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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.
This entire pointless article revolves around "markets" so small compared to the "music industry" as to entirely be composed of "data" within the margin for error which would be discarded anyways. :facepalm:
mnem
"It's hard work being this cynical; but I have a lot of Karma to burn off."
“Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976? If these trends continues... AAY!"
Audio reproduction started out shitty and steadily improved
Each advance was a real technological advancement that made music sound better
Then, everything changed
People started to value convenience over quality. MP3s on shitty earbuds became the standard
Others were seduced by nostalgia for old, crappy sounding media
Hopefully, people of the future will continue the quest for audio quality
I should have invested in mustache wax, fair-trade coffee, and LPs.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
You can also buy "raw water" for $20 a gallon, but that doesn't mean it's better. Old records suck and cassettes are even worse. Tube amps suck too. I've lived with all of them. It's cool for a retro experience, but that's about it.
Didn't I read that home taping was killing music?
That was years ago, and the awful rubbish still hasn't gone away yet.
Seriously guys, get your acts together.
Perhaps kids are learning that listening to an album is pretty damned awesome.
Cassette tape, I would have to agree with you there. There is no real redeeming feature to cassette besides nostalgia. But vinyl, well, there is another story.
Take good care of your albums and they will reward you with rich, warm, pop-free sound for a lifetime. Eventually some dust gets on them, either a fine layer of white glue or some good light cleaners, or both will take care of that. I have a 1963 Philips Capella Reverbio B7X43A, one of the last tube radios and one of the only tube radios to have FM stereo reception in addition to stereo on the line in. I have enough spare tubes to last a lifetime, and when my turntable plays through it it's like a spiritual experience. The warmth and beauty of that has to be experienced. And sure, I've rigged it for bluetooth. Respectfully, though, because there is no way I will make any permanent mods to this work of art. But still I can play my phone through it. And, like everyone else, I'll pump MP3s (or preferably OGGs) through it, because perceptual compression really is good technology and while you are listening to a bunch of MP3's then at the time it seems good enough. When you are munching on popcorn, you hardly worry that it's not prime rib.
But I would be devastated if I had to munch popcorn for the rest of my life. A direct-to-vinyl recording on my turntable put through my tube sound system is a perfectly cooked prime rib dinner with delicate au jus and a fine wine. It's an experience. Bach's Little Fugue in G Minor done this way still makes my heart beat faster.
The *only* advantage that cassettes *ever* had over vinyl is that they were more portable... but you took a very discernible loss in quality as a price for that convenience.
Today, you can store countless songs on a portable music player no larger than a single cassette, and at *VASTLY* higher quality than cassettes themselves are capable of. Vinyl, at least, has a redeeming characteristic over digital storage in that it is at least pure analog, and perhaps for some people, it might carry that appeal. Certainly there is no significant lack of quality in vinyl, at least not until the needle has worn the record down through very extensive repeated playing. But cassettes, while also analog, are so far inferior in quality to even today's lossy mp3 sound storage, that there is no reason I can imagine that people today would actually still prefer them.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The problem is that people think digital results in a different waveform than the original analog waveform. They can't understand how you can go from a stairstep digital signal to a smooth analog signal, and incorrectly conclude that something must be lost when you store music digitally. Yes something is lost, but it's only frequencies higher than Nyquist - half the sampling frequency, which is carefully chosen so the only frequencies lost are those beyond your hearing range (and weren't captured in the original analog recording anyway).
Monty Montgomery demonstrated this in a video using an analog wave generator, an analog spectrum analyzer, an analog oscilliscope, and A/D and D/A converters. At 20 kHz, the stairstep digital waveform is an awful mess, but after conversion back to analog it's still a perfectly smooth sine wave.
The mistake people make is thinking that the digital signal is a series of stairsteps. It's not stairsteps, it's just the corners of each stairstep. The sound's value is only defined at each corner. In between the corners, it's undefined. And it turns out that there is only one analog waveform which can be drawn through every one of those corners, yet contain no frequencies higher than Nyquist. So the digital sample of the waveform can perfectly recreate the original analog waveform (within the chose frequency limit).
