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CD Sales Continue To Plummet, Vinyl Records Soar
Lucas123 writes "Over the past four years, vinyl record sales have been soaring, jumping almost 300% from 858,000 in 2006 to 2.5 million in 2009, and sales this year are on track to reach new peaks, according to Nielsen Entertainment. Meanwhile, as digital music sales are also continuing a steady rise, CD sales have been on a fast downward slope over the same period of time. In the first half of this year alone, CD album sales were down about 18% over the same period last year. David Bakula, senior vice president of analytics at Nielsen Entertainment, said it's not just audiophiles expanding their collections that is driving vinyl record sales but a whole new generation of young music aficionados who are digging the album art, liner notes and other features that records bring to the table. 'The trend sure does seem sustainable. And the record industry is really doing a lot of cool things to not only make the format come alive but to make it more exciting for consumers,' Bakula said."
Nice lossy format to prevent clean ripping, too.
Smell is the sense that is tied to memory the strongest. I remember the smells of those records as much as I remember the sounds and the artwork. :)
A 12" CD could hold about a dozen regular ones. Not only could you have big album art, but the spinning patterns would complement the bong quite nicely.
Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976? If these trends continues... Aaay!
CD sales are still roughly 100 times vinyl album sales; 110 million units for the first half of 2010.
Have you read my blog lately?
Why the ":(" ? It's a damn good thing.
Of course, a properly mastered CD will be helluva better than any vinyl, but thanks to douches involved in the loudness war, all currently sold CDs are of dog shit quality that makes it even worse than pops of vinyl.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
This just further proves it's piracy as the cause. Every audiophile knows that vinyl records are far higher quality than CDs. Pirates can only make inferior digital recordings of vinyl, so they don't bother. Thus, they are forced to buy the vinyl records. Since we see many-fold increase in vinyl sales, we have a glimpse of what CD sales would be like without piracy. So, vinyl is literally a natural DRM that both protects the artists and ensures superior sound quality. Now, would you like to buy some Monster USB cables? Guaranteed to improve your typing and mouse speed.
We called it "Dubbing" instead of "making rips|ripping". We wore an onion on our belts while we did this, which was the style at the time.
How did the industery react when cassette sales started to slip and CDs soared? Or when 8-track started to slip and cassette soared? Or, or, what ever came before whatever and the older format started slipping to the new format? Oh no, the old way to buy and listen to music is being replaced by the new was to buy and listen to music. I'm sure in 10-15 years they will be complaining because online sales are slipping to, something. *Gets my tin foil hat ready.*
I have CD's that i picked up less than 15 years ago that are unplayable, I had heard of laserdisc rot but didnt know it would happen to prerecorded cd's. On the other hand, I have vinyl that belonged to my father that still sounds great. I baby my collection but in a noticeable portion of my collection it seems that simply handling with care didnt matter.
The reasons are many for this. One reason is that though the CD cost of production has fallen the cost to the consumer has stayed the same or even risen. I for one refuse to pay that much for a CD when the majority of it goes to the record company and not the artist. Considering that DVDs are going for around $5-10 US and the cost of producing a movie is orders of magnitude greater I find the difference in prices hard to fathom. A second reason, Vinyl just plain sounds better most of the time. Save your technical BS for those that have not listened to the same track on both using good equipment. This is fact. SHUT IT! Third, downloaded digital music is fine but the quality sucks and the cost is even higher than that for the CD if you want the whole album/CD. Add in that some DL sites are using DRM and the smart people don't buy. DRM is a pain in the ass and only hurts the larger segment of the populace that just wants to listen to the music they have legally purchased. Very few share with others. Hay assholes, did you ever think that if you were not trying to RAPE the customer at every turn of their heads and sell the content at a reasonable price that more would be willing to pay for it? When the cost is less than the effort to steal the content then you will have a license to print money wholesale. Until then, people will work hard to circumvent any mechanisms you put in place if for nothing more than pure spite.
The minor technical, but a real consideration, is space. Say you have a pretty simple recording, just a jazz quartet. That is a minimum of 5 tracks, one for each instrument2 for the drums (stereo track). In reality if you wanted full control like at the studio, the drums would probably be anywhere between 6 and 15 tracks. This of course only increases with larger ensembles, and with the more fine grained control you want. You could easily have a song that is 32 mono and 32 stereo tracks. That would take 450MB per minute of audio. Storing all the data in a cheap format could be a real issue.
