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Vinyl and Cassette Sales Continued To Grow Last Year (fortune.com)
Albums sold on vinyl and cassette both saw a growth in sales according to BuzzAngle Music's End-Year Report profiling U.S. music industry consumption for 2018. From a report: Vinyl sales grew by just shy of 12% from 8.6 to 9.7 million sales, while cassette sales grew by almost 19% from 99,400 to 118,200 copies sold in the US, The Verge reported. Sixty-six percent of those vinyl sales were of albums that are more than three years old and feature classic bands like The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, and Pink Floyd, reported BuzzAngle. Cassettes saw popularity in newer releases. CDs on the other hand have declined by 18.5% in popularity leading to a total decline in physical album sales of over 15%, reported The Verge. Meanwhile, audio streaming saw an increase of 41.8%, the largest of all music consumption.
Some people get their hiss and crackle that way. I choose fire and snakes to accompany my digital music.
“Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976? If these trends continues... AAY!"
Perhaps kids are learning that listening to an album is pretty damned awesome.
No, you remember that in 1973 it was pretty damned awesome to be young and in the arms of your old girlfriend as you listened to that album, baked on whatever pills you had bought in the street that morning.
There is no way your grandkids will ever be able to reproduce that experience. They are visiting you at Retirecrest listening to the album through your carefully coddled and patched McIntosh amp, but all they see is a drooling old guy with a recording that hisses and pops. That 1973 experience was yours and yours alone.
Cassettes more portable? I guess you never experienced the glory of a turntable in your dash...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Vinyl is the music equivalent of homeopathy.
Well. Not quite... homeopathy would be a track with only the cracks and other noises and then you would imagine that the music is playing.
Heavy Metal style music disproves the Nyquist stuff elegantly. Just because you can't hear it distinctly, doesn't mean it wasn't part of the overall sound quality. Overtones, harmonics, etc. Look, use a Metallica album on tape (or your favorite high volume/distortion using metal band). Listen to it. Use in the same album on CD. The distorted guitars sound cleaner, thinner, some of the aggressive quality has been thinned out and cleaned away. At the same time, the digital version causes ear fatigue for long term high volume listening. The cassette can be listened to at a maximum volume before clipping occurs without such ear fatigue. 16-bit/44 kHz is a brick wall quality to a CD (even those mastered at 24-bit before being pressed to CD), and all parts of the waveform ultimately have to be discrete values.
Then there's any interpolation or lack of interpolation by a Digital to Audio Converter... pure digital is just a bitstream and has to be converted to audio. Oversampling vs. something as cheap as a 1-bit DAC.
Digital was best for electronic music that used those types of waveforms anyway. No need to CONVERT what is already a sine, sawtooth, square, etc. wave except for multiple layers and overtones... and the high frequency response of digital lets those analog dial high frequency effects of combining Q with Resonance sound up to the maximum capabilities of the headphones or speakers.