The name comes from the Goldmine grading scale for used records, where "mint" denotes a pressing in perfect, like-new condition. MINT is a German-language magazine devoted entirely to vinyl culture, published eight times a year since 2015 under the editorship of Achim Karstens, who spent years working in the music industry before channelling his obsession with the black disc into a publication that would become the voice of the German vinyl community.
The magazine covers the full spectrum of vinyl life: record shops from Paris to New York to Namibia, pressing plants and their machinery, turntable technology, the economics of the vinyl revival, the art of album covers, the science of needle maintenance, and the peculiar psychology of collecting. Titelgeschichten have addressed counterfeits and bootlegs, the 25 most coveted records in the world, and the question of whether vinyl addiction qualifies as an actual disorder. A recurring "Master Class" feature by Frank Wonneberg dissects classic albums pressing by pressing. The "Soundtrack Of My Life" column has hosted everyone from Debbie Harry and Shirley Manson to Smudo and Heinz Strunk.
Karstens draws on the journalistic expertise of the VISIONS and GALORE editorial teams, and in collaboration with MINT, former VISIONS publisher Michael Lohrmann put a rolling record shop on wheels — the MINT Vinyl Bus — that has toured Germany in multi-part reportage series. The readership is 97 percent male, mostly between 41 and 50, and 44 percent hold university degrees. None of this is surprising to anyone who has ever watched a middle-aged man explain the difference between a first pressing and a reissue for forty-five minutes.
Now past its eightieth issue and approaching its tenth anniversary, MINT has proven that vinyl culture in the German-speaking world is not a nostalgic phase but a permanent condition — and that the people who care most about the physical object of music deserve a magazine that takes them, and their obsession, as seriously as they take a mint-condition original pressing of Dark Side of the Moon.
Explore MINT at <a href="https://www.mintmag.de/" target="\_blank">mintmag.de