Slashdot Mirror
Vinyl's Revival Is Now a Phenomenon On Both Sides of the Atlantic
New submitter journovampire sends this report about the resurgence of vinyl:
Vinyl album sales smashed records on both sides of the Atlantic in 2014, as a format that recently seemed on its last legs hit astonishing new heights. ...n the UK in 2014, vinyl album sales totaled of 1.3m – six times bigger than its tally just five years earlier (2009). In fact, 2014 represented the most vinyl albums sales in the UK since 1995 – nearly 20 years ago. In the U.S., vinyl sales have quadrupled in the past five years, narrowly missing out on a 10m sales milestone in 2014. Amazingly, the year’s 9.2m vinyl sales haul is the biggest since Nielsen Soundscan records began in 1993 – by some distance.
peace.
If you really wanna go retro, use wax tubes.
Go figure. Hipster trends hit mainstream, give it 2-3 years and vinyl will fall by the wayside as people pickup Zune's and say "THIS IS HOW IT WAS MEANT TO BE!"
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
Typical.
But then again, there's a lot of us old farts who still have a nice Vinyl collection collecting dust. Say what we will about the immediacy and portability of digital media, I get really irritated having to redownload/sync my media (especially CD and odds and ends picked up from bands on the internet) on my laptop. Yes, I can't take my vinyl with me on the go (and for that, I have my phone). but for lounging around the house on saturday afternoon, sometimes picking up an old record (or new one) has a bit of nostalgia that I can sit back and enjoy while sipping a coffee.
There's a coming anti-digital storm: Vinyl, Instant Film, cassette tapes, now we just need to see super 8 and 16 for film. Too many hacks, too many insecure sites, and people finally coming to the realization that maybe, just maybe, they shouldn't put everything they do online for anyone and everyone to see or "steal". I'm okay with this.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
Of course, there is the retro side to vinyl. However, there is the physical aspect of the media, from plenty of space on the cover for album art (as opposed to what is shown on a smartphone display) to having liner notes and other niceties with the album, to the actual handling of a record which is 100% analog. Of course, its audio quality compared to a CD is debatable, but there is definitely something about having a record collection and the physical aspect of that.
For example, one physical aspect was Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick" newspaper. Another album actually folded into a miniature desk. This is a physical trait that has been lost, and is now being rediscovered.
Of course, there is the fact that DRM and the play device phoning home isn't an issue, and it doesn't take that much in the way of electronics to play a record compared to a CD or MP3 file.
I start to think what they call "warmth" is "muddiness".
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Static guns and discwasher brushes notwithstanding, vinyl had a lot of issues with dust that people are soon going to discover, if they haven't already.
HBI's Law: Frequency of calling others Nazis is directly correlated with the likelihood of the accuser being Communist.
"Vinyl album sales smashed records on both sides of the Atlantic in 2014..."
Now that everyone buys music digitally, the only reason to buy it physically is to collect, or to own something to display your fandom of the band. Vinyl is much better for these purposes than CDs. It is cooler to collect, and the packaging has a much large area for art to display. You can even frame it and hang it on the wall.
Vinyl LPs, as art in itself, will probably outlast the CD format.
I suspect that the majority of households in the UK and US no longer have a vinyl turntable any more now that CDs have been around for 30 years and of those, hardly any would consider buying a turntable any time soon. Even CD players are on a similar downward slide (probably Blu Ray/DVD players keeping them alive more than anything else) with downloads and streaming rapidly becoming the method of choice.
I never bought vinyl myself because unless you take great care with the discs and have a top quality turntable as well, a well mastered CD (i.e. not horribly compressed) is going to generally sound at least as good as vinyl, if not better. Don't forget it's trivial to back up a CD using a PC (into a myriad of formats including ISO, FLAC, mp3, ogg, wav etc.) and much, much harder to do so with a vinyl record (USB turntables can do it, but they're not a massively popular item).
