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Vinyl Records Outsold Digital Downloads In the UK Last Week (adweek.com)
Sales of vinyl outstripped those of downloaded music for the first time since the advent of digital downloads last week in the UK. From a report on AdWeek: The U.K.-based Entertainment Retailers Association, or ERA, said Monday that Britons spent 2.4 million pounds ($3.03 million) on the old-school wax last week while only doling out 2.1 million pounds ($2.65 million) for digital downloads. Vinyl Factory, a website dedicated to records, reported that those numbers represent a big change from the same week in 2015, when just 1.2 million pounds was spent on records compared with 4.4 million on digital downloads. That's a 100 percent year-over-year increase in vinyl sales and also the first time that vinyl album sales have bested digital downloads over a weeklong period in years, per Vinyl Factory. The surge in vinyl sales could be attributed to the popularity of vinyl as a Christmas gift and the growing number of retailers. You know it's a gift because, as BBC adds: But 48% of those surveyed said they did not play the vinyl they bought -- while 7% did not even own a turntable.
Vinyl is the new coffee table book that people are expected to see but not read.
I ran into someone buying vinyl that didn't even realize he needed a turntable to play it. Just following the popularity mob.
By far the majority of digitally distributed music is streamed, not downloaded.
Downloaded music is a niche market.
Eat the rich.
Because of the Loudness War, Vinyl really does sound better, because it can't be abused the same way digital recordings can. There's only so much the needle will tolerate.
It's not because Vinyl is "better" -- it's because the mastering on the digital formats is appalling.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Digital recorded music on vinyl is like dehydrated chicken in a home made soup mix.
You do not gain anything from going from digital to analog back and gain all of the wow, flutter, pop, hiss, etc.
Those that claim more 'warmth' are fooling themselves. Sure. Back when analog recordings were made vinyl was better. But once you lose the quality from the digitization process it is lost for good. Why is it so hard to realize that the music today is 99.99% recorded digitally and that is where the problem is.
If you still believe in converting your digital recordings to analog I have LOTS of swamp land as well as land on Mars I'd like to sell you.
The artwork on many classic albums are amazing and are worth framing and hanging on the wall.
>while 7% did not even own a turntable.
It's like Humble Bundles and steam sales, turned into real life.
HOWEVER, it should be noted. People buy plenty of stuff for various reasons other than the media itself. Many people never open their "collectors edition" stuff. It's about owning something, not necessarily playing it.
I own Demolition Man on LaserDisk, as well as Sega CD. I love that movie. I've didn't have the Laser Disk player when I bought it. And I still haven't watched it on LaserDisk. It's not about that. It's about having a little memento more than the media itself. And I don't even own a Sega CD. It's just a cool box, for a vintage game system from my childhood, for one of my favorite movies.
it is scratched.
I could finally get a needle for my old turntable. They had literally disappeared from the local music stores over here.
Open Source Network Inventory for the masses! Kuwaiba
1st. You can buy a single digital song, but are forced to buy an entire LP.
2nd. An LP can costs more of the sum of the single digital songs.
3rd. Digital songs have a larger market, thus lower prices.
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Analog is getting its revenge. From the review:
"Analog experiences can provide us with the kind of real-world pleasures and rewards digital ones cannot," he writes, and "sometimes analog simply outperforms digital as the best solution." Pen and paper can give writers and designers a direct means of sketching out their ideas without the complicating biases of software, while whiteboards can bring engineers "out from behind their screens" and entice them "to take risks and share ideas with others."
And further down the review:
In these pages, Mr. Sax takes us on a spirited tour of the resurgent analog universe. He takes us to United Record Pressing, a vinyl plant in Nashville that's churning out 40,000 records a day, with a staff that's tripled since 2010.
Of course this is nothing new. I've been saying analog is better than digital for a very long time despite being modded down every time I say it.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Have we just reached peak hipster?
This trend has less to do with the increasing vinyl sales and more to do with the fact that more and more people are getting their digital music from a subscription service vs buying it outright. Spotify, Pandora, Amazon, Google, and Apple music services are gobbling up digital sales.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
If you go used you can get things that are not available any more and can't be found on youtube or anywhere else.
love is just extroverted narcissism
This confirms what Americans thought. Brits are all elitist douchebag hipsters.
