They Explore and Promote Everything Vinyl, Hoping to Turn Their Hobby Into Everyone Else's Daily Habit | Great Little Studios

"Vinyl, as a medium, is a way of digging for music. And the fun of it is that I found the music, but you can't take it away from me."

Xiaobing has two Technics SL-1200 turntables that have been with her for more than ten years. The American musician Moby described the machine in Wired this way: "It's built like a tank, weighs 27 pounds, and has unbelievable stability and longevity. It's the sampling source for every musician and DJ."

Her parents bought her the turntables in 2008. By then her passion for hunting down records had already gotten out of hand — she was on first-name terms with the owner of the audio-video shop in the Shijiu Building Materials Market, at the corner of Changshou Road and Yejiazhai Road. Back in 2004 she used to haunt a pirated CD shop near her home, where the owner recommended Western pop; later she found hip-hop and started taking it in by the crateload.

She joined forums and argued about hip-hop culture with strangers, danced street dance, and went with classmates to spray-paint subway stations. The people she hung out with then were usually much older than she was. By 2008 she had two turntables and had started learning to scratch. After high school she went to study in Guangdong — another period of obsession, during which she barely left her room, spending her time online looking up music, listening to records, and building her own database. Six months later she decided she had thought it through: she would turn the hobby into a career. She hasn't changed her mind since.

That interest is now Daily Vinyl, which started as a Weibo account posting a "quality vinyl of the day", alongside a Taobao shop that could list up to 2,000 vinyl records and didn't get many customers. The ambition grew from there: an independent label, vinyl weekend markets, a free newspaper called Record Daily (《唱片日常》), parties, musicians invited over from abroad to play in China, and physical music releases — cassettes, vinyl, CDs.

Daily Vinyl was founded in October 2014. Along with Xiaobing, the other founder is her close friend Endy.

Endy is the studio's digger — the one who hunts down the records. He and Xiaobing each run their own independent label. In 2015 he put out a Cantonese-language record on Bandcamp for the Guangzhou hip-hop group MADPETE, his first attempt at releasing a CD himself; it sold 100 copies in five minutes. The same year he released the vinyl record Cantonese Boom Bap (《省广奇兵》), which sold more than 200 copies and came close to selling out.

The year Daily Vinyl entered the Chinese market as a vinyl seller, 2014, was globally the best year for vinyl since 1991. That year, 9.2 million vinyl records were sold worldwide, 52% more than in 2013 — even though vinyl still accounted for only 6% of the record market.

"The vinyl revival" began appearing on foreign media websites, and that celebratory story has continued ever since. At the same time, with streaming in charge of the music industry, global sales of physical music — CDs, cassettes, vinyl — have fallen year after year, and everyone seems to have accepted the premise that independent music and independent artists are a small-circle affair, kept alive by devoted listeners supporting each other. Vinyl's return while the record business shrinks — revenue from physical records has more than halved over the past decade — reads almost like an irony.

Daily Vinyl's debut struck a lot of people as something new. They held their first vinyl weekend market, Daily Vinyl Weekend, at On Stage, a jazz bar in Shanghai that carried some weight at the time.

Even though they had tipped off a few media outlets beforehand and asked musician friends to set up stalls, neither of them expected that many people to turn up. It showed them how much appetite a city slowly building up its own culture already had for small, lively music events. So in 2015 four vinyl markets, each built around a theme, took place in different corners of Shanghai: "Year of Loving Vinyl," "Family Day", "Surprise Raid," and "Romantic Summer." The mood was that of a "college club" — "bands brought their instruments, customers brought their kids" — though many of the venues that hosted them are gone now, for policy or economic reasons.

In the months that followed, Xiaobing noticed that organizers in other Chinese cities had started holding vinyl markets too. "One event's promotional copy had an idea almost identical to what we'd written."

That energy didn't hold in Shanghai. The markets still happen a few times a year, but the audience has changed. "Honestly, the format of the vinyl market is pretty stable — the vendors are the same regulars — but customers don't necessarily treat going to the market as a habit." Meanwhile the atmosphere of the city's cultural venues has been changing, and still is: "These past few years, the music lovers around me would rather stay home. They don't go out as much as before, and there's nowhere much to go anyway."

Shelter, once treated by Shanghai's young people as a trove of underground culture, closed at the end of 2016; on its last night the crowd nearly filled Yongfu Road and Wuyuan Road. "At Shelter in Shanghai you could hear the newest music, in step with Berlin and London," people liked to say.