The only advantage I can see with vinyl is the larger artwork, but nowadays that's long been replaced by a downloadable digital PDF booklet (which can be resized bigger than the vinyl artwork :-) ).
I noticed our local JB hifi has got a whole section of vinyl so had a leaf through. Most of the albums I already have on LP from when they were new and they cost a lot but it is still nice to see. The real problem LPs had back in the late 80's was the quality of the pressings because they were so mass produced and the vinyl was thin plus they were trying to squeeze a CDs worth of music onto the LP so you got shallow grooves and crushed dynamics making them sound much worse than they could. Given the choice between CD and those terrible LPs from that period the CD is hands down the better choice. If these new pressings are done right, they should sound very good assuming the source material is good and I have a few direct to disc LPs which are incredible. I don't tend to use my turntable these days but I have still got it, plus my collection and hope to have the right space to set it up because the experience of listening to a record isn't just about the quality but rather you end up listening to the whole album as a complete piece of work where with CDs or MP3s you would focus more on tracks
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
I see what you did there ...
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
There are a few types I see doing this.
You'll always have those insane people who think Vinyl has better quality than CDs or FLAC... but I imagine they are a pretty small group.
You've got people who're after the experience -- maybe a more personal feel to having a big physical system that needs more interaction. Again I imagine this is larger than the first group, but still relatively small.
And finally you've got hipsters, who'll do anything just because nobody else is doing it. Very suspicious that vinyl's popularity starts to grow with a strong correlation to this group's size.
DJ'ing has gone so far down the toilet with fake vinyl (i.e Serato). I wouldn't mind seeing real records used again at DMC championships.
Is Tipper Gore back?
I wonder if you can get a 7 inch single of "Bigger Hatin Me" by Johnny Rebel.
Ebay? I don't see any brick and mortar stores that sell vinyl. Just wondering.
Don't have to worry about a company telling you you can't listen to the music you already purchased.
Knobs and buttons are far superior to crappy touchscreens when trying to change stations.
No ridiculous black bars down the side of a picture when the camera is held vertically.
When the power goes out, an analog phone line doesn't die or need a charger.
No reading a manual to figure out how to set your a/c or heating controls.
Typewriters never lose your documents.
As a general rule, you can fix a broken analog device for less than the cost of a new digital one.
A compass never needs a satellite to tell you which way is North.
You'll never see a 0x00000008 error on a piece of paper.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
If one is going to buy the physical media version of an album, why WOULDN'T they get the Vinyl?
A vinyl side is 18-25 minutes long. After it ends, others in the room will be usually be consulted on what the next side will be. That's pretty close to ideal - much shorter than that and the constant duty interrupts the flow of conversation. Much longer than that, you have audio CDs where you might have to sit through an hour or more of something that is not terrible (otherwise people would've voted it out), but maybe not what most people want to be listening to at that moment.
replying to your own post right?
Vinyl is for fetishists and trendoids. I am shocked we didn't see an effort to revive clay cylinders, you know because the sound was so "pure." Vinyl is the hipster beard for the next little while then it will return to the grave.
It's debatable in the same way as the audio quality of regular speaker cable compared with gold-plated oxygen-free copper cable is debatable. It's not a long debate.
If you look at the equipment the analogue-faddists are using, it is for the most part not the high-end audio equipment of a previous generation, but retro-reproductions of the portable record players teenagers used to have in their bedrooms, record players that sounded terrible then and sound just as bad now. The only thing that's changed is that there were a lot of genuinely hi-fi systems around in those days for comparison. These days tiny speakers with wildly exaggerated bass are the norm on pretty much everything you buy from mobile phones to TV sound bars; it's hardly surprising that the sound from a Dansette record player sounds better by comparison.
I still have the speakers I used with my pre-CD sound system and I don't regret ditching a turntable for the first model of CD player that was available - the sound quality is superior in every respect (noise, frequency response, dynamic range). Vinyl records are the audio equivalent of Instagram - washed out, artifically-coloured facsimiles of the original that have become a passing fashion.
