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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.

9 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. Hiss and crackle by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Some people get their hiss and crackle that way. I choose fire and snakes to accompany my digital music.

    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.

      --

      --
      "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
    2. Re:Hiss and crackle by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      It's nothing to do with the medium, it's entirely to do with the mastering.

    3. Re:Hiss and crackle by Zobeid · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

  2. People don't understand what digital music is by Solandri · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:People don't understand what digital music is by imnotanumber · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

  3. Re:Cassettes? Really? by LynnwoodRooster · · Score: 4, Funny

    Cassettes more portable? I guess you never experienced the glory of a turntable in your dash...

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    Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
  4. Kurt Godel, and Archilies by aberglas · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. 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.

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