Speculative Markets and the 7-Inch Single

On Thursday, December 11, 2008, as the New York Times reported, the “legendary” and “consummate trader, Bernard L. Madoff, was arrested at his Manhattan home by federal agents who accused him of running a multibillion-dollar fraud scheme—perhaps the largest in Wall Street’s history.” Within days, of course, everyone in the country knew the name of “New York’s most hated man” (as a Times blogger soon referred to him), Bernie Madoff, and at least some of the details of the elaborate Ponzi scheme his firm had operated for decades.

Five days later, on the Terminal Boredom web forums—which have for years offered a smart and rowdy clearinghouse for record reviews, want lists, for-sale ads, and what-are-you-listening-to-now threads about music that fits both narrow and generous understandings of the term “punk”—a poster with the handle WOLFGUTSSS offered a pre-order sale for an upcoming 7-inch record, titled “In Here,” by a then-still-somewhat-mysterious band called Blank Dogs, in the caps-locked typography of the online-inept and the conciseness of the initiated-only:

TWO GREAT BD SONGS. 700 COPIES. 100 YELLOW (PREORDER ONLY), 200 CLEAR BLUE AND 400 ON BLACK. ORDERING INFO ON THE PAGE.

WOLFGUTSSS included a link to his label’s web page. His post was time-stamped 9:15:27 a.m., December 16, 2008.

Within twenty minutes, another poster had already replied: “money sent. psyched, etc.” Blank Dogs had, in 2007 and 2008, released a series of well-received and highly collectible singles on various micro-labels while remaining anonymous—though Blank Dogs was soon revealed as the solo project of a guy named Mike who worked at Brooklyn’s Academy Records and previously played bass in the band D.C. Snipers—so such a reaction was foreseeable. Three minutes after that, WOLFGUTSSS followed with a warning to anyone else reading the thread: “Fuck[,] these are already going fast.” By midday, a number of other posters who had “Paypal’d” funds for the record wondered if they had paid their seven dollars too late to have acquired one of the hundred copies of the record pressed on yellow vinyl. Just after 1 p.m., on the second page of the thread, WOLFGUTSSS reassured these anxious posters: “First 100 are yellow, second 200 are blue, the rest (400) are black, so if you want to view it from an eBay standpoint, the first 300 are eBay gold haha. Or you could keep it and listen to it.”

There followed some complaints over the price of the record, and rebuttals to those complaining: “$7 is pricey it’s true / however; I don’t know if you guys have noticed but the economy is, in a word, fucked / . . . it just means I take less [sic] gambles on records for now” one poster noted; another suggested that the complainers weren’t “considering the PayPal fees [WOLFGUTSSS’s] gotta pay too.” WOLFGUTSSS himself responded with this explanation of his economics:

I’m not cutting any costs with these releases and each record is coming out to about a buck or so less than the wholesale price I’m charging for it. Every dollar I get goes into the next record being released, period. If I was pressing 1000+ of each record it’d be much easier for me to charge a lot less and still get records out but I’m kind of stuck doing it this way or else it’d be a failing endeavor.

Only hours after the initial post, the point was clear, even from the perspective of the person releasing the record presumably for the love of the music: this record was a commodity, understood in its particulars entirely in the language of the market. A few pages into the thread, only two posters had casually noted that they liked the music on this record; no one had even bothered to describe it.

II

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