(and some gasoline)
Well, *I* use whale oil, which burns much cleaner and with a warmer flame. But you mainstream types probably wouldn't appreciate it.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I'm a self-proclaimed "audiophile" but not in the annoying, trust-my-ears-only way that plagues the hobby (I'm a scientist, dammit). I have a nice tube amp, great speakers, subwoofer, etc.... and I have a turntable as well (and a network enabled player + nice DAC). Anyhoo.... I can speak to the non-hipster side of things. Yes, some of the growth of vinyl has a faddish aspect to it. But, keep in mind, many musicphiles and audiophiles never stopped collecting and buying vinyl even through the meteoric rise of CD.
If you are a major music fan (and do not have an unlimited supply of pirated needledrops on the internet), a turntable is essential. A lot of obscure stuff was never released on CD. A lot of stuff that was released from the past on CD sounded (and continues to sound) dreadful due to the mad scramble to ride the CD wave; nth generation tapes, some equalized for vinyl, were used as the source material. Thankfully a lot of stuff these days that is selling is remastered versions of old stuff from original master tapes (not copies). You can be cyincal about this (say the major labels are just milking old warhorses) and you can also acknowledge that the digital audio technology has increased astoundingly since the late 80s and 90s. What does this have to do with vinyl? Well, vinyl can sound really good if done well. I won't argue that it is a better medium than digital; it simply isn't. But it has its own charms.
I have bought vinyl reissues that were mastered very well, and the vinyl was quiet, lacking surface noise - but about a third of the time I get burned with either lousy mastering (sibilance and related issues - and I have a very good microline cart) or more commonly, ticks and pops in shrinkwrapped new vinyl (and run through a we clean). This is the way it has always been and will always be with vinyl.
A primary motivation I have for buying new vinyl releases of new music is to acquire recordings that haven't been as dynamically squashed in the digital mastering process. While vinyl releases can be very dynamically compressed as well, as a rule, vinyl releases tend to be mastered with more dynamic range than the digital version (you could argue that this is partly, or mostly due, to physical limitations of the vinyl medium). And yes, I acknowledge that most vinyl is either digitally sourced or goes through an ADA conversion.
But mostly I continue to buy vinyl because it's fun - it's part of a hobby I enjoy very much. Spending hours just sitting "in the sweet spot" and listening to music (from any source - digital, tape, vinyl or whatever) is something I enjoy. So while people scoff at the vinyl "revival" I'm just glad to see there are more choices our there for getting good sounding music.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
(and some gasoline)
Well, *I* use whale oil, which burns much cleaner and with a warmer flame. But you mainstream types probably wouldn't appreciate it.
I have been hard at work cloning dinosaurs from mosquito DNA so I can raise them and make them into oil myself; the overall experience is vastly superior to your silliness with slaughtering those new-age whales. I'm also manufacturing new vacuum tubes for my unbeatable analog system, but you wouldn't understand how it works so I won't bother telling you, you silly modern sell-out.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Green Day does not deserve to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. At least, not the Green Day that put out American Idiot - an argument could be made for the Green Day that put out Kerplunk but they haven't been heard from in about 20 yars.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I'm waiting for punch cards to come back. You just don't get the same experience when loading your program on cassette tape.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I'm getting a 10" black and white TV
Yeah, GP is clearly just a poseur. He probably goes to some midwestern college where his fraternity thinks whale oil is cutting edge.
Maybe vinyl helps to get away from the loss of dynamic range caused by artificially increasing the perceived loudness of a work. Take a look at point #4 in the following article:
#4. Reducing Sound Quality So You Perceive a Song as "Louder"
http://www.cracked.com/article_20256_5-things-record-labels-dont-want-you-to-know-they-do.html
Of course you do have room for better album art and liner detail/notes, and you just can't knock what came with Cheech and Chong's Big Bambu, truly a watermark event in consumer relations.
And don't even get me started on the tube mythologies.