A more major technical problem is all the processing needed. Mixes aren't just a bunch of tracks summed together. They have extensive processing done. While some of it is things done per track, and thus things that could be committed to the tracks on the medium, some of it is things done to the whole song. All of that would have to be done by the playback device. So in addition to heavy mixing hardware, it'd have to have a wide battery of effects that could be called on. OF course various musicians/producers wouldn't like it, because it would limit options. You'd have only the included effects as options and it wouldn't be upgraded.
However the most major is that the industry doesn't want it. They don't want you able to easily remix their music. Such a thing would make it so much easier for someone to use parts of existing material for new uses, and they wouldn't want that, at least not without you contacting them for permission.
Neat idea but never happen.
That's what They said about writing operating systems, and yet here I am happily compiling kernel modules for an OS developed largely by enthusiastic amateurs who learned by doing. Take my point?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I buy the vast majority of my albums on vinyl, even at a 5 or 10 dollar premium mainly because I love having a permanent physical copy, but the switch to almost a vinyl-only collection was when the record companies got wise to offering a digital download with the record. With the alternative usually being to just pirate it online and get the CD later and transcode, selling a vinyl with a digital download solves all my problems and the band usually gets a great deal more with record sales than CD sales. So it's a no brainer really, along with the other swag that goes along with it.
What's the point of buying it on vinyl for great quality and ripping it to digital? You'll certainly get better quality by directly downloading FLACs from the internet. It's astonishing how clueless record companies are. Release lossless audio on data DVDs, or for digital download if you want quality.
I think the impetus behind vinyl sales is that they're a collector's item. They come in a big envelope with big art instead of a tacky plastic jewel case, and they usually come with inserts or collectibles. Everyone has albums on CD but it commands a lot more cred to say "I have that on vinyl." Some people collect records of great music they already own, and store them (playing vinyl reduces its quality and value).
http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=35530
Second, and this is by all means a serious question, are current vinyl releases any better than current CD releases? Or are they also compressed to avoid complaints about sounding quieter than the CD version?
Generally the vinyl is not over-compressed. But there are notable exceptions like the recent Metallica album - in that case the vinyl was exactly the same as CD because they were both mixed under the auspices of the same producer - I forget his name, but he's become ever more popular in the business and he brings the loudness war with him to every new project he takes on and this was his first metallica album. What's really interesting about the metallica case is that the guitar hero version was (apparently) mixed by the guitar hero sound engineers and they were not under the control of any of the loudness warriors. The result was that the people who really wanted the best sound quality from that album bootlegged the ripped guitar hero version.
Here's a video comparing CD mix to guitar hero mix - you don't even need headphones to tell the difference.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRyIACDCc1I
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
...vinyl records to CDs - compare vinyl vs. digital downloads thru i.e. iTunes. I recently mail-ordered Wilderness Heart by Black mountain (as an aside, GREAT record), which came with an immediate digital download of the record. I couldn't wait for the vinyl to arrive because I expected it to sound superior to the high-bitrate mp3s. It does. It's noticeable even to my far-from-audiophile wife.
I'm admittedly a fetishist for packaging - double LPs with great gatefold art, colored / clear / marbled vinyl, large-format insert books, all the way to crazy triple and quadruple LPs with all of the above (i.e. Altar, by Boris and Sunn O))) ).
If I can help it I buy nothing but vinyl now. And yes, I do have a USB turntable so (admittedly quite a bit more labor than with a CD) I can make properly tagged copies for listening to on my iPhone.
"The law" couldnt even get involved then! Apparently you weren't around back in the late 70's and early 80's when radio stations across the country were thumbing their noses at the RIAA by hosting "album parties." Always late in the evening, they would proudly boast they were playing so-and-so album "in its entirety" and would even tell listeners to "get your tape decks ready." We'd get side one without interruption, a brief interlude for the dj to switch sides (and for us to do the same) then we'd get side two.
One-to-many. This is exactly what the radio stations were doing. And guess what? The law could not stop them.
Yeah, I'm sure Moby got straight A's at Juilliard.
You there, creating art without a license, halt, I say!
God damned hipsters.
