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Vinyl and Cassette Sales Continued To Grow Last Year (fortune.com)

Posted by msmash on from the closer-look dept.

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.

2 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Hiss and crackle by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 5, Insightful

    its worse than bit rot. bit rot implies you had once a perfect copy; and in that case, you could have copied it to HD and others for backup.

    vinyl and analog cassette NEVER let you get a perfect copy. each and every time you play it, it gets worse and different (both). can't avoid it unless you optically scan the LP; and no way to avoid degrading tapes (they stretch, have drop-outs, no redundancy, bleed-thru, HF loss, etc).

    I have no idea what you are talking about. I grew up with that stuff, glad its gone, I do audio for a hobby and digital is the only way to go.

    analog is for hipsters OR for those who have exceptional analog systems, and that's really rare, today.

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    --
    "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
  2. Re: There is in truth much beauty by Tough+Love · · Score: 4, Insightful

    there are still ways to tell the difference, especially on tracks that have any waveform that are close to a fundamental harmonic of the sampling rate. You can actually hear the sampling beat frequencies injected into the music and distortion

    So you have not heard of Nyquist frequency or sinc filtering. If you can actually hear beat frequencies than your hardware (software?) is misdesigned. It can be mathematically proven that you can't hear such beat frequencies in a properly engineered system. Of course I realize I am telling this to someone who *believes* in vinyl, so it probably fell on deaf ears.

    Anyway, I can guarantee that you are wrong about the other guy being wrong. This is science.

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    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.