50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player
lightcapai.medium.comI oversee pressing for over 150k+ records a year. We eliminated download cards a while ago because the redemption rate was so low. I wouldn’t doubt if the number of buyers who don’t own a record player is even higher tha 50%, and that the percentage of people who actually play the records is actually 10-20%. I don’t have data on that, it’s just a hunch.
Many of us in the indie music industry (hip hop sustained record plants for many years, arguably until independent music started pressing in the 2000s) have mixed feelings about records. It’s a lot of plastic. A lot of waste. And they’re cubersome to bring on tour.
But there isn’t another physical medium that sells at all as well as vinyl. Soft apparel always does well. But people want vinyl.
I don’t love the Gen Z framing of this though. Vinyl purchasing at this point is multi generational.
I don’t think it’s some mysterious Gen Z love of physical. I think we all know that Spotify doesn’t pay artists appropriately and we want to help sustain the music we love. Buying digitally is just isn’t the same for a lot of people (even though it arguably is the best and easiest income generator for artists).
I’m increasingly conscious of being an outlier here. I prefer physical, for a variety of reasons (ownership being one of them), but also prefer CD to vinyl. Nobody loves CDs any more and I don’t get it. I own vinyl, I like vinyl, but CDs are objectively better and somewhat easier to store.
I love both for different reasons. CDs sound better, they can be ripped and archived and can be carried around without any loss in their digital form.
On the other hand, vinyl is great for intentional listening. Putting that hour aside to brew a nice cup of coffee and listen to something while exploring the feelings the album evoke, then get a break to flip/change the record and continue.
It's a kind of personal care for me. I even recently showed a little love to my old record player (an Akai AP-D210) so it can regulate its RPM better and play smoothly as it can.
I can argue that CDs are for listening to the music, and vinyl is for listening to yourself.
This resonates with me. I have a hobby where I transform classic books into hand-written papyrus as the author intended. There is something almost meditative in unspooling a 10kg scroll where the sometimes illegible ink allows me to wonder what that sentence even was.
So glad to see my people. I have a hobby where instead of a modern synthetic ball, I play soccer with a severed goat head. There is something positively transcendent about the resonating thunk of a kick that you just don’t get with a standard ball.
Love me some old school goat ball
Vinyl is also better for all the old ones still around that haven't been republished as CD.
> CDs are for listening to the music, and vinyl is for listening to yourself
This is amazing
> This is amazing
This is not a reply I was anticipating. Can you elaborate a little? =)
He’s reacting to an implication in your phrasing. “CDs are for listening to the music”. frames CDs as rational and objective. “Vinyl is for listening to yourself” reframes vinyl as something more inward and identity-driven. For many people, vinyl already sits in an intentionally irrational space compared to modern formats, worse fidelity, more friction, more ritual. So that line can be read as quietly calling vinyl navel-gazing or performative rather than about the music itself. Some readers find that observation insightful or funny, which is likely what prompted the “this is amazing” reaction, even if it wasn’t how you intended it.
these types of people used to be called “hipsters.” I don’t know if there’s a more modern term for it.
That’s what I guess he meant by “amazing” and also why it spawned the goat head and papyrus mockery.
Well, I interpreted the comment I responded in good faith. On the other hand, I respect and understand people who choose to mock me directly. Actually I'm pretty used to be mocked.
Being more serious, I think it depends on one's relationship with music itself, and I don't expect everyone to have the same relationship with it. Personally, I met with music at a very young age, and funnily I started with CDs and open-reel. Vinyl came into my normal rotation pretty late, after its availability started to increase.
I worded my comment exactly like that intentionally, because the unwritten context here is my vinyl collection is solely composed of albums I already love to listen, and dedicate some time listening to. As a person who also performed in the past, I also understand that my relationship with music is a bit different when compared to today's consumerism-centered approach.
So, if spending some time with a favorite album, enjoying it and respecting the effort went into its production is worthy of mockery and being labeled as a hipster or being backward, let it be. I don't personally care.
Same goes for pen and paper, actually, but it's a subject for another day.
CDs are annoyingly delicate to handle. Vinyl does not care about your finger tips. Vinyl sleeves are also more attractive than CD cases and easier to store on a shelf or bucket.
CDs are great for ripping into FLACs and then playing them from Jellyfin.
> Nobody loves CDs any more and I don’t get it.
I loved CDs, but I was forced to stop buying new CDs decades ago because I can't stomach supporting the RIAA. That said, it is still my preferred physical media for music (followed by minidisc) even though ultimately my CD collection was digitized and stored.
