The Ultimate Guide to Vinyl and More: All You Need to Know About Collecting Essential Music from Cylinders and CDs to LPs and Tapes

by Dave Thompson

An in-depth and comprehensive guide to – and history of – music collecting, The Ultimate Guide to Vinyl and More traces the hobby from its beginnings over a century ago. The book features informative and entertaining sections on every significant format in which recorded music has been released – and some that are now almost completely forgotten.

Based on Dave Thompson's original Backbeat classic, The Music Lover's Guide to Record Collecting , this revamped, colorful, expanded edition takes readers from the early days of cylinders, 78s, and Edison records on through 45s, LPs, 8-tracks, cassettes, bootlegs, CDs, MiniDiscs, MP3s, LPs, and other formats.

Landmark labels, collectable artists, specialist themes, and more are explored across a series of essays, while dozens of color images bring the most obscure corners of the hobby to life. Unlike other volumes that focus exclusively on vinyl, this book caters to the audiophile whose obsession for music welcomes all formats. Through it all, the joy and fascination of music collecting in all its guises comes alive.

Genres: Music

304 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2018

About the author

English author Dave Thompson has spent his entire working life writing biographies of other people, but is notoriously reluctant to write one for himself. Unlike the subjects of some of his best known books, he was neither raised by ferrets nor stolen from gypsies. He has never appeared on reality TV (although he did reach the semi finals of a UK pop quiz when he was sixteen), plays no musical instruments and he can’t dance, either.

However, he has written well over one hundred books in a career that is almost as old as U2’s… whom he saw in a club when they first moved to London, and memorably described as “okay, but they’ll never get any place.” Similar pronouncements published on the future prospects of Simply Red, Pearl Jam and Wang Chung (oh, and Curiosity Killed The Cat as well) probably explain why he has never been anointed a Pop Culture Nostradamus. Although the fact that he was around to pronounce gloomily on them in the first place might determine why he was recently described as “a veteran music journalist.”

Raised on rock, powered by punk, and still convinced that “American Pie” was written by Fanny Farmer and is best played with Meatloaf, Thompson lists his five favorite artists as old and obscure; his favorite album is whispered quietly and he would like to see Richard and Linda Thompson’s “I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight” installed as the go-to song for the sad, sappy ending for every medical drama on TV.

Kurt Cobain, Phil Collins, Alice Cooper, Joan Jett, David Bowie, John Travolta, Eric Clapton, Jackson Browne, Bob Marley, Roger Waters and the guy who sang that song in the jelly commercial are numbered among the myriad artists about whom Thompson has written books; he has contributed to the magazines Rolling Stone, Alternative Press, Mojo and Melody Maker; and he makes regular guest appearances on WXPN’s Highs in the Seventies show.

Reviews

[Aaron Badgley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very well detailed and very informative with a great deal of humour sprinkled throughtout.
I learned a ton reading this book

[LaShana Claude]

Backbeat Books

[Howling Rabbit · Rating 2 out of 5]

This mess is sloppily written. the copy is badly laid out and irritating to read, makes too many assumptions of what the reader is supposed to know beforehand, and mentions "facts" that are at best questionable. In the author's "history" of recorded music, he mentions Thomas Edison only in passing... no mention of his pioneering invention of the cylinder.
I really wanted to enjoy this book. Even after tossing it aside out of sheer frustration, I kept on returning it in hopes of getting something out of it...
But it was impossible.