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Not All iPods — Vinyl and Turntables Gain Sales
Says the New York Times: "With the curious resurgence of vinyl, a parallel revival has emerged: The turntable, once thought to have taken up obsolescence with eight-track tape players, has been reborn."
You only have to sell a couple albums more than usual to claim huge percentage increases.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Me and my friends have been talking about the resurgence of vinyl DJs for years. A friend who visits Japan every year to sell vintage jazz, soul and funk music (they love it out there) was telling me that DJ shops seemed to be catching up to guitar stores back in 1998. I almost think it's just about peaked myself. Then again maybe DJ Hero will cause a nice spike in sales.
Personally, I prefer to buy my music on vinyl, I like the huge cover art and the tactile interaction of playing a record. The nature of vinyl also doesn't lend itself to the Loudness War. The only things I don't like about vinyl is it weighs a ton when you're trying to get to a gig and when listening at home you gotta get up and flip the record.
I kinda think digital DJing has been gaining a lot of ground lately... there are so many Serato copycats) out there now (some are purely digital while Serto allows the use of timecoded vinyl for control. I've been a hardcore vinyl head and I'm finally considering going the digital route because of the convenience of weight saving and you can make your own remixes. Though it still pisses me off that I spent so much time and money collecting rare tracks when these days laptop DJs can just download them off the net. It's made it a lot harder to have an exclusive track.
Deltron 3030 - Virus (music video)
Living in Oslo, Norway, I have been watching this trend for some years. The number of shops selling physical CD's is steadily decreasing - either they close or they are converted to DVD- and/or game-shops. At the same time, the number of shops selling vinyl is increasing. Every self-respecting hifi-shop has turntables on display in their windows. And who even buys CD players anymore ? Some years ago, only niche-titles got a vinyl release. Now even chart-topping big names release on vinyl. This ain't a fad. We will all live to see the death of the music CD. The vinyl will live on, as the sole medium for physical distribution. It will serve a distinct market - people with a keen interest in music, sound/hifi and/or collecting records. For these customers, portability and convenience is not high priority. Cover art and lyric booklets are. The music industry will embrace the trend, as piracy / copying will not be an issue. Vinyl rips are too inconvenient to ever threaten digitally distributed music. The vinyl record has outlived the CD in all respects. Some of my oldest CD's - 20-25 years old - are being refused by my CD player. While I have vinyl records from '65 that sound just as fresh today. I buy 30-40 records a year, around 4 out of 5 on vinyl; I select the titles purely based on musical merit, and buy vinyl if available. Luckily bands within the genres I prefer almost always release on vinyl.
"And you are dying so slowly, you believe to be living" - Bertrand Besigye
A few years ago I worked in a record store where we actually sold more records more than cds. I own a relatively large number of records, contemporary and otherwise. Despite all this, It's my opinion that this is just a fad, one strangely ambling along at a lazy pace. I think the only reason it has been able to gain traction is because people don't realize all the pitfalls of records. To start, yes, records can theoretically sound better, but there are Many things that can get in the way of that: virgin vs. recycled vinyl, cold pressings, warping, dirty or worn stylus, imbalanced tonearm, etc. Even under optimum conditions the quality advantage of a record is gone after 5-8 plays, as friction heat from the stylus literally melts the signal irreparably; from then on, the sound quality will continue to deteriorate with each play. Most people start out saying that they like records because analog sounds better. Then, after I tell them this, their reasoning changes--they like records because the hiss and pops are warm and soothing. The question of quality aside, records are a pain to deal with! You have to handle them carefully, clean them often with specific supplies. After a couple of songs have played, you have to stop what you're doing and flip the record over (don't try putting on a Barry White record, it may set the mood, but only for a few minutes... and hopefully that's regarded as a problem). Some people say they enjoy the whole process involved with records, that by having to do all that work they are able to appreciate the music more. Fine, but personally, having to constantly fidget with the record player interrupts the pleasure I get from listening. Also, consider the weight and space records take up: I estimate about 50 records occupy a cubic foot and weigh at least 25 lbs. On the other hand, you can fit thousands of digital albums in your pocket. Records do have a certain sense of novelty to them, but it wears off fast; digital music is and will remain an incredible thing.
the most powerful intellect is that unbounded by indubitable preconception
It's not really becoming popular because it is better to hear music off one. The vinyl turntable is a performance instrument all of its own.
