Music making you immortal

Anyone reckon they can’t live without music? Well, now you don’t have to. Jason Leach, founder of And Vinyly, has announced a new option for those who’d rather die than live without it: have your ashes combined with 24 minutes of audiophile-quality vinyl. Although being incredibly expensive (cop $4,600 for 30 copies of a record, each one containing a bit of ash), for those who have lived their lives through music and want their legacy to be remembered by music, what better way than to actually ‘become’ music when you die? The process is pretty simple: ashes are delivered to a pressing plant and sprinkled into raw vinyl, and you can also get your all-time favourite track pressed onto your ashes for a cool extra $760. So all-in-all, you can essentially become your favourite tune when you die for $5,360. That’s a fraction of the cost of a typical burial, which the National Funeral Directors Association in England ballparks at around $6,560. Oh, and as another cute add-on, James Hague of the National Portrait Gallery in London can create an original painting for the record sleeve for around $5,470 if you feel like paying big money. The idea from Leach comes as he remembers the failure of his father trying to scatter his grandfather’s ashes from a boat; “it went terribly wrong, and they ended up sweeping him off the deck.” Tough break. Things didn’t turn out much better at his own grandfather’s memorial service either, “there was a strong breeze…and the ashes blew right into my face.”