Movies on wax
APRIL 7TH, 2016 — POST 094
Polygon yesterday reported on an initiative of Konami, the game developer, and Mondo, an online retailer of limited-edition movie and game merchandise, to bring the soundtracks of Castlevania, Silent Hill and Contra to vinyl. These will join a long list of recent releases of game soundtracks packaged on collectible vinyl. Games like The Last of Us, Hotline Miami, and Battletoads have seen special release vinyl packages that include unique artwork, posters, and multiple pieces of coloured and patterned vinyl. One of my personal favourites Super Hexagon has even been pressed into hexagonal-shaped vinyl.
Games are a medium ripe for these kinds of collectible products. If any pop culture community is generally besotted with the collection of artifacts of its favourite properties, it is the games community. Subscription services like Loot Crate, in which for a monthly fee subscribers receive an assortment of merchandise based on a monthly theme, have proved so popular that the company has recently started offering a new “Loot Pets” crate with pop culture products specifically for your furry friend. We know there’s a large community that is seemingly insatiable for this kind of stuff. Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons did have his superhero alterego named “The Collector” after all.
A flick through Mondo’s online store, or any other ecommerce site offering these special edition vinyl releases, will uncover a similar, albiet smaller scale, trend in the reissue and release of movie soundtracks. Titles like Back to the Future and Batman v Superman have been given deluxe vinyl releases, the three for the trilogy of Back to the Future featuring all new artwork. Understandably, the titles that are getting the most effort put into their vinyl productions are those whose expected audience overlaps most liberally with the video game audience. Whilst Mondo does have some cult and indie releases, like the soundtrack for the recent The Duke of Burgundy, these are pretty typical: 180g black vinyl stuck between a sleeve printed with original artwork. You’re lucky if you can find any of these with so much as a gatefold cover. For the most part, these special edition vinyl releases are not seen as a worthy component of a movie’s release (or reissue/rerelease) strategy. As far as I’m concerned though, this is because of a massive oversight.
Since the rise of digital music in the 2000s and the (almost) simultaneous vinyl resurgence, there has been a new piece of the vinyl package which has become necessary. The download card. It’s almost impossible to find a new piece of vinyl that is shipping without some means of obtaining the contents of the disc in some digital way. It’s long been acknowledged that whilst you’re buying vinyl for the sound quality and monumental physical object, you shouldn’t have to neglect the convenience of digital consumption when you’re away from your turntable. With the aid of the code printed on a business card and slipped in the sleeve, one can download mp3s, FLACs, or whatever format they want. When I spent $30 on the Under The Skin soundtrack recently I was left with one question: Why aren’t I getting a copy of the movie too?
Paying for movies, to put it lightly, is a shit show. Between the cinema, Blu-Ray, VOD, and streaming services like Netflix, it’s pretty hard to be into movies and have a system in which all movies (and TV for that matter) is consumed legally. Especially living in Australia, VOD and streaming releases (like the recent The Invitation) are either months behind or simply never come. On the other hand, just selling digital files inherently reliquishes distributive control: there’s nothing to stop someone who purchases an .mkv of Batman v Superman from hosting it straight up on torrent sites. To my knowledge, Louis C.K. is the only creator who is entirely comfortable with this model: $5 for a file you can download and do with what you want. And yet, once hosted, the sale of digital files (whether mere access like VOD or through file ownership like what C.K. is doing) is a machine to print money. The main benefit of digitisation was the reduction of overhead to (once you’re at scale) practically zero. So why can’t the price of a movie soundtrack vinyl package increase $2-$3 to include a copy of the movie itself?
This might just be me wanting something in the world especially tailored for my use-case. I want a way to legally incorporate movies into my media server (accessible throughout my house as well as remotely, anywhere with an internet connection) that does not involve the purchase of Blu-Rays and the time-intensive process of ripping them. Even if I went down this Blu-Ray route, there’s still a question of what do I do with all these blue boxes? If a copy of the movie was downloadable from a purchase of the movie’s soundtrack, I could build a collection of gorgeous 12” artifacts to listen to whilst also being able to watch in the best way, by definition, there is to watch: my way.
Now if only someone would do exactly this.
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