What Should a $56 Vinyl Preorder Get You?

Song of the Day, 5.29.26: "99 BPM" by Kurt Vile

Just about six weeks into unemployment, one of the most depressing aspects of the whole experience thus far has been forcing myself to stop buying records. In the before times, I didn’t often go more than a few days without one of the familiar brown LP mailers showing up on my doorstep, and even still, thankfully, the records I had pre-ordered continue to trickle in, which is nice.

When I woke up yesterday morning, the first email I saw was a shipping notification from a record label that will remain nameless. I didn’t immediately remember even ordering anything from this label, so I had to do a little bit of digging to see what it was. Turns out it’s for a record that comes out today. A 2xLP on really fun, limited-edition colored vinyl. Gatefold packaging. Presumably, based on prior experience with the artist and label, a really nice pressing. $39.98. Not cheap by any means, but not crazy compared to some of the other shit I’ve seen artists at this level try to pull over the past few years. Then, when I scrolled to the bottom of the email, I saw this breakdown:

Subtotal: $39.98
Shipping: $11.46
Taxes: $4.46
Total: $56.12

I don’t even want to know how we got to the $4.46 in “taxes” there, because that works out to be well over an 11% tax rate, which, news flash, is very much not a standard tax rate here in New York or anywhere else in the country. But whatever.

What I’d really like to talk about is the $11.46 in shipping. I’ve always griped a little about shipping costs for records, but this is making me feel extra crazy right now because of an experience I had a few weeks back. I sold a guitar through an online service and had to ship it to the buyer. The guitar itself weighed around eight pounds, then there was a bulky soft case, a bunch of other padding and assorted packing materials, all placed inside a standard guitar box, which, full disclosure, the nice people at my local Guitar Center gave me free of charge. I don’t know how much the whole thing weighed. Call it 10 pounds?

The total cost of shipping? $22.82 for delivery from New York to Connecticut via “standard ground,” and it arrived the next day. A big fucking guitar! In a big, heavy box! Delivered in 24 hours for just over $20. But I’m paying $12 for a little record to be delivered…I don’t even know when?

I don’t mail a lot of things, and I try my absolute hardest to never, ever step foot inside a post office, so what the hell do I know, really, but this feels insane. I’m sure there’s some good explanation for it, and if any record label people out there would like to offer one, I’m all ears, and I’d be happy to share it here. Even if there’s not, though, and the only explanation is, “Oh, uh, yeah, making a living at indie rock is hard, so we try to sneak in as many last-minute up-charges as possible so that we make a little more money,” I’d be like, yeah, I hear you.

But here’s where you need to work with me: If I pre-order a record nearly two months before its release date, and you want to charge me $40 for it, then add on some mysteriously high “taxes” and wildly overcharge me for shipping, to the tune of nearly $60 total, then please see to it that I at least receive the fucking record on or before release day. This does not seem like too much to ask.

There is nothing more satisfying to people like me than having a record show up on the Wednesday or Thursday before it officially comes out. Even the perfectly timed release-day delivery is awesome. And I say this as a dude who’s usually had a promo stream of the record for months anyway, but the rush of getting that record in hand simply cannot be beat.

Do you know what the opposite of that rush is? I will tell you. It’s checking your order status less than 12 hours before the record will be released to the world and seeing that there is no estimated delivery date and that you’ve only gotten so far as the dreaded “shipping label has been created” stage. So now you’re $60 poorer and you still don’t have the record or any idea when you will. Soon you’re gonna start seeing other people posting it on social media. Maybe you'll even be in a record store where it will be right there in front of you for…$39.99 or maybe $43.99 + plus whatever the actual NYS sales tax is.

As I’ve said here before, I love record labels, and I think we should support them whenever we can. But it is inconceivable that we should get fucked for going through the trouble of pre-ordering a record direct from the label—and then not even receive it in a timely enough manner to justify the absurd costs.

We can all go on at length about how streaming platforms fuck over artists, and how the art of music discovery is being destroyed, and all the romantic stuff about how physical media enriches our lives and our experiences with music, but if we’re headed toward a world where only the most fortunate among us can buy records with any regularity, and where the record labels don’t seem to care about preserving the experience for even those fortunate few, then we’re losing the plot in more ways than we even thought.

Anyway! That brings us to the Song of the Day, which comes from Kurt Vile’s brand-new full-length, his tenth, Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me.

Ten albums is an awful lot of albums, and for an artist like Vile who’s never really strayed too far from his basic sound—an adamantly laid-back, guitar-forward but hazy take on Americana and folk-rock and all that—you could almost see it getting to be a little repetitive, a little too much of the same admittedly very good vibe, which persists even when he’s at his most bummed out.

But after all this time, he’s still becoming a more fully-formed (Philly-formed?) version of the artist he’s always been, and it’s just an absolute pleasure to watch. He’s never seemed particularly encumbered by, like, strict external ideas of what is cool or isn’t, always kinda out there marching to his own beat and leaning into his idiosyncrasies. And he still is, more boldly than ever, to the point where, at its best, Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me kinda just sounds like he’s fucking around the way you do with your closest friends. Or goofing off and being weird while you’re cooking dinner with your kids. He says lots of funny shit, and he speak-sings in strange voices and occasionally an accent that sounds…made up? Half-Philly and half, I don’t even know, deeply Southern?

And it’s true in his guitar playing, too. He’s always been good, capable of far more dexterous stuff than you might think, given his whole vibe, but I feel like he’s come into his own even more on this album, with a sound that’s becoming easier and easier to recognize. The record also sounds incredible, expertly captured at his home studio, which was set up early in the pandemic. It’s all very warm and welcoming like you’d expect, but it’s also crystal clear in its own way. Again, I think there’s more technical proficiency on display here than people probably give him credit for.

I’m gonna go with “99 BPM” as today’s Song of the Day, because it’s awesome and I think it illustrates much of what I just said. The way he shrugs, almost grunts, his way through parts of it, with random “woo!”s thrown in here and there. Lines like, “It was 2012, but it felt like 2014 and…and I know you still…know what I mean,” which I absolutely do not but I love nonetheless. The way it just kinda fades out, but not like one of the fancy studio fade-outs; it’s more like how, as anyone who’s ever dabbled in home recording will recognize, no specific ending was ever “written” so each instrument just slowly…stops.

But I also wanted to take a minute to talk about another song, confusingly called “99th Song,” which is hilariously built around the idea that it’s the 99th thing he’s recorded onto his looper pedal, which only holds 99 tracks. I know this because he sings, “This is the 99th song on my red looper. The last track that’s possible before the software explodes. For the main frame of my memory, for my brain, but also my pedal.”

It’s 10 minutes long, so it would fuck up my playlist, but it’s so good. And there’s a refrain that, as a dude who’s roughly the same age as Vile and who also has a wife and two young daughters, I’d be seriously remiss not to call out here, where he sings, “Stoned on music, the best kind of high. Got love in my life, and three girls by my side. Holding it down and taking it slow,” with that “slow” drawn out for effect, both comical and wise.

Give both tracks a listen:

Buy Philadelphia’s Been Good to Me here, and catch Vile on tour all summer.

I created a Spotify playlist of all the songs I’ve been writing about here, which I update every weekday. Follow along and share if you’re so inclined.