> RIAA
I get you but there’s also an element of pick your poison. Not all the online options are great either, particularly not on the streaming front (cough, Spotify, cough[0]) in terms of their treatment - and payment - of artists. I think Bandcamp might be decent, and is generally the place I go for FLAC.
I buy a lot of pre-owned CDs as well: upside, less hard/impossible to recycle waste (discs), and less plastic waste (cases), doesn’t support the RIAA; downside, it also doesn’t support the artists. Somewhat regularly I find pre-owned is the only option though, at least if I want a physical copy.
[0] One could perhaps argue that the RIAA set the standard for turgid money grabbing scumbaggery that modern services have chosen to adopt, I think.
For me there is no point storing digital music on optical discs. Easier to steam it or listen from a hard drive.
On the other hand the larger format of vinyl and rather peculiar way it works scratches the “tactile” part of what makes physical attractive a lot more.
Each to their own of course but that’s me.
The discs are your backups.
(You can of course also back up the rips, but you have the disc as origin, and as an option for re-ripping at higher or lower quality, etc.)
Nobody loves CDs any more and I don’t get it.
Anecdotally, I see more and more stores that sell music now carry CDs.
Just yesterday I saw an entire wall of new-release CDs at a Barnes and Noble bookstore.
Yeah, I’m sort of hopeful it’ll experience a similar resurgence to vinyl.
Despite being terminally online for literally decades now I never got out of CDs just because it always bugged me that I could buy a physical copy with better (or, nowadays, usually equivalent) sound quality for the same or less money than the MP3 (or whatever format) album.
I’d then invariably rip to a compressed format for convenient on the go listening but, in 20 odd years, I’ve bought maybe half a dozen albums digitally, and half of those have been simply because no other format is available. (For context, I have maybe 700 albums on CD but I lost accurate count some years ago so it could well be more.)
>I think we all know that Spotify doesn’t pay artists appropriately and we want to help sustain the music we love.
not a big fan of all music streaming services, but they only keep about 30% of their revenue. the rest goes to the labels, and this is where most of the problem is. before the 2000s, very small artists hardly earned any income from the sale of (physical) media. I don't like the new platforms such as Spotify, Tidal, etc. either – but this kind of discussion often just distracts from the mafia-like structure of the major labels.
This is part of the problem for sure, but it's also how the revenue is split between back catalog vs new music.
In the physical media era, when you bought a record/CD you owned it forever and your marginal cost of listening to a song approached zero over time. Most dollars went to new music.
Now, it's close to a 75/25 split of dollars going to back catalog vs new music on streaming services.
If you're a new musician, you're not competing against new music, you're competing against the entire history of recorded music. You're fighting for a piece of a pie that the Beatles are still taking a chunk of.
And the labels are a part of the problem there, they made the deals with the streaming services that allows back catalog to dominate.
This redistribution of revenues from new to old has also taken place in games: ~90% of time in games on PC is spent in games older than a year, ~50% in games 5+ years old like Fortnite, CoD, Roblox etc. Around half of revenues are 'free to play' [1]
This is why making a new game is probably a terrible idea... but hey, world is casino!
[1] https://newzoo.com/resources/trend-reports/the-pc-console-ga... and widely reported e.g. [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1je98mm/pc_gamers...
This is a problem with all of copyright, not just music.
You need to let things become public domain so people can make new. You need it to be unprofitable to just keep selling the exact same bits in perpetuity.
It’s labels plus the limited revenue available due to competition.
15$ or so just doesn’t reflect the work that goes into a month’s worth of music listening.
>It’s a lot of plastic. A lot of waste.
Compared to the plastic waste produced daily it's a drop in the ocean. And at least this is kept and collected.
>even though it arguably is the best and easiest income generator for artists
Digital is nowhere "the best and easiest income generator" for musicians. A common complain from musicians is how, with the advent of online music, sales craterred, and musicians despite having the same or more fans, and be able to fill the same venues, have lost the living they could make by selling even 50K records (with a favorable indie label split).
During the entirety of the 90's 11883 records sold at least 50 000 units[0]. If we assume $3 royalty each[1] that's ~1200 artists making $150 000 or more in an average year. That's ~$300 000 adjusted for inflation.
In 2024 1450 artists got over $1 000 000 in royalty from Spotify.[2] Additionally 2.3% (~276 000) earned at least $1000 and 100 000 earned at least "almost $6000".