Vinyl is the music equivalent of homeopathy.
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!
And the ripped WAV files from CDs don't have DRM unless you choose to add your own
Unless you have a nonconforming disc passed off as a CD instead of a CD.
Renaissance fairs are big in Europe. Everybody dresses like The Gap is 400 years in the future and there is no such thing as medical science. I understand they have a lot of fun.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Older than hipsters, the top hits look like retired baby boomer stuff. But not all of it, some of it looks like grandkids of baby boomers. Who probably get disks and players as presents from their grandparents.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
MySpace alone has millions of artists.
Apparently 99% of people don't want to look for good music, they want the record companies to find a few decent songs for for them. I guess that's why they only pay attention to the 0.01% of music that is handled by major labels. That and maybe the production quality.
Absolutely.
The weight of even the lightest (and cheaply made) vinyl records are about 80 to 90 grams, and more typically closer to about 150grams., while an audio cassette is only about 40 grams.
So yes, definitely more portable.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
A cassette tape will never install a rootkit on your tapedeck.
They will never be able to take your cassette tapes away from you due to some rights-holder asshattery.
A cassette tape doesn't care what region your playing it in.
Cool old cars have tape decks.
Creedence is supposed to have those hiss and pop sounds.
Tapes come with cool album art, lryics, and hidden messages.
Tapes work offline.
Tapes don't report your listening habits, location, duration, sexual preference and political affiliation so some corporation.
Grampa knows how tapes work.
Whole albums can be had for less than what you paid for coffee this morning.
Cassette tape cases are great places to hide your joints and ludes from your square parents.
A stack of classic rock tapes looks cooler than and hard drive.
Cassette tapes can go up in value.
(Full disclosure: All my music is 128k mp3s ripped from my personal cd collection, or downloaded back before Metallica showed the media how. It's a shame, but it turns out the audiophile skill tree is locked out once your character completes the "War in Afghanistan" limited edition expansion pack.)
You are being ripped off every second of every day, so that advertisers can help rip you off even more tomorrow.
But, as the Tortoise points out to Archilies, if the play back device is of sufficiently high fidelity then a cassette could be constructed that will produce resonances that will cause it to self destruct. And no matter how hard Archilies tries to fix his machine, the Tortoise can always produce a new machine destroying tape.
Has something to do with Godel. And possibly Bach and Escher.
I wonder if people buy these shitty inferior sound formats just so they can waste a lot of money on the equipment and cables needed to make it sound acceptable.
Your tapes and records are in shitty shape if you hear hiss and crackle.
I have new for you. ALL tapes sooner or later get in shitty shape. I'm old enough to predate the CD so I grew up with this tech. Pretty much all tapes and records end up in bad shape if you play them a meaningful number of times.
The best part about analog music? No DRM and no bit rot.
That hiss and crackle IS a form of bit rot. It's data being lost through the waveform being deformed.
Also your notion that there was no DRM is not quite true. There is no practical way to make a perfect copy of a tape or vinyl record and making copies requires equipment and physical media. This is de-facto a form of DRM via inconvenience and cost. Just because it isn't based in cryptography doesn't change the fact that it makes making copies prohibitively difficult. Copying a tape or vinyl record is essentially no different than playing it through speakers and then recording the playing. You get a copy but it's not a perfect copy.
Vinyl and film I can understand, but magnetic medium just doesn't hold up.
Vinyl and film don't last either. Anyone who thinks they last hasn't actually worked with them enough to know that fact. You play vinyl records by putting a very sharp needle on a very soft bit of plastic. Expecting the record to not wear/scratch/deform/etc with repeated playings is delusional. Film degrades over time and has to periodically be transferred to new medium. Otherwise it will eventually decay and be lost. Countless films from years gone by have been lost when the film decayed.
I don't understand why anybody would want a cassette tape.
The answer is mostly one of a few reasons. 1) People who have a cassette tape player and tapes and who are happy with it and don't want to change. Similar reasoning to people sticking with obsolete PCs that get a job done even when better options are available. I have a few people who work for me who listen to some old audio tapes to this day. 2) Hipsters. 3) People trying to get data from old cassettes. 4) There are always a few people who stubbornly refuse to move on from any given technology.
