Welcome to the New York Times

Popcast, your busted tail light of music news and criticism.

I'm your host, John Caramonica.

Build yourself back, shoulder chip by shoulder chip, only to find the method used erroneous.

Why you always transmitting from a place of desperation?

Why those low frequencies be your final destination, huh?

A thing that I have stopped doing a lot of is buying records and yes obviously I can get records. And yes, obviously I can get records for free, that's part of the job, although nobody mails records anymore

because of prohibitive cost.

But even just on a sort of like month to month curious to have a

totemic item of a thing that I care about I just don't buy records that much anymore. I don't buy CDs and I pay a lot of attention to all the kind of like

merch items that are being offered week and week out as part of the kind of like Billboard besting bundles that all the pop

stars and most hip-hop stars now make available in their opening weeks.

And I started to think a few weeks ago

about whether an album really held any value anymore.

And I couldn't figure it out. I didn't know the answer. And I kind of came across this rapper, his name is Rap Ferreira. He used to wrap under Scallop Hotel and you know Milo. been to a couple of his shows, very much reminds me of kind of like

mid to late 90s, the high end of the underground. And at the beginning of the show, you know, we were listening to Little Rap Ferreira and that was appropriately titled No Starving artists and that's off of this this latest record which is called Purple Moonlight Pages.

And I saw that he was selling vinyl of his new record for $77.

And I was like, damn, that seems, that seems nuts.

And I was like, so maybe, maybe there is value in the album after all.

And it got me thinking I should call some folks up and write about it. So I wrote this piece and I think what I

ultimately determined was depending on where you are in the pop music ecosystem

kind of depends on how valuable an album is to you.

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