It seems to me that there now is a long tail of artists making a few thousand a year on Spotify that assume they would have sold tens thousands of records each year in the 90s. E.g. the 100 000th most popular artist on Spotify assuming they would have sold as well as the 1200th most popular artist in 1998.
The more likely case is that the top ~10 000 artists would have made less back then than they do now and the rest would have made essentially zero dollars from selling records back in the 90s.
0: https://bestsellingalbums.org/decade/1990-238 1: https://dailybruin.com/1998/09/27/paying-the-price 2: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2025/03/12/spotify-loud-and...
You're not comparing like for like.
The $1m is gross income, pre-royalty slicing. The actual payout to artists on a label will be much lower.
The $3/album is post-royalty at the other end of the telescope, and the actual number varied by territory. The gross income to labels would be much higher.
So the final premise is incorrect. The real winners - the household name bands, artists, and soundtracks - made incredible numbers from their royalty slices which are impossible on Spotify today, especially once labels take their cut.
Drake may be getting lifetime sales of $400m, but a chunk of that goes to UMG for distribution.
Meanwhile there were vital scene subcultures around indie/rave/dance/hiphop where niche artists turned DIY music production, pressing, and distribution into a workable fairly well-paid full-time career. Those numbers mostly weren't logged.
Spotify dilutes the scene effect because everyone is competing with everyone else, globally, so it's harder to get exposure, even in a specific niche.
I think that makes sense and was in a way unavoidable.
Compare a physical shop with Spotify. A physical shop has limited space, so old stuff has to be pruned out to leave room for the new releases. So sales for old stuff gradually stop, and there's a small selection of current releases you can buy.
Spotify and the like aren't like that. It's an infinitely growing amount of music you can play. New releases may be completely unnoticed by users who follow recommendation algorithms. You can trivially follow impulses like "So what else did the the band that made Video Killed the Radio Star make?".
Since digital is infinitely reproducible and not perishable this will keep getting worse and worse. Any new artist competes against all of the music that was released before them.
> Compared to the plastic waste produced daily it's a drop in the ocean. And at least this is kept and collected.
Basically anything taken individually is a drop in the ocean. Problem is all those drops add up and that's what creates the ocean.
Perhaps they meant digital download sales such as Bandcamp & Beatport and less so for iTunes, Amazon, etc... as there are still real revenues to be made from selling digital music. It all depends upon how many middlemen between purchaser and the artist but vinyl adds in unavoidable production costs, risks of unsold stock, etc... versus Bandcamp where there is little upfront cost, low risk and low transaction costs.
> And at least this is kept and collected.
Just to expand on this, there is a reasonable distinction made between multi-use and single-use plastics. Things like a shampoo bottle, plasticware, drink bottles, etc. are considered single-use. (Yes, even the shampoo bottle despite being in your bathroom for weeks because its thrown out when it's empty.) As the parent comment mentions, purchasing a vinyl record does little—practically nothing—to contribute to daily plastic waste, especially with how few customers there are (compared to shampoo bottles).
I will spend more in a month on a digital download at times than what I would've paid Spotify in years.
It’s a lot of plastic. A lot of waste.
It's only waste if it's being discarded. If someone wants to keep it and cherish it, even if they're not playing it, then it's not waste.
At some point in the future, the owner will pass and their children will have a mass of plastic to manage.
Perhaps their children will cherish it for generations, or perhaps their children will have different musical tastes from their great great great grandpa and the plastic ends up in a landfill, forever un-played.
At that point it becomes waste. That doesn't mean it's waste now.
in the grand scheme of things, this is a very small amount of plastic waste, and as far as resources go, one of the less scarce ones. at some point, the cost of the hand wringing to avoid waste is more of a drag on society than the actual wasted material itself.
It's all waste eventually.
> It’s a lot of plastic. A lot of waste.
And yet again customer demand and financial gain supercede environmental concerns. There’s no hope for a better, less consumer-oriented culture if even the indie creatives among us acknowledge the problem yet succumb to it.
Less consumer-oriented culture demands brainwashing, totalitarianism and terror, to force people to not do things they naturally want to, when there is a capability for doing that (if there's no capability, a nation will be physically overwhelmed by other nations and cease to exist/replaced)...
>> Less consumer-oriented culture demands brainwashing
It simply requires putting a stop to the constant brainwashing campaigns for inducing demand.
>> do things they naturally want to
collecting Stanley tumblers is not a "natural" tendency.
> It simply requires putting a stop to the constant brainwashing campaigns for inducing demand.
Unfortunately, there are C-suite level roles for this so it will never stop.