That said, cassette tapes SUCK and need to die in a fire sooner rather than later. If you actually are a hipster buying one in a pathetic attempt to be ironically hip then you need to die in the same fire...
Vinyl is not the music equivalent of homeopathy. Vinyl is a way to sidestep the loudness wars and get recordings that aren't afflicted with horrible dynamic range compression. Pop and rock CDs from roughly 2000 onward have generally been sonically crushed and sound like garbage. LP releases, for the most part, don't. That's the decision of the record companies and their recording engineers, and you'd have to ask them for the explanation of why it's done that way, because I don't know. I just have to deal with the results, and that means always buying new releases on vinyl.
I can't play a record in my car, even if there were record players that did not skip on a slightly bumpy road, they would probably wear out the records pretty fast.
I can't play a tape in my car either. Hasn't been a car made with a tape player as standard equipment in quite a while. Last car made with a tape player as standard equipment was sold back in 2010.
And if I connect my phone to the car, then instead of just driving and listening I am tempted to play with the phone trying to select the next song at every opportunity (red light, stopping for a pedestrian etc).
If this is your argument in favor of tapes, it's a terrible argument. If you think people didn't play with their tape decks (fast forwarding) to skip to their favorite bits you haven't driven in a car with a tape deck. People played with their tape decks while driving ALL THE TIME.
With a tape, I just put it in and listen until the end of side B.
And then put a gun in your mouth at the next stop light out of boredom. Plus you have to keep a library of tapes in your car unless you are a psycho who likes listening to the same thing endlessly. No thanks. I lived through the cassette era growing up and have no desire to repeat.
I use cassettes to listen to music in my car and on a portable player primarily.
I'm sorry. That must be an awful existence.
You are aware that you can connect digital music players via adapters to play through a tape deck without having the awful experience of actually using tapes, right?
I already have a lot of cassettes - recording them to CDs (though CDs are bigger than cassettes, so it would be less convenient) or other digital formats would take a long time. It is easier to record the new CD I bought to a cassette so I can listen to it in my car.
What's even easier is to rip a new CD to your smartphone and then use that to listen to it. FAR less hassle than recording a CD to a fricken cassette tape.
I tried connecting my phone to the tape deck and playing mp3s. The problem was that I was too tempted to skips songs etc that it distracted me (I would select the next song at an intersection, not notice that the light is already green etc). With a tape, I just put it in and I listen to it until the end of side B. Also, connecting the phone, starting the player program is an additional thing to do when I start the car.
Seriously? You be you but if this is your reasoning understand you are many standard deviations away from normal. If you are that easily distracted I worry you probably shouldn't be driving a car in the first place. Plus I've never met anyone who didn't try to fast forward tapes while driving or fiddle distractedly with changing tapes.
It's all very easy to explain.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Twelve percent growth sounds impressive, but this is like a penny stock having a 50% change in price. It is just noise. In the heydays of vinyl there were individual albums that could sell 9 million copies in one year. Heck, even Billy Ocean sold 2 million copies of "Suddenly": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Long live the Speaker Bracelet
Rolo D. Monkey
Take good care of your albums and they will reward you with rich, warm, pop-free sound for a lifetime.
Not if you actually play them they won't. You are putting a sharp metal needle on a soft plastic record. Even with the best possible care you will inevitably damage the vinyl record merely by playing it even if nothing else goes wrong which is seldom the case. If you think you can avoid this you haven't actually lived with vinyl records or played them with any regularity.
Eventually some dust gets on them, either a fine layer of white glue or some good light cleaners, or both will take care of that.
Eventually? Try almost immediately. Dust is everywhere. And dust will be the least of your problems in the long run. Any time you have a media which relies on physical contact it is going to wear and be damaged over time. Vinyl records are no exception to physics.
I have enough spare tubes to last a lifetime, and when my turntable plays through it it's like a spiritual experience. The warmth and beauty of that has to be experienced.