About a year back I ran into someone who had a vinyl turntable hooked into Ubuntu studio. He'd essentially use the turntable hooked into the MIDI port(?) which lets him control any soundtrack with a touch of his finger.
The guy was explaining how the user interface of a turntable supersedes anything else out there for what he's doing. That in some sense, it's the touch screen of the music man.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I like Mozart on the glass armonica, myself.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
At least for a long while. There now is in the form of Final Scratch. What it does is encode a timecode signal on a record, which you then feed to a soundcard. Final Scratch then interprets that timecode to tell what you are doing with the player and can control the speed and seeking of the digital files associated with it. Works great, I've seen it in action a number of times.
Another factor was the processing power for good resampling. These days that is trivial but it wasn't when digital first came about. If you are going to stretch the sound a lot by slowing it down, you need to properly resample the data to make it sound smooth. You'll get nasty artifacts otherwise.
Net result is non-degraded digital sound, with turntable controls. You can reuse the same timecode record quite a few times before ti becomes damaged to the point of having to get a new one.
These days, however, if you aren't scratching and such, software can beat match way better than you can. Songs can be tagged with BPM (or measured) and you can visually set cut points. Not as much fun though.
First of all, we need to keep this in perspective. TFA says that through November there had been 2.1 million vinyl records sold in the US. That's far less than individual albums once sold, so vinyl hasn't staged some glorious comeback, it's just establishing itself as a minor niche.
That said, I'm a vinyl junkie and am happy for its continued survival, if only because it means that I'll be able to get new parts for my turntable for a long time yet. I think that the biggest advantage of vinyl is the physicality of the product. This includes of course the artwork and liner notes, which will be much larger and usually more attractive than with a CD. But there's more than this. Purchasing records often involves flipping through large bins of vinyl, something you sort of get with CDs, but instead of the clack or platic bins you have a nice soft thwap of cardboard album sleeves. Playing vinyl is also a much more physical act than playing a CD. With a CD you open the tray, put the disc on, then press a couple of buttons. With vinyl you have to open the lid, put the record on the turntable, line up the needle and plop it down, then come back and flip it over in twenty minutes or so. Choosing a specific track involves some pretty careful aligning of the needle. It forces you to become more engaged with what you're doing and promotes a more active listening; you can't so easily slap something on and ignore it, and the 6-disc changer (and, god help us, the random button) don't exist. You have to interact with your music because there will be a little bit of physical labor involved in keeping it going for more than 20 minutes at a time.
Of course, playing 7" singles is even better for this, because you're hopping up every three minutes and constantly having to think, "What would sound good with this?" Vinyl is far better for an evening devoted to listening to music because it really encourages you to make the music the central part of the evening. Too much distraction and there's no more music. That contrasts with CDs, and is entirely different from mp3 listening. Banshee tells me that I can start playing my mp3 library and continue for 22.5 days. That sort of thing promotes an extremely passive kind of listening, music as just something that's there.
A final thing to consider: I have a few CDs that have become scratched and are now unplayable. I have a bunch of LPs that have become scratched and now have a little scratch on them when you play them. My LPs are going to outlast my CDs.
>>>Not until we have Vinyl ROMs..... The system takes 45 minutes to boot...
Not even close. My computer used to store programs like that (by sound) on cassettes. It would take about 5 minutes to load a 40 kilobyte program. Assuming that same speed holds true for data stored as audio on a record, it would take 12,500 minutes, or just over 8 days to boot a modern Linux OS.
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