Infrasonics a digital format can handle much better. Digital can go straight down to DC if you want it to. Most of the time you high pass the signal for various reasons (so you don't record things like A/C vibrations and such) but digital can handle it. Movies sometimes have infrasonics, bass down to the 10Hz region. I can generate sinewaves that are 0.01Hz for a CD if you like. Records can't handle that. Lows are a big weak point because of how they work. You aren't going to get a solid 20Hz signal like you do out of CD or DVD.
Ultrasonics, well, not so much. First off, instruments really don't produce much up there. I've looked at spectra plots of high frequency recordings, there is just not much up there other than noise. You can see a chart that gives you a good idea of the range of instruments (http://www.independentrecording.net/irn/resources/freqchart/main_display.htm).
Then you have to prove that we can perceive it. I've never seen any valid study that shows it.
Generally the vinyl is not over-compressed.
It certainly was back in the record era, at least for pop or rock records from the 60's-70's on, with rare exceptions. It almost had to be to sound recognizable on AM radio or in cars (since the radio stations all played the records). Only in the mid-late 70s were there many pop or rock records that were mixed for FM or home listening on quality equipment. Early 70's pop records were horrifically compressed, easily as bad as your average Britney Spears crap. Even back as far as the "Wall of Sound" where the dynamics were intentionally compressed "up front" is an example.
I would also note that most full-dynamic-range records *can't be played* on anything less that pretty expensive cartridges on perfectly-adjusted equipment. I have one Sheffield direct-to-disk "Harry James" records that I could only reliably track after extensive adjustments to the tracking force and cartridge moment of inertia and tonearm mass. Almost anything I tried, and any conventional inexpensive cart ($50) is sends the tonearm off the record 1/8". If for nothing else, it would play much better in the majority of cases if there *was* some compression applied. It HAS to be.
I have been a high-fidelity guy (not an audiophool "cable consumer") for the past 40 years. CDs and digital music has been such a tremendous advance. Compression is hardly a new idea and absurdly compressed range was common for as long as records have existed. Vinyl is no solution, it's the engineering, no matter what the delivery medium.
Brett
What's the point of buying it on vinyl for great quality and ripping it to digital? You'll certainly get better quality by directly downloading FLACs from the internet.
Vinyl is less likely to have its levels compressed to the clipping point than digital.
The majority of USB turntables come with a lousy needle that produces a signal that negates all the benefits of vinyl and can even damage your record. Also, cheaply built turntables as most USB turntables are can produce vibrations in the turntable surface that disturbs playback, preventing a clean rip even with a good needle and again, possibly damaging the record. If you really want to rip vinyl properly, you probably want a belt-driven turntable made of as little plastic as possible, about as expensive a needle/cartridge as you can find, a decent phono preamp, and a good analog capture device (a M-Audio Audiophile 192 is excellent; an ASUS Xonar DX2 would be fine; a Creative X-Fi would be minimum).
Actually there is a DAMNED GOOD reason to rip your vinyl to MP3, as I can attest to because I helped an old friend with a great 60s-70s collection do it. You see, those vinyl records? Not affected by the loudness war because they can't take that "compressed all to shit, pushed to the edge of overdrive" sound because the medium simply won't accept it. You listen to an MP3 at 320k of Axis:Bold As Love, or Pieces of Eight from the original vinyl? TOTALLY different sound than what you get from today's CDs, and IMHO 1000% better. People look at me funny when I play my vinyl ripped MP3s, that is until I play them the same song from a CD, then they can see the suck the loudness war has wrought.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Sonic structure and operating systems are about as comparable as pottery is with rat husbandry. Modded up to +5 eh? I thought slashdotters were a little more mature than that.
The problem with USB turntables are the crap preamps. My own transfer setup is an old Technics SL-1300 direct drive with a high end "linear contact" Audio Technica AT331LP stylus (sadly since discontinued). Recording was done with a Soundblaster AWE64 Gold and later a Soundblaster Live! The quality was pretty good for a soundcard (noise was basically undetectable). The best digitizing solution is likely something USB as its away from the RF interference typical in computer cases.
Post processing (de-noise and de-click) is done with software called Diamond Cut ( http://www.diamondcut.com/ ). Its propose built audio restoration software, not a bunch of plug-ins for some random sound editing program. Highly recommended and comes with an excellent user's manual (covers all kinds of audio restoration techniques).