I am very dubious your claim would survive a double blind study. And if a turntable playing is a spiritual experience for you then you need to get out more. Sorry, that's a little harsh but you sound like every lunatic audiophile I've ever run into who goes nattering on about "warmth" and "fidelity" and other nonsense that they want to believe they can hear out of confirmation bias. If you love listening to vinyl records on some good old equipment then you be you. But forgive me if I don't share the same appreciation for the "experience".
Each advance was a real technological advancement that made music sound better
That's because we were starting from nothing. Eventually we got to Good Enough and there was no reason to progress further.
People started to value convenience over quality. MP3s on shitty earbuds became the standard
It's adorable you think people used cassette tapes or vinyl records because of their quality. They used them because they were the ONLY realistic options at the time. The moment CDs came out people dumped vinyl records and cassettes like they had the plague. Vinyl records and cassettes are huge pains in the ass. The moment MP3s were available they did the same to CDs. Why? The new formats were FAR more convenient and the quality was Good Enough. For those who care high quality records were and still are available.
Hopefully, people of the future will continue the quest for audio quality,
No need. We have awesome technology for high quality audio WHEN WE NEED IT. Most of the time we don't. Most people just want to listen to a beat they like in reasonable fidelity and in a convenient format. If they really need a high quality recording then there are ways to get that. Your argument is like claiming everyone should walk around with a $5,000 DSLR camera instead of their smartphone camera even when they don't actually need or want the extra capabilities, bulk, and cost.
My car is older and it has a slot for a tape deck or radio.
I'm passingly curious what you plan to do when it dies...
When I can select a song to play from a list (be it on a phone or PC), I tend to spend too much time thinking what should I play next.
All phones and PCs these days have playlists which you can listen to in order just like a tape if you want. Nothing forces you to fiddle with them. Also they have voice interfaces so you don't even have to take your eyes off the road while driving to use them. I understand using constraints to deal with a bad habit though so if it works for you who am I to judge?
What I do is decide what tape I want to listen to and then take it to my car.
So make a playlist and then play it. Same effect with less hassle. Use an iPod shuffle or similar if you don't trust yourself to not fiddle with it.
I missed this yesterday so probably no one will read thus but anyway...
It's always amusing to see a story like this on Slashdot because it just drives the crowd on here fucking nuts. A largely superior form of listening to music exists and yet people are buying more and more music on an ancient medium.
I'm sure there are people who believe vinyl sounds absolutely better. I used to be one of them. Over the many years since I've been in high school and had that belief I've learned a lot about technology, sound engineering (just a pinch), music mastering, and so forth to realize that the notion that vinyl is better is not an absolute thing at all. It has the potential to sound better in certain circumstances, usually involving an expensive turntable, but overall it mostly just potentially sounds different, not necessarily better.
But for most people, I don't think that's the reason they're buying vinyl. Today, if you're buying physical music in any format you're basically buying a souvenir.
Consider a CD. What's the difference between buying a CD in the store and burning one from MP3 files? Cover art, liner notes, silk screening on the disc and some amount of added audio fidelity. The fidelity is not insignificant but really when you're buying a CD you're buying something you could almost make yourself from downloaded files (regardless of how you got the files).
And that's before you consider the fact that if you're buying a CD you probably also want it on MP3 and you'll have to rip it yourself with an optical drive you're increasingly unlikely to have.
A vinyl record, on the other hand, is not something you can make yourself. And there's a decent chance it comes with an MP3 download code. And even if it doesn't, it's a big, huge tangible thing that done correctly can be a work of art. The vinyl can be colored, or using funky patterns, or translucent. It can have things like etched holograms in it, or weird tricks like the ones Jack White pulls where he has alternate intro tracks based on where your needle falls or hidden songs in the space on the label. It's just neat.
