One thing that I learned when I was looking through releases on Discogs is that not everything that I thought is vinyl is actually vinyl. Many 7"s (and some LPs) in the US were made from styrene instead of vinyl and made with a different technique, namely injection molding. Apparently it is cheaper to produce than vinyl and singles were basically seen as a throwaway product, so the fact that the quality wasn't as good as vinyl didn't matter. My guess is that by shaving off even a tiny bit of the costs per unit big savings could be made. Depeche Mode said it: everything counts in large amounts.
I never encountered styrene records before because in my collection there are very few 7"s from the US, but recently a friend bumped into a few. The differences are obvious: you just feel that something isn't quite the same. The disc feels brittle and it isn't as flexible as vinyl. When you tap a styrene disc with your finger it also makes a different sound than when you tap a vinyl 7". The edges of the disc are also different: the edges of a vinyl 7" are thin, but the styrene ones are as thick as the rest of the disc. Another sign is the label, which is (most of the time) glued on rather than pressed on, and there often is a ridge at the edge of the label.
Another easy trick to recognize styrene disks is to use a lamp: it the disc seems translucent red it is absolutely 100% styrene, if not, it is likely vinyl (but also look for the other signs).
In the pictures below you can see what that looks like: for one picture I used a torch with LEDs, for the other picture I simply used the sun.
The pictures don't fully capture the red glow, but try to do it yourself with a styrene record and it will be very obvious.
Apparently for some releases both vinyl and styrene were used, so the completists search for both variants, as others try to avoid the styrene releases.
I searched the data to see how many releases were tagged with Styrene. As it was apparently quite popular I expected to find plenty of releases but to my surprise there were only 990 releases in the September 2017 database dump tagged as Styrene.
I can currently think of the following reasons:
One thing that I will try to do in the future is to mine the free text fields in Discogs (notes, perhaps other fields as well) to see if there are references to styrene and investigate.
I never encountered styrene records before because in my collection there are very few 7"s from the US, but recently a friend bumped into a few. The differences are obvious: you just feel that something isn't quite the same. The disc feels brittle and it isn't as flexible as vinyl. When you tap a styrene disc with your finger it also makes a different sound than when you tap a vinyl 7". The edges of the disc are also different: the edges of a vinyl 7" are thin, but the styrene ones are as thick as the rest of the disc. Another sign is the label, which is (most of the time) glued on rather than pressed on, and there often is a ridge at the edge of the label.
Another easy trick to recognize styrene disks is to use a lamp: it the disc seems translucent red it is absolutely 100% styrene, if not, it is likely vinyl (but also look for the other signs).
In the pictures below you can see what that looks like: for one picture I used a torch with LEDs, for the other picture I simply used the sun.
The pictures don't fully capture the red glow, but try to do it yourself with a styrene record and it will be very obvious.
Apparently for some releases both vinyl and styrene were used, so the completists search for both variants, as others try to avoid the styrene releases.
Styrene in the Discogs database
The Discogs database has an option to tag if records are made from styrene (for example this record which is the one used in the pictures). In the XML it can be found in the formats tag. Inside that there is a tag called format for each of the pieces of a release (some releases for example have a vinyl record and a CD, so multiple format tags) and inside that there is a tag called description. If a release is tagged as Styrene you can find it in this tag.I searched the data to see how many releases were tagged with Styrene. As it was apparently quite popular I expected to find plenty of releases but to my surprise there were only 990 releases in the September 2017 database dump tagged as Styrene.
I can currently think of the following reasons:
- the (optional) styrene format tag was only added four months ago and it will take some time before people start to fix older releases (the tag actually has been used a lot more for new releases added to the database)
- the tag is optional
- people don't know about the difference between styrene and vinyl
One thing that I will try to do in the future is to mine the free text fields in Discogs (notes, perhaps other fields as well) to see if there are references to styrene and investigate.
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