What this boils down to in the audio sense, in all cases except for two exceptions -- when you're playing vinyl you simply don't have a digital source for or when the digital source has been compressed and the vinyl hasn't -- is that consumers have been duped by Audiophile mythology. Badly duped.
There's every reason to have a turntable in your system, as high-performance as your budget can stand, so you can manage those two exceptions. No point in depriving yourself of something just because there's no adequate digital version. But barring those use cases, if your ears are actually working, you want a CD or better.
signed (Musician, music lover, engineer, recording engineer), me.
PS: You want to hear what a CD is actually capable of (and so also learn what crappy recording techniques and mastering houses have been cheating you out of), go get yourself a few CDs from TELARC, and listen on a good system. No vinyl on the planet can even come close -- and that's just how it should be. Why don't all CDs (and up) sound like that? The vast majority of it can be attributed to bad recording practice and far too much compression (but I repeat myself.) Google "Loudness wars" and learn the ins and outs. It's both fascinating and sad.
PPS: Not associated with TELARC, except they've gotten a lot of my money already, and are going to get more. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yeeeehawwwww - can't wait for 8 track to come back!!!!
Years ago I was very close to buying a whole lathe setup with spare cutters and everything, it was an auction and the price was 1$... but you had to pay for getting the thing out of the warehouse that very day or they'd penalize you big time.
Sometimes I regret not being more proactive about the whole thing. I enjoy electromechanical contraptions like that and would have liked to make masters and one-offs for people.
But the thing was enormous and it would not have worked well in a 3rd floor apartment in any case. It would be happier in the basement of a warehouse.
http://gallery.audioasylum.com...
plus two 19 inch racks full of all kinds of junk...
Mostly random stuff.
Vinyl was already on the way into the graveyard by 1993. I used to buy used vinyl albums dirt cheap - couldn't afford new cassettes and CDs - because no one wanted them. Used music stores were shoveling vinyl into your arms for almost nothing then. I played them once and made a cassette.
What is the % increase/decrease since, say, 1970?
If I had to guess, the main reason Vinyl is popular is because of the enlarged artwork and people wanting to own some memorabilia from an artist they like. I wouldn't be surprised if the people who own these records never play them.
and noise
You missed a group. DJs. CDJs are fine but you can't lower your eye and see where the beat drops like you can with vinyl. Don't believe me? Grab a record with a track that has a meaningful shift - in volume, pace, a silent or spoken break, even instrumentation - and LOOK at it, from the lead-in to lead-out sections, and you can SEE where it changes, as the texture of the band shifts at that point too.
I have a fond memory of gifting a record to a DJ friend, who threw it on the turntable, lowered his eye, and said "ah, the beat should drop about here", popped the needle onto that groove, and... yup.
DJs have culture-followers, who glom onto what they like, and as well it's a prestige position so there's a lot of amateurs wanting to try,
You also can't put a sticker on a CD like you can on vinyl, to mark the exact location of the sample or break you want.
FYI.
Think it might be because you can transfer vinyl to any other media without paying vast sums of money or inviting the copyright stormtroopers to confiscate your computer? Maybe?
It shouldn't be. Not unless either your tube amp, or your transistor amp, in a word, sucks, anyway.
Tube amps and transistor amps differ from each other in sound reproduction not at all in the linear zone used to reproduce music. A tube amp may have a slightly higher noise floor (and then again, it may not... but really low noise tube amps will cost ya.)
Where tube and transistor amps differ significantly (meaning, to your ear) are in what happens when you drive them so hard that they can no longer linearly reproduce the signal you're feeding them. A naive transistor amp will hard clip, generating a most unpleasant bunch of harmonics, along with a distorted version of the original signal. A tube amp (given an adequate power supply) will clip softly (by comparison), rounding off the signal instead of cutting the tops into flatlines or droopy reverse trapezoids, and this is much easier on the ear.
Now here is the thing: Anyone who likes music, much less loves it, would never, and I seriously mean never, not just "mostly wouldn't", manage music reproduction in such a way as to have our tube or transistor amplifiers distort. Because the second we do so, differences notwithstanding, the music would have to sound better to reach up through the resulting dreck to the standard of "sounding like shit."
