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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.
no bit rot
Yeah, the shit just wears out, which is much better...
Vinyl and film I can understand, but magnetic medium just doesn't hold up. I don't understand why anybody would want a cassette tape. When are we going to bring back floppy disks? Or zip disks, there ya go... or better yet, punch cards and ladies in long skirts and high heels changing the reels of tape
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Well, you're up to something but you're barking the wrong tree. It is not magic, but for some a highly sophisticated technology is indistinguishable from magic.
The 'digital' part of the audio systems has nothing to do with quality, and the Solandri's description is rather accurate, if not too technical for slash dot. In fact analog audio systems have rather limited frequency range and dynamic range, much more so than digital ones. Yes overdriven digital system will create nasty artifacts while analog ones would distort like heavy metal amps...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
However, usually in customer digital systems the compression of audio is removing a lot of information from the original and sometimes also introduces audible artifacts.
So it's not 'digital' that evil but 'mp3'.
4wdloop
Cassette tapes? They are the worse medium for music devised by man.
Well no that's unfair. They were better than what went before. They were compact, the tape was pretty well protected, recordable and you could fit 120 minutes into a single tape. This allowed you to actually carry quite a lot of music with you. 1 or two tapes would see you through two bus journeys and whichever lessons you could listen to music in without getting caught...
At the time they were about the best choice.
Though I only bought a few albums on tape, mostly I copied them from CDs or friends to my own tapes.
Tape stretches and breaks for almost no reason.
Yeah but it wasn't that bad. Even the rather failure prone D120s would last a fair while. The somewhat thicker tape that music was sold on generally lasted better than that. I basically listened to everything on D120.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Yes. This. CDs can sound incredibly good if they're mastered right, but that's something record producers no longer have any interest in. Basically any rock or pop CD from about 2000 onward is going to sound crummy. Also, any recording from earlier than that if it has been remastered. When I see REMASTERED on a CD label, I mentally translate that as SPECIAL EBOLA EDITION.