The free paper Record Daily has kept going. Xiaobing says the original idea was that a newspaper could pass from music fan to music fan across the country. "We both prefer what old websites used to look like — blogs, say, which are easier for storing things and are permanent. A print medium like a newspaper also stirs up the urge to write, to have your own column, and that matters. WeChat and phones are the opposite: information slips past fast, and people rarely go back and read something a second time."

In April 2015 the studio teamed up with the Shanghai record shop UpTown to put out the first issue. Xiaobing was editor-in-chief, handling layout, story selection, printing, and distribution. Endy set up interviews and wrote up his own trips — arranging, for instance, a conversation with the owner of an independent record shop in Hong Kong. One issue of Record Daily described itself this way in its masthead:

"A free zine independently produced by Daily Vinyl and Uptown Records together, published every two to three months, available at major performance venues, events, and record shops around the country. It covers all kinds of news about music, live shows, and record culture at home and abroad. We hope you'll read it, keep it, use it, and pass it on, and that it becomes an easy way to fill your spare time and keep up with music."

Record Daily is a newspaper made purely for music lovers. The cover carries a feature: it might explain the basics of music copyright, or have a contributor recount a piece of music history at home or abroad, or run something by an important Chinese independent musician. From issue six on, the dominant color shifted from yellow to pale pink; the biggest changes were thickness and color. That came from a printing shop in Nanjing a friend introduced Xiaobing to, which could supply better paper and cut costs at the same time. Price rises were unavoidable, though: with raw material costs doubling, each copy now costs 2.5 yuan to print, and 1,000 copies are printed per issue. Xiaobing now settles on how much paper the next issue will need before she places the order with the factory, to stay ahead of the increases.

Record Daily's regular columns include live show news, musicians' gear logs, record picks, "A Collector's Record Shelf," new releases and live recommendations from Chinese musicians, and record shop guides and interviews. Petechen, a friend of the two and a designer, runs an illustration column called "Pa Ti Pi," with a different theme each issue. Wooozy, known in China for its professional music recommendations, also has a section in the paper for long interviews or reports, including a piece on "touring 20 independent record shops in Sydney."

In February 2019 Endy went to Bangkok and used Google Maps to find independent record shops nearby. At one of them he listened through 200 vinyl records between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m., and walked out with more than 20. "That level of efficiency and haul is already very high — thanks to the shop owner for staying open an extra hour just for me," he wrote in a piece for Record Daily's "Record Shop Guide" column. It was the column's 14th travelogue.

Endy's first trip abroad specifically to find independent record shops was in 2015. In Tokyo he felt the thrill of digging: "There are so many shops and so much variety — buying vinyl here has become such an everyday thing." At lunchtime, middle-aged Japanese office workers in suits would show up at record shops, some crouching, some standing, flipping fast and expertly through a stack of secondhand vinyl, eyes sharp. That has been the routine there for more than a decade.

Xiaobing and Endy don't pay much attention to what moves China's mainstream music market. When they pick stock they don't think about what's more popular, and they know perfectly well that "record culture has no roots here — it's an imported thing to begin with." But they insist this is not nostalgia. "Nothing keeps going steadily on feeling alone," Endy says. "This is a business, and it's also a hobby. Since you can't cover everything, what you choose has to carry your own point of view."

From 2017 Daily Vinyl had a physical studio, open by appointment. That Technics SL-1200 sits on the studio's control desk. Around it, wooden shelves hold vinyl sorted into fine categories — fusion jazz, world music, hip-hop, with less rock and electronic — sourced from all over the world, organized by the shop's Luo Zha, put into display boxes and labeled with serial numbers.

Besides everyday visitors, foreign musicians invited over will sometimes play a small, informal set inside Daily Vinyl's roomy wooden space before their official show starts elsewhere. It gets filmed and posted to YouTube. Afterwards these musicians usually wander around the room, sometimes pulling a record off the shelf, carefully sliding it out, then setting it gently on the turntable and dropping the needle, or putting on headphones. They have done this hundreds of times, and Xiaobing still often gets nervous; sometimes she reminds visitors not to damage the needle on that turntable.

Once Daily Vinyl had a physical shop, costs went up, and making the record shop alone profitable became very hard.

Endy thinks "right now we're surviving normally." The music industry has been turned upside down, but he believes a business mind can still be just as open: "We can't compete with how all-encompassing streaming is. Since we can't cover everything, we curate to the extreme instead. The demand for record shops has actually always been there."

