Ohhhh, I *do* remember now that you mention the desire for people to take the complaining to other threads. I guess the part I don’t get is getting other people’s opinions on what to swap for: I take it that it’s less about the music and more about the strategy of picking wisely vis-a-vis value & inventory?
I just need to understand why if you want to swap the Essentials pick it can't be discussed in the Essentials thread, and so on for the other 2 tracks? Not a statement, an honest question.
FWIW I found the swaptions thread very valuable MOSTLY because it was in its own place, separate from everything else. When you have a 2-3 day swaptions window and you're not sure exactly which records will be in there, it felt like crunch time every month making those decisions [maybe this isn't as much an issue for people anymore though]. I could stream the albums on spotify (for the most part) to decide on the music itself, but it was helpful to pop into that thread to get feedback on things like pressing quality, packaging quality, whether it's just a color variant or was remastered [that info was harder to find for some of the older ROTMs], which you don't have time to wade through each of the album discussion threads to get a quick general sense of. We have a group of hundreds if not thousands of people on the forum who might have ALL of the records you're deciding between, and it's helpful if you can see a general consensus in their comments that VMP's pressing of Charlie Rouse was more special than The National "Boxer" etc when all you know is that you like the music about equally well.
It's also interesting to see which records people recommended out of a head-to-head matchup of two or more releases, based on the question posed in the thread. It's a sometimes very repetitive version of "would you rather?" and the answers and rationale offered were really interesting. And people's answers change over time as they spend time with the records. It's hard to gauge those things from guess threads. For example, when I correctly guessed Feist's "Let It Die" [ironically, I'm never going to let anyone forget about that] the reaction in the thread ranged from "definitely swapping this month" to "hmm that's an interesting choice, she has better records, but I'll check it out and see what they do with it". But in the swaptions thread, lots of people were talking about how it was one of the best ROTMs from last year, because they'd actually seen the finished product and had time to process it in the comfort of their home.
Eugh! Swaption/ROTM chess talk was definitely one of my least favourite topics of conversation over there...
This is another good reason for swaption talk to be a separate thread.
In closing, I know I posted a lot here, but I'm fine with any decision the mods make. In general, though, I think the more threads, the better for everyone, right? Makes it easier to keep things on topic and stay current on the discussions I want to follow, while avoiding discussions I don't want to see. If people justifiably don't want the Vinyl Clubs section to be dominated by VMP, lets create more threads for other vinyl clubs and if there aren't that many more that people want to discuss, then lets start some (more) of our own. I think the best way to give VMP a middle finger and/or encourage newer forum users to look elsewhere is by showing them more and better options rather than trying to minimize/hide the one we're all most familiar with.