Plus digital music has done lots of great things but it's true, digital music devalues music. An album comes out, you listen to it once, you say "cool" and then you hit shuffle on your whole collection and you listen to the songs as they occasionally pop up. Listening to CDs was more atomic - you would tend to listen to one CD in your car over and over, or however many your home or car disc changer could handle. A vinyl record though, that's a commitment. You have to decide you want to listen to pretty much the entire side of an album. If you want to listen to a double album you have to get up and flip or change the record three times. If you want to listen to the Hamilton soundtrack you have to get up or flip the record seven times. This is why a lot of the vinyl that sells well to this day are things like Dark Side of the Moon where it's more album oriented than song/single oriented. And a lot of you reading this probably think this is stupid but a lot of us think it's neat. If vinyl continues to grow in popularity we might see a return to the album oriented rock it popularized.
But yeah if you're buying physical music you're buying a souvenir. And it looks like more and more people figure if they're going to buy music, might as well buy a souvenir. Something with big, cool album art and a tangible experience. The rest of the public is fine with music services like Spotify and Apple Music. So the CDs are leaving stores, the vinyl isn't, and although a small handful of people with breathlessly fight to the death to argue that vinyl is superior in some form or fashion the simple reality is that digital music and streaming services aren't going anywhere.
So let the vinyl weirdos like me have our fun.
Schnapple
...but there's no such thing as a 45 RPM LP. LP stands for "long playing", because dropping the RPMs from 45 to 33 1/3 allowed them to put more music on a disc.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!! Even if you're used to listening to low-fi Youtube bootleg recordings on a cheap phone via $5 drugstore earbuds, cassette's gotta sound really bad. Why? Why would anyone wanna pay money for that?
Debate is a form of harassment. Do not question my truth.
Arguing with someone who insinuates that VHS has redeeming qualities compared to DVD is just as pointless as explaining digital audio to an "audiophile", but here we go. VHS has even lower color resolution than a DVD with color subsampling. Feast your eyes on the trainwreck that is VHS: "NTSC VHS is roughly equivalent to 333×480 pixels luma and 40×480 chroma resolutions (333×480 pixels=159,840 pixels or 0.16MP (1/6 of a MegaPixel)).,[34] while PAL VHS offers the equivalent of about 335×576 pixels luma and 40×240 chroma (the vertical chroma resolution of PAL is limited by the PAL color delay line mechanism)."
I get the vinyl sales. The record is iconic and the box art is a key part of the package of 'owing' a record. A vinyl copy is a physical thing. I can see how a true collector would insist on the vinyl copy for their shelf along with a digital one for their devices. With the unlimited streaming services, all you're doing is renting. Besides, I would think that purchasing the vinyl record at a concert will do more to support your favorite band than just streaming.
Does vinyl sound better? I won't touch that one with a 10 foot poll. I'll let the audiophiles and philosophers grind on that one for the next infinity.
As for cassettes... I don't see a need for these things to come back. They were garbage when they were in their hayday and they're garbage now. Perhaps a nostaga wave from the 80's kids... I hope to see these things die out quickly again.
It depends: there are some listening-environments in which the dynamic-range compression is actually desirable--basically anywhere with a high noise floor; if you in a machine shop, for example....
There are plenty of less extreme examples, though: any public space where people are going to be having conversations; or driving in a car on the highway....
If you're trying to listen to music with high dynamic range and you have to overcome the ambient noise of the environment, then you need to turn the music up in order to hear the quiet parts and the loud parts end up blasting you; these are the situations when you end up either constantly re-adjusting the volume (doing the range-compression manually) or using some sort of noise-cancelling or isolating headphones/earphones/canalphones (which can create their own issues: sometimes you *want* to be able to still hear your environment *as* you're enjoy your music).
Parents who want to listen to something without waking their napping kids but without having to wear headphones also go for dynamic-range compression (either built into the audio, or done manually via repeated tweaking of the volume-control, or through a playback-system that includes an automatic dynamic-range compressor or "volume limiter").
On the other side, if you were for example in a restaurant or something where they played `background' music with high dynamic range, you'd be more likely to get frustrated with alternately having to yell over the louder parts when the music jumped into the foreground (or having other people yell over it) and having the quiet parts that would be enjoyable be completely drowned out by the chatter of the crowd (many of whom probably increased their own volume to talk over the loud parts and then failed to turn themselves back down...).
-rozzin.