Why would you buy a vinyl record just to look at? I am a fan of vinyl but if someone gave me music to play on vinyl I would want to listen to it, not look at the cover.
The other quirk in this is that people still feel physical products have much more value than a digital download.
It's about the "cool" factor.
Of course, analog downloads are popular as ever.
Given how close the amounts are, and that vinyl costs quite a bit more per album, it's pretty clear this is still far fewer purchases. In fact, given that vinyl is more a fad (with half of them never being played), this could easily be accounted for by the same number of sales at twice the price each.
In other words, this isn't particularly meaningful data, except that audiophiles haven't gotten any less gullible in the last year.
that Britons spent 2.4 million pounds ($3.03 million) on the old-school wax last week while only doling out 2.1 million pounds ($2.65 million) for digital downloads.
So, its about turnover rather than numbers of sales. Lets have a look on Amazon...
Thought so:
Dark side of the moon vinyl: £18.98
Dark side of the moon digital download: £7.99
...or stream for £0 if you already have Amazon Prime
...or rip the CD you bought in 1988 for £0
...or screw over those poor, penniless artists and torrent for £0.
So, yeah, you can see why the turnover on vinyl is tasty.
Got to hand it to the music industry: after getting everybody to replace all their vinyl with CDs in the 80s, it must have been so frustrating when the next big format let you convert all your CDs for free, but now they've gone back to the drawing board, applied themselves and found a wheeze to get everybody to replace all of their MP3s with vinyl again... so it looks like vinyl may even outlive the CD.
Remember guys - store all your CDs carefully for the grandkids so they're ready for the big 16-bit revival in 2050...
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
That they've only had digital downloads for a week?
and you loose all perspective, statistics are too easy to spin.
I'm one of those weirdo's who buys vinyl without owning a record player. It's mainly because I get something that is a beautiful large collector's item, it costs a tiny bit more than the CD and I already have the digital version so vinyl represents a distinct version of the music. I fully intend to one day buy a record player and listen to all my records, but I'm in no rush.
It is just because vinyl records are now overpriced hipster gymics now.
Most people don't buy music anymore anyway. And I'm not just talking piracy, I mean streaming services as well.
When I buy music, I prefer to own a physical copy of it. Now that some companies like Amazon offer a digital download for free when you buy music on a physical medium, I've found myself opting for vinyl over CD if the price difference isn't too great. I mean in reality, the digital version is the version I'm going to be playing, the larger size of vinyl allows for some great artwork, and there's just something inherently cool about an audio storage system that strictly speaking doesn't even need electricity to play (although I'm not aware of any steam/pneumatic gas powered record players), let alone electronic decoding hardware.
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No doubt - a live DSD recording is very, very cool. Though it depends on the position of the microphone(s) and how the recording engineer mixes all the input streams. Back in the old days they had 2 (maybe 3) mics and that obviously gave a more "natural" source. The Dorati 1812 (Mercury Living Stereo) is a good example. An average concert stage now has 10 or 15 mics floating above the action and the recording engineer downmixes those to Stereo. Unfortunately very often with little success. Compare a high quality Mercury Living Stereo with a modern Digital recording and -most of the time- you will like the vintage recording more - even though - strictly speaking - the physical "quality" of the digital medium is superior.
The talk about "bass" not being reproduced on a record .. well .. as usual with analog .. it depends. The RIAA curves make it possible to cut good bass on the record without loosing too much "real estate" (records are cut after shifting the sound into a higher frequency band. The playback equipment "shifts" it back down so that it sounds ok). But cutting too much bass and you may have the needle jump out of the groove because physical limitations make it impossible to follow the groove. And since records are cut to be played even with shitty equipment, bass is sometimes reduced to safe margins. But even with RIAA bass needs more space. And there's the rumble filter. So there are a number of reasons why some records don't feel to have the right "boom". But it's not necessarily a limitation of the record.
All in all : Back in the days only highly trained and experienced engineers were allowed to touch the very expensive studio equipment. A few of them are still active and they still produce stunning results - yes .. on vinyl. Today - almost anybody is an "expert". "nuff said.
m.