Like most good ideas, LP Roulette came about over lunch.

Benjamin Palmer, Pfeffer and I were talking: What is it that record stores offer that the Internet doesn’t? What aspect of discovery have we lost?

The thing we came up with, besides local community, is browsing by album art. Those of us old enough to remember used to sometimes just browse racks and racks of LPs or Longboxes and when we stumbled upon some bad-ass looking album art, our interest was piqued. Often, that’s all you had to go on – if the clerk didn’t know or have an opinion, you were on your own. No checking Pitchfork on your iPhone.
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And often, when you did roll the dice, man, it was BAD. Bad bad. But sometimes, juuuust sometimes, it was AWESOME. Dinosaur Jr.’s “Green Mind”., Galdalf, Matthew Sweet’s “Girlfriend”.
(I STILL have a 14 year old crush on that girl)

So we set out, over lunch, to fix that. To bring back that thrill. We give you, Internet, LPRoulette.com.

LP Roulette picks an album at random from Amazon’s stacks. You get the cover, the name of the record and the band name. That’s it. No ratings, no preview, no social tools. Look good? Buy it instantly. Not your cup of tea? Try the next record in the bin.

Pure, unadulterated music discovery. Happy Hunting!