from the high quality of many records pressed in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, where quality control existed at every level of the production chain. Also, once upon a time people had stereo systems that were worth a damn.

The website goes on:

Mp3s, by comparison, contain only 15% of the original sound information.

We are the 85%! We are the 85%! But seriously, it’s not like the mp3 of “Stairway to Heaven” you’ve been listening to is missing a few verses and the guitar solo. Mp3s are compressed files that trade sound info for file size, but the increasingly improved algorithms by which the compression takes place are built around something called auditory masking. This describes a condition of human hearing whereby, basically, when you’re hearing more than one tone simultaneously, certain tones will be rendered inaudible by the others. It’s something the brain does automatically to make sense of all the information it’s required to process; our visual system does something analogous when it comes to seeing. Mp3s get small by essentially removing the sonic information containing the tones we don’t process. And as anyone of average hearing who’s done an A/B listening test comparing an mp3 sampled at 320kps and a CD or record can tell you, it’s pretty hard to hear the difference. But if that’s not good enough for you, most labels now offer lossless digital files like FLACs that contain far greater sonic information, and sound fantastic. So mp3s end up being a straw man in Feedbands’s argument.

This is my favorite line:

If you want to hear music exactly the way the band sounded when they recorded, vinyl is the only option.

Actually, if you want to hear music exactly the way the band sounded when they recorded, you should have been in the studio with them. Maybe in the future, Feedbands can start a new program where they fly you to a different recording studio each month to sit in on the band’s session. If they do, please let me know how much they charged to ship and handle you.

It shouldn’t amaze me that unscrupulous companies are looking to feed off the recent vinyl frenzy, but I give them credit for trying to revive what’s considered one of the oldest legal cons in the business. It makes a weird kind of sense today, when people are essentially overloaded with information, to try to make money by giving them one more annoying, easily-overlooked task to add to their infinite to-do lists. I might even have let Feedbands slide without comment were they not trying so hard to pass off much-invoked dumb canards about the quality of vinyl compared to mp3s. But with no track record or good faith effort to establish any curatorial credibility, it’s hard to see how Feedbands’s monthly meals will satiate anyone other than its investors.