So tube/transistor, difference meme, WTF? This WTF: For a musician, playing a single instrument, and usually that means an instrument producing a relatively simple waveform, the tube distortion *does* add interest (think electric blues guitar for the classic example), and so for the musician, the tube amp is a tool which does indeed get used in its distorted regimes.
But when that sound gets to YOU, the very last thing you would EVER want to do is add MORE distortion to it. You'll have some, because no sound production system is distortion free (the speakers are the worst culprit, followed by the stylus if you use vinyl) but man, you want that to be as near not-a-damn-bit-more as you can manage. Otherwise, your ear will shit in your auditory cortex and crown it with audio battery acid. Hate and discontent everywhere in your mind.
So, no. 1000 times no. Tube amps sound like transistor amps in hifi setups unless someone has completely screwed up your installation, or your ears.
Having gone that far, some caveats: That noise floor thing I mentioned, that's one. Lousy tube amps often hiss like angry snakes. If so, get rid of that POS (or at least try new tubes, and/or have someone replace the capacitors and old carbon resistors in your "classic" pride and joy.) Next, damping factor: For bass, a transistor amp may do a lot better, depending on your speaker systems. This is because transformer coupled outputs from a tube amp (these are typical) can't control the inductive kickback from a moving coil speaker as precisely and decisively as a direct coupled transistor amp can. However, from the tube days, there are speaker systems that were designed with this in mind, and which are extremely well behaved re inductive kickback, and so the end result is similar. This is a multi-variable issue (amp+speaker), and one that takes some knowledge to waltz around satisfactorily. So there's that. Finally, tubes are more likely to be microphonic; in a really high power system, that can cause feedback, which is intolerable; but the (good?) news is, there are very few hifi tube systems with that kind of whip-ass.
You like tube amps, I have no argument with you. I like them too, and I own some great ones. Plus, they glow in the dark, which appeals to my batlike nature. :) But when you say they sound different or better, just, no. Not unless something's been done very wrong, or something is broken.
If you want primo sound reproduction, the place to put your do
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Vinyl sales for the entire year totaled nearly 3.5% of 257 million albums sold in 2014! The other 96.5% of sales pale in comparison!
And we're not going to mention the 1.1 billion individual track digital sales! Because that would make vinyl look bad!
If people really like the only vinyl, why not improve upon it?
To be more specific, I have two specific ideas about this, and this come from my personal interest in another dead format - Laserdisc.
First, back in the day Pioneer actually made a Laserdisc player that could play vinyl records with the laser, causing no wear. It was designed for radio stations and cost something north of $10k (and this was in the 80's and 90's). So, I am thinking this might be much cheaper and easier to do with today tech, and certainly would be interesting.
Second, video for Laserdiscs was analog - yes the thing looked like a giant CD, but it was all analog aside from some optional digital audio tracks. So, what if today you recorded analog audio using a laser on a 12" disk? I think that would be really interesting, and might be able to challenge some of issues with both the frailty of vinyl records and the pitfalls of digital processing and compression. Hell, use a blue laser and get many, many hours of recording or use a smaller disk. Imagine how much data - digital or analog, a disc that size could hold.
-RoS
"What these naive enviro-conscious hipsters don't realize is that every time a record is "cut" the small bits of plastic that result are released as nanoscopic pollutants that clog the tubules of bivalves living in a pond near a small community north of Maine."
The above is the dream of most every old prick on slashdot to be able to say. Get off my lawn!
As I recall Monty Python did a record with three sides -- one side had two grooves spiralling in parallel. That's what vinyl is good for.
How many vinyl buyers get the mp3 download along with the vinyl and hardly ever actually play the record? It's really just a deluxe option.
The people who think vinyl is better are nuts, or maybe Amish. I suppose they'd rather go back to horses and buggies or living in caves.