Whoa there, don't knock the fedora. Baseball caps and cowboy hats cause a man to look like they dropped 20 IQ points. The fedora is the only hat that a man can wear and not look like an idiot.
Cow Cube
I think the impetus behind vinyl sales is that they're a collector's item.
There's your key bit of information right there. They are collectors items often produced by enthusiasts. Record companies these days don't view vinyl as a killer medium to out-do the competition, so they don't push stupid unrealistic expectations on the people who master the stuff, which may I add also usually needs to be mastered separately. You often end up with a case where the digital releases are dynamically compressed to all buggery. I mean what's the point of having 96dB of dynamic range if you only ever use the top 5 and then horrendously clip the peaks in an attempt to make the records sound loud?
Take for instance this quote from wikipedia's entry of Stadium Arcadium by the Red Hot Chili Peppers: "A problem often pointed out by audiophiles is Vlado Meller's mastering for the CD release. It can be regarded as a product of the loudness war, with heavy use of dynamic range compression, and suffering of frequent clipping.[14] In contrast, Steve Hoffman's mastering for the vinyl release was praised for its quality."
The quality inherent in vinyl is about attitude of the producers.
You can record overcompressed sound to vinyl too. Vinyl, like magnetic tape or CD, has a maximum level that can be recorded (for tape it's saturation level, for CD it's 0dBFS and for vinyl it's when the playing needle jumps out of the groove), but it does not require the recorded signal to have some minimum dynamic range. I could record a pure 1kHz sine wave and it would be played back correctly. Nothing prevents record companies from recording vinyl from the butchered CD master (and a few records were made that way).
However, the people that buy records usually care about sound quality and dynamic range. If the record is badly mastered they won't buy it. Also, these people usually use high quality equipment (amplifiers, speakers, record player) that can correctly reproduce the dynamic range (ever tried listening to a recording with wide dynamic range on laptop speakers?). This is the main reason why record companies make better masters for records. The CD crowd does not care about sound quality enough to not buy the CD if it sounds bad.
Even if the turntable were fitted with a decent cartridge, needle and tone arm, there's no way that USB can be made into a good connection
Uh, what? USB means that the ADC is outside the computer, which means that you get less possibility of EM noise from the electronics in the case interfering with the analogue signal. Once it's digital, USB 1 gives 11Mb/s for transferring it to the computer, which is just under ten times the data rate of an audio CD. A USB connection has more enough bandwidth to transfer audio from vinyl.
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The loudness war didn't start cranking up until about 1990, so most CDs pressed before then don't suffer from it. (This is why so many "digital remaster" CD releases sound crummy compared with the earlier CD release!) Those early CDs often sound better than the LP version.
The CD format is really fantastic when it's used properly and not abused. It was billed as a technological wonder when it was introduced, and it mostly lived up to the billing. The only things I would change are the fragile little jewel boxes and setting some kind of mastering standard to reverse sonic havoc wreaked by the Loudness War.
or just buy the mp3 and ignore the foolish idea that you get better quality from a non digital format. Notice that sound quality was NOT one of the drivers noted in the article
No, records were not mastered as hard in the 60's and 70's and 80's.
They did not have the kind of signal processing we have now. There were no fast look ahead multiband peak limiters like TC finaliser, Waves L3 etc. These are the things that give the hyper loud square waved sound that is so offensive on some CDs. Use of multiband compression was also rare, starting only really in the 80's. They would have mostly used full band compressors/limiters, and the kind of peak limiting you get by driving the master tape a little, but that is a world away from a modern CD master.
It is also physically impossible to cut records with the squared off peaks you get from abusing the digital process. What you hear when you play those CDs back is the sound of the reconstruction filter trying to turn 'impossible' waveforms into a voltage. If you try this with vinyl then the coils in the cutting head melt as they try to slam from one side to another in zero amount of time. If I have to cut a record from a slammed digital master than I have to *reduce* the level to allow for overshoot, and filter the high end to remove the out of band stuff caused by the clipping causing aliasing in the D/As, and you end up with a *quieter* record than a gentler mastering process would have resulted in. This results in a shitty sounding record.
But really, it's only from 1998ish onwards that anyone has tried to cut records with the same kind of mastering you would do on a 'loud' CD. Even now, it's generally only done when people were mixing with the look ahead peak limiter on their master bus, so it's the only final version, and it is not possible, or there is no budget to get a proper master done.