Aural Robert

The return of vinyl, which has stayed popular and profitable since its resurgence, has now developed a surprising nuance. Pierre Markotanyos, the owner of the reissue label Return to Analog and Montreal record store Aux 33 Tours (which refers to the speed at which an LP spins), has noticed a distinct change in the makeup of who's buying vinyl these days. "In the late 2000s," Markotanyos reflects, "it was mostly 55-to-70-year-old guys who were coming in, buying records to play on their high-end stereos that they bought at the audio show in Montreal." [Sound familiar, Stereophile readers?] "They were the purists and the true believers."

"And then 2010, 2011, the hipsters started really getting hardcore into it. And then, about four or five years ago, we started noticing 15-, 17-, 18-year-olds and a lot of girls. I'd stand in the middle of the store on Saturday and go, "Hey, 10 years ago there were just guys in here and now it's like 30% women. Today, it's more like 60–40 on a weekend. You look around and there's almost as many girls as there are guys."

While the female attraction to vinyl has sadly come too late for those of us who have been collecting records since the '70s, it's a most welcome boon to label and store owners like Markotanyos. This summer during a trip to Montreal, I made the journey to the Plateau-Mont-Royal neighborhood on the far side of beautiful La Fontaine Park and walked into Aux 33 Tours.

Leafing through the stacks, I noticed that some LPs were on the Return to Analog label, which I'd never heard of before. Members of the Aux 33 Tours staff recommended several worthy French albums and informed me that the store's owner was in Montreal. I called him to get the story.

"My passion with collecting goes way back to when, at 9 or 10 years old, I was delivering newspapers, cutting grass, and shoveling snow to be able to go downtown and buy records. I used to come home and listen to my Rush albums, my Cure albums, my Depeche Mode albums, and stare at the jacket and dream," Markotanyos remembers.

After a failed attempt to establish a comic book and sports card shop in the 1990s, the lifetime collector was forced to get "a normal job" with Bell Canada. By the early 2000s, he was buying record collections and planning to open a record store. He opened Aux 33 Tours in 2007. Early on, running a record store that dealt in new and used vinyl gave him a unique perspective that stirred his business instincts.

He continues, "I started to scope out certain titles that weren't coming in [used] very often, or originally in the '60s and '70s had very low print runs. Or when they would come in, the records would be totally wrecked. For example, Return to Analog has done a reissue of Les Jaguars, Vol.2, a '60s teenager surf guitar party album, which is a great-sounding record, but the originals were always dead when they came in.

"Another reason why I built the label is that I'd see a lot of customers coming in, the 20-, 25-year-olds, even 30-year-olds, who are buying records, grab a record off the wall and it's like $47.99 and they are scratching their heads and they are going, "Hmm, that's 56 bucks with tax,' so they put it back. And then they'd go for the $20 indie release or a record that's $17.99. So now with Return to Analog, young people who can't afford the $1000 original or the $700 or even the $150 original can buy it for 20 bucks."

The RTA catalog has grown through licensing deals to 150 titles. He uses five different plants across Canada to press the vinyl. Markotanyos says he currently has "40 or 50" yet-to-be-released titles in the pipeline. RTA titles encompass most music genres from jazz entries by Horace Silver and Thelonious Monk to mainstream titles by Johnny Cash, The Rolling Stones, and The Beatles to what they are best known for, Québécois albums by bands like Offenbach, Men I Trust, Les Jaguars, and Maneige. Preferring reissues, he says he's lost money on signing and releasing music by current acts.

"When I originally started the label," he explains, "I wanted to become like a French-Canadian Light in the Attic basically, where we would reissue French-Canadian acts, some of which were unheard of or out of print."

With the rare perspective of being an owner of both a record label and a record store, Markotanyos drops one final physical media revelation. "One thing that I have noticed in the last year to year and a half is that the CD is making a comeback. Three or four years ago in the store, we were selling 55 CDs and 5000 albums a week. So, we took the CDs off the floor and put them in the basement. But lately the demand has changed. CD sales from our website and from Discogs have gone up big time."