With the recent news of the entertainment industry lying about numbers ($80 million settlement .. was a lie), how'm I to believe this rhetoric?
Remember, 106% of all statistics are a lie.
you expect me to believe that sales have been going up? What would people even be doing with all this vinyl if they don't even have a record player? That makes about a much sense as a recent quote by Abraham Lincoln.
Better range for your speakers. Guaranteed.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
This makes me think of the technological progress of communications between computers. (Note: This is not a totally accurate depiction of history.) First, we had serial communication, like RS232. When that wasn't fast enough, we went parallel, like Centronics. That reached a certain speed limit due to signal skew between the parallel wires. But by then, on-chip transistors were so fast that we could modulate differential serial in a way that beats the heck out of parallel. (Notice that modern highspeed interconnects, like USB3 and PCI-Express, are all differential serial, where any parallelism has decoupled phasing.)
So imagine we computed the transfer function of the "typical" record player, accounting for all the distortions in the needle, amplifier, and speaker. Then we took the waveform we WANT to get and reverse engineer exactly the groove we need on the record to get the exact sounds we want. It might take a decent amount of compute power to do it, but we could do a far better job than we ever could back in the 1970's.
People going for vinyls is not really about DRM. The thing is that people actually like the vinyls, because the mixing and mastering is better. Almost always you have a better dynamic range in vinyls. I really wish they would stop over-compressing everything.
It's sad that to actually get high quality audio you really have to search for it. We have the tech and the methods to produce high quality stuff, but everything is streamed in low quality or botched at mixing/mastering.
And no. We don't need 24bit/96khz to enjoy music. We need the dynamic range back.
I've always been a vinyl fan.
I could never get across to people I'd talk to about true reproduction and 8x sampling a second. Being you only get 8 points of "sound" per second. Not a reproduction as one was missing the other 92 points. Much like a JPG where hell you'll never miss it, but by the 5th to 10th save...
Build a man a fire, you'll keep him warm for a day.
Set a man on fire, and you'll keep him warm for the rest of his life.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
It's easier to be sentimental about the songs when there's a record spinning and an album cover reinforcing the experience.
The only good thing about all is the square foot of artwork in the album covers. Vinyl degrades the sound in every way and further degrades in each playing. People who prefer vinyl to CD are as stupid as the Flat Earth Society.
I read lots and lots of people joking/whining over the (somewhat) worse sound quality of vinyl compared to digital.
Though they are theoretically right (but not always in practice, google "loudness war" , digital clipping makes digital always sound worse than vinyl), they miss the point.
Playing records is just a lot more fun to do. Because you have to turn/switch the record every 20/30 minutes you really keep your mind on the music. The slow browsing through a crate of records in itself has a completely different feel than browsing/searching through a list on a screen.
With children present it has the added fun factor that the way the music is stored on the record is easy to understand. You can even *see* it with a loupe. You can hear the sound coming from the needle.
So while my everyday music use comes from my computer, when there's a party I get out the record player and boxes of records. Both ways of listening to music have their place.
People joking: "why don't you go back to wax rolls" miss the point. I own a modern record player and an old windup 78 rpm player (no electrical components at all, the amplification is just a horn) and using them both on a party is immensely fun to do. If I would have a wax rolls player I would probably play them as well, just for the fun of it.
In a way listening to records at a party is more like watching youtube movies than like setting up a playlist and forgetting about it.
So while vinyl is mot per se the best long term storage format (though the simplistic storage medium makes it a lot easier to play back after a zombie apocalypse. I once created a 78s record player from Lego and a sowing pin and a cardboard horn)
it has it's advantages on parties.
One last nitpick about sound quality. Most of the people joking about the sound quality of LPs play there music through tiny computer speakers (or tweeters+woofers without mid-tones) and on these systems it's impossible to hear the difference between the frequency response of a CD and a record.
All in all a record player is like an open fireplace: central heating is better in all ways except for the fun factor.