Stanley tumblers, no, but even magpies like collecting rocks and buttons and things. Seeing a checkmark on an online digital widget just really doesn't scratch the same itch.
Well... if we had a constant stream of inventions so that people will always have things they'd love to have but struggle to afford, then there won't be a need to induce demand. But we don't have nearly enough: people have more spare cash than inventions they want, are produced every year.
If we don't induce demand by brainwashing, what will people do? They will keep inflating bubbles buying up stocks (making economy even more unstable, and eventually undermining themselves), houses (making sure new generations can't buy theirs, depressing birth rates and giving rise to political radicalism), and crypto (which is absolute insanity). People need to be given ways to spend their spare cash, and nudged to do it as opposed to "investing" that cash (which is, in the true meanin of this word, mostly impossible because there aren't enough inventions to invest into).
This is a pretty cynical take. It's also possible people would find meaningful things to do with their money.
Is this some libertarian/randian take?
There are many things people naturally want to do that we regulate and steer away from via many different means (smoking bans, traffic laws, etc.).
You do realize we don't live in an objectivist society, right?
Technically they could get some paper stating “you own one vinyl” and we would use less plastic and storage (and we’d get an alternative monetary system perhaps).
A lot of plastic? less than a couple takeout orders no?(sure that's less of a toxic plastic in food containers but still)
35. My record player is in storage, but I still buy records sometimes because they're beautiful art and I want people to keep making them. For now I lend/give them to my friend who has a proper player set up. Spotify's max-blandness shuffle algorithm is like having a wank compared to letting an artist give you a full performance
> We eliminated download cards a while ago because the redemption rate was so low.
Oh. my. gosh. This has been driving me NUTS recently. Please please please here me out. The first dozen or so records I bought were of albums I already owned digitally, as FLAC so I was one of those kinds of people that didn't redeem the downloads. I wanted to buy my faves, stuff that I knew I'd love to listen to on vinyl forever. Now that I'm buying brand new stuff, that I don't have digital copies of I've noticed they rarely, rarely, if ever include a download link and so I had to renew my dang apple music subscription to listen to albums I already own when I'm away from my record player and its started to really turn me off from buying any records outside of bandcamp (where you always get the digital version too.)
I’ve been buying vinyl for the sake of collecting it, with limited intention to ever play it.
And I’ve been wondering why would anyone buy the cassette or CD? (And I own more cassette players than the zero vinyl players)
I recently found out that some of my favourite vinyls, that I’ve been collecting, ONLY include the art/lyrics booklet in the CD version. These are from the early 2000’s (peak cd?).
I reckon I’d buy an art / lyrics booklet over a physical medium of the music itself. Particularly if it included flac download of the music.
> And I’ve been wondering why would anyone buy the cassette or CD?
I have no interest in cassette or vinyl. I love CDs because they provide the highest music quality, uncompressed audio that’s trivial to rip to lossless FLAC files, complete with metadata.
Sure, but on the whole I’d take getting FLAC directly over CDs. Not that I don’t have CDs, even deluxe editions with picture books and stuff, but I pretty much never get them out.
I can understand people preferring vinyls as physical artefacts, the full frame jackets of my father’s albums are gorgeous in a way that’s distinct from and superior to CD album art, even if the music bit is markedly inferior technically (although that technical inferiority has led to better musical end results in some cases, you can’t compress the shit out of a vinyl, then again hopefully that time is long on the past).
So you go to work, earn money, then you buy yourself some object to put it in a shelf?
And thats basically it?
You are not even playing it?
To do what with it? Letting your kids/family sell your collection with a loss?
Is it background decoration for you? Couldn't you just buy bulk of Vinyl no one wants to use it for your decoration purposes?
That feels like consumerism at the peak.
Is it consumerism to walk around the beach collecting pretty rocks to go home and put them on a shelf?
A rock is not a consumer good, so no.
And a rock is unique, nice to look at, did not cost you anything and kind of an appreciation of nature.
Enjoy your rock! (i'm sincere)
Naturally since people are buying things, technically they are consuming.
I mean that collecting a relatively small number of durable and visually pleasing objects isn't really the worst flavor of consumerism, even if it seems pointless to some people.
I agree we have a massive problem with over-consumption (most glaringly with things like fast fashion), but I'm not sure record collectors are a big problem.
I buy cassettes. Mostly old, period-correct ones, but some new. I also have a fairly high end tape deck, that these days can be had for rather good price. Our perception of cassettes are mostly warped by the experience of badly recorded tapes played on horrible, unmaintained players, but inherently the tape is much less of a limiting factor to quality than most of the things people use to play music nowadays. In fact, when comparing my vinyl and cassette purchases, I have higher change of getting a bad sounding vinyl than a bad sounding cassette.
