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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!"
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.
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'
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.
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.
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.
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.
You forgot how crappy sound systems were in the old days. Today even cheap digital systems can often outperform the best equipment in an old time studio. Now when you get to analog components you might have a point, although there have been huge advances there too.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
"Today even cheap digital systems can often outperform the best equipment in an old time studio"
Err, no. You're quite wrong, there.
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
A cassette tape will never install a rootkit on your tapedeck.
Neither will a standard Red Book audio CD.
They will never be able to take your cassette tapes away from you due to some rights-holder asshattery.
Neither will they with a standard Red Book audio CD.
A cassette tape doesn't care what region your playing it in.
Neither does a standard Red Book audio CD.
Cool old cars have tape decks.
My cool old car has a CD changer.
Creedence is supposed to have those hiss and pop sounds.
If so, they put it on the master so it should show up on your standard Red Book audio CD.
Tapes come with cool album art, lryics, and hidden messages.
So does a standard Red Book audio CD.
Tapes work offline.
So does a standard Red Book audio CD.
Tapes don't report your listening habits, location, duration, sexual preference and political affiliation so some corporation.
Neither will a standard Red Book audio CD.
Fuck it, this is too much work... romanticize all you want, just keep it to yourself!
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.
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".
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.