VINYL
1. Superior sound quality
2. Collectable
3. Exists in the corporeal realm
4. Can be sold
5. Gets bitches
6. Pleasant psychological effect of owning physical things
7. Reproduces the actual intended wave rather than an interpretation of it
8. Better dynamic range
9. Wider frequency response
10. Perfectly reproduces sine waves that digital can't capture
11. Warmth
12. Isn't sterile and doesn't smell of disinfectant like digital does
13. Did I mention superior sound quality?
14. Infinite sound resolution
15. Digital = Literally Hitler
16. It's literally the only way to make music if you're serious about music and not just a poseur
17. Enjoy listening to digital software synths on your $1 store headphones (or maybe your $20 skullcandies if you're *really* extravagant) and your phone
18. Objectively superior sound quality
I was so glad to throw away my turntable. It was a high-end model, with a highly-rated cartridge/stylus. Even so, and even after I used the recommended dust remover on every disk several times, I had annoying clicks and hiss within a week after a new album purchase. Good riddance.
The popularity of 192kbps mp3s over 320Kbps ones, choosing to use VHS over Betamax, the length of time it took people to stop using DVDs over Blu-Ray. There are so many mixed factors as to why certain media formats are used over others and why the best isn't always the chosen format, some are effectively nonsensical and we have to accept this. Then of course you have genres like noise rock, speecore, splittercore, anything lo-fi etc. that go against the 'sensible' progression of music. Long ago I stopped trying to make sense of music consumption (be it format or genre) because the truth is that not everybody wants the best sounding music, they just want the most enjoyable experience from their music. If that means playing a [comparatively] unjustifiably expensive and inconvenient format over a much cheaper and more flexible one then so be it.
From the creation of genres to the formation of bands and beyond, the entire evolution of music has never followed a linear progression toward better produced or more complex sounding music. The only way we can truly make sense of trends like these is to stop pointing the finger at supposed consumer stupidity and to start observing changes in consumer culture and subculture; what might seem stupid from the strictly technological perspective of 'Every music consumption format has to be objectively better than its preceding technology' will make perfect sense to the consumer who is not interested in the *best* way of listening to music, but the one that gives them the most enjoyment and makes them feel closest to the music they love so much.
Is anyone really surprised here? A technically inferior product has become so cool that people are willing to pay a premium price for it. Apple has been making money hand over fist in the cellphone market for years with this strategy. Of course I'm going to get a bunch of people replying with that tired old saw that vinyl has a certain "soul" or "character" to its sound. They are like the people say they like the iPhone because it "just works" but are really too embarrassed to admit they've paid a premium price for the "cutting edge" of yesteryear. Face it, the hiss and crackle and lower fidelity of vinyl was surpassed two decades ago with CDs and the quality just keeps improving with the digital formats of today.
Is anyone really surprised here? A technically inferior product has become so cool that people are willing to pay a premium price for it. Apple has been making money hand over fist in the cellphone market for years with this strategy. Of course I'm going to get a bunch of people replying with that tired old saw that vinyl has a certain "soul" or "character" to its sound. They are like the people say they like the iPhone because it "just works" but are really too embarrassed to admit they've paid a premium price for the "cutting edge" of yesteryear. Face it, the hiss and crackle and lower fidelity of vinyl was surpassed two decades ago with CDs and the quality just keeps improving with the digital formats of today.
Go figure. Hipster trends hit mainstream, give it 2-3 years and vinyl will fall by the wayside as people pickup Zune's and say "THIS IS HOW IT WAS MEANT TO BE!"
Actually this
https://ponomusic.force.com/
may be how it's meant to be...
Are all these articles really about vinyl sales (are vinyl sales really increasing) or is this just a music industry publicist campaign to get us to buy albums because everyone else is.
Stupid people will buy anything if they have money to burn.
This is not the next big thing. Its morons with money.
Bring back film and we can start buying that as well. Lots of tinned film and vinyl degrading as we value it more and more.
walk into an urban outfitters store, records everywhere. no doubt they are a HUGE part of sales and this trend.