Needles & Grooves

@MyWifeHatesTrain might be able to help.

What's your favorite one so far?

May 15, 2019 - Forum shut down.

How far back do you want to go and are you familiar with the "buckets" debacles?

It's not a company that's really on my radar as actively "screwing over their customers". Other than shutting down the forums, that was a genuine fuck you to us. Otherwise, they're just dumb and keep making dumb mistakes. And I say that as someone who hasn't been with them in years. But I got a lot of good records from them. And many I didn't need too.

What did I miss?

I quit with them after the forum closure, and just have vague recollections of the problems after that (off the top of my head there was the few months they’d just send users double digit copies of records at random…one user got something like 70 records of a /100 pressing and ended up sending them back to the artist directly)

I just know I personally felt screwed over by then before quiting…there was that one staff member that would always try to be helpful in the forums but end up making false promises that fucked over users in the end, along with their CS at the time which would just send out new records to people willy nilly, and scalpers would end up with 10 copies while just paying for one.

The Infamous raised to the power of [insert integer here]

@David A. Nothing. Just been seeing some vinyl Instagram accounts I follow start to promote them, not knowing their history of being a shit company.

@folsom_lives Remind me, what’s the “buckets debacle”?

I can’t help. They’ve done too much and I’ll be damned if I can keep it straight.

@DJSJ they would oversell records and just say well we put some of you in one bucket and some of you in the other. The other bucket may or may not ever see the record they ordered. They put you in a bucket at random and never did anything by order time or first come first served.

@MyWifeHatesTrain yeah that’s the problem, I mention they’re a shithole company, people ask for an example, and I can’t even begin to keep all the scandals straight.

I don’t know, they bought a record plant, then when it took longer than expected to get off the ground fired the c-suite and claimed it was never their plant is probably enough.

Along with firing their best curator (a woman of color) for being too interested in her career after not getting advancements she had been promised.

If VMP forums didn't shut down we might not exist! So that might be a positive?

The worse thing about them in my opinion is quality control. I probably have like a 50% warp rate with them

@zomgbear QC is the main reason I ended up leaving. GZ had a terrible run for years. Prices going up too, but that's not a scandal, just business and my prerogative as a customer to buy or not based on what I'm getting. Otherwise, they always did right by me when there was an issue.

That is why I quit too. I made an exception to re sign up to get the bone thugs album but was reminded of why I quit. I did three months and I did that crazy 40% thing while I was a member. I probably won't do it again unless they have something I really want.

almost like a cult...