He marvels at how finely Japanese record shops divide up their stock. Allowing for the differences in national context and musical depth, he is still amazed: "And the quality is really good — a lot of the records are expensive too, and they can absolutely live off their customers." One of his favorite shops is obscuro, in Takayama, Gifu Prefecture, a mountain town thick with tourists. "The owner moved there from Kyoto. The shop's decor has a plain, understated elegance, and it mainly sells ambient, new age, and world music. I imagine he must live a very peaceful life," he said.

The studio's "Open Studio" series has run five sessions so far, sometimes inviting musicians for a conversation on something like "freestyle rap and jazz," sometimes running a small workshop on music skills. The two of them also get invited by organizers in other cities to give public talks about music.

Compared with a couple of years ago, though, some things haven't changed. Explaining to new customers online what a turntable is, how to tell a secondhand original from a reissue, what a record cover means, the differences between genres. That group churns fastest, because they usually come out of curiosity to try it, and buying records is never going to be something they actually need; after a try or two they don't come back. The regulars who stay are the steady source of business. Some of them wait until five or six new arrivals have piled up before asking for one shipment, to save on postage. A vinyl record costs between 150 and 200 yuan; secondhand copies in better condition or that are rare cost a bit more. All of it goes back to how shallow record culture's roots are in China, and the two of them believe "record culture in China won't get better in the next few years either."

They still remember the boom before the internet was fenced in. Back then everyone downloaded music of every kind from everywhere — "the most popular were Jazzy Hip-hop, J-pop, Funk, Indie Rock" — swapping folders of audio files, which then filled in database entries that had been all but blank in China. Most of these forms of music first arrived here as pirated copies, but someone still had to spend enormous effort sorting, tagging, and archiving them by hand, and who did that work usually went unknown.

Among the online friends she used to dig for records with, Xiaobing remembers "someone called Clash-Cash-Car, who from 2008 on kept adding music entries to Douban, tagging records nobody had ever listened to, on a scale nobody had attempted — he was something of a legend." Between 2008 and 2016, "Clash-Cash-Car" created 6,108 music entries in the site's database, tagged across 371 genres. "No one knows how he found all that music — maybe he downloaded it, or maybe it was vinyl and CDs." In 2016 people online learned that he had died. His actual job had been security guard.

Endy first learned that anyone was buying "vinyl records, that kind of thing" from an online friend called "53," who collected rap singles that often included rare instrumental versions (with no vocals, they're easier to remix). Endy was moved by the musical richness the format held, started buying a few albums he liked, and gradually became obsessed with Asian music. "Because in the download era there wasn't much Asian music from the '70s and '80s around, and records were especially cheap then, so obviously the easiest way to get the music was to buy the records. And so, naturally, I ended up selecting, buying, and building my own database."

In 2013 and 2018, as the moment suited each of them, Endy and Xiaobing founded their own independent labels — GrooveBunny Records and Eating Music — to help young independent musicians in China release their work.

So far Endy's label GrooveBunny Records has released 10 records, on cassette, vinyl, CD, and digital; some come with English, Korean, or Japanese lyrics inside. Friends settle the design, and production depends on him contacting overseas manufacturers himself. Prices run from 70 to 150 yuan, which roughly covers costs. In his hometown, Jinhua, he has now opened a shop that combines a men's barbershop with vinyl, using it as a base; the stock runs to 8,000 or 10,000 records.

"Vinyl as a music medium is, for me, a way of digging for music. And the fun of it is that I found it, but you can't take it away — it isn't a USB drive you can unplug and walk off with. It isn't nostalgia either." Endy and Xiaobing now often work as DJs, going into the city's music venues or brand stores to pick music and play it for an audience. Sometimes they bring musicians over on tour, or throw parties and sell tickets. That is already half the studio's income. In August 2018 Endy toured Seoul, Tokyo, and other cities with AZ from the Osaka record shop Revelation Time, and said, "The dream is to play the Rainbow Disco Club festival on Izu Island."

Things are still moving. In the summer of 2018 Xiaobing ran a two-week "Musician Summer Camp" under her own label, Eating Music. She gathered musicians on the label from Nanjing, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the United States to live together at the Daily Vinyl studio, sharing equipment so they would spark each other's work. It produced a record in the end, released physically as a cassette with 12 tracks. "It might not be the most polished showcase, but it still tries to present sincere work," Xiaobing wrote in the introduction.

The cover image and all photos in this piece are courtesy of Daily Vinyl.