Notably, tape decks with separate play and record heads let you listen to the recorded signal, while it's being recorded and quickly switch between the tape and source signal. Even on a good pair of headphones, when correctly dialled in, vast majority wouldn't be able to recognise which signal is the tape.
>And I’ve been wondering why would anyone buy the cassette or CD?
Many people I know buy the CD because they prefer owning a physical medium, and the CDs they actually play and have a collection of them.
As for cassette, I don't know about buying regular releases on it, but there's a small but very passionate music community around cassette releases for experimental and indie music (same as a demoscene using old computers or people making new 8bit games).
My wife and I both own vinyl, and neither of us has ever owned a record player. We put them on display for the most part. We have a song we got married to, and we bought a couple of album variations (each with different artwork) with that song; we also like the cover art on some vinyl releases as wall art.
If you use the records as a display (and though I don't do that, I empathize; CD covers just don't generate the visceral reaction that LP covers do), wouldn't it make sense for publishers to offer record covers without the actual records?
I'm curious - does the music content actually matter to you? Would you buy an album from an artist you've never heard just because the cover art was great?
Not who you're replying to (but I'm in the same camp). I use the album art as decoration, but the music is the first selection criteria. The music has to mean something to me first, and then the album art just needs to "pass".
I have young kids also, so I try to stay away from violent or scary album art.
Why not just buy the cardboard cover?
>It’s a lot of plastic. A lot of waste.
I don't know all the nitty-gritty, but the last Shellac record was "pressed" using an injection molding process that utilized recyclable PET (I can't find the interview with Albini[RIP] where this was discussed but if I find it I'll edit it into the comment).
Confused by this until I realized you meant "Shellac (band)" and not "Shellac - resin secreted by the female lac bug" which was used to press records in the 1920s.
The last shellac record was indeed made from shellac. And shellac is a natural (or at least non-manmade) material; does this make it more environmentally friendly than vinyl or PET?
Gen X. Own a record player.
Listen to vinyl as “intentional listening” and love the album cover art.
My daughter (Gen Z/A) could play her albums but doesn’t. She puts them on display in her room. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I own a very nice record player. Absolutely love listening to vinyl while looking at the cover art (Jethro Tull has the best album art and I'll fight anyone who disagrees).
For me it's a time machine back to my childhood. We grew up poor and couldn't afford tapes and then CD's. We had thrift store vinyl albums.
For my kids, vinyl was this weird thing that sounded scratchy. Then they grew up and found that the plethora of selection was both a blessing and a curse. They now frequent local record stores and invest in physical media like vinyl specifically because it forces intentional choice.
There really is nothing as good as finding an amazing album you didn't expect, and there's nothing as crushing as realizing the album you just bought based on one song only has that one good song on it (any album by The Police, I'm looking at you).
I'll bite... Slayer - Divine Intervention
> and there's nothing as crushing as realizing the album you just bought based on one song only has that one good song on it (any album by The Police, I'm looking at you)
Why call out The Police? This is the norm for all studio albums. That's why the popular albums are greatest hits collections instead.
By any measure, both of your statements are patently false. You’re almost making a valid point somewhere in there but the hyperbole buries it.
Also Gen X... though don't own any vinyl or a record player... mostly ripped CDs through the later 90's up through 2010 or so. Since then, mostly just use online streaming.
That said, I did once consider getting a record player only to rip/archive my grandmother's collection of vintage vinyl that wound up going to my niece on her passing.
I just prefer convenience/portability. Of course, as far as purchasing goes... I bought far more music when original Napster was around... it lead me to discover a lot of music that lead my to outright buy/rip full albums myself. It's the one thing that is significantly worse today without actual DJs in control of music at radio stations in favor of automated industry garbage controls.
I have no good way to discover new music any more. At least nothing I actually find myself using.
Also Gen X. Stopped purchasing physical media altogether ~2010 after trailing off once the iTunes store opened up. My old physical media are all down in the basement somewhere. I don't own anything that'd be able tp lay any of it.
Instead, all of my music is digital, mostly purchased on Bandcamp. I have a full archive on my NAS, also in the basement. I use iTunes Match so that i'm able to stream any of my music on demand to any of my devices. I have 0 desire to ever go back to physical media. It's far more convenient and space efficient to do it this way.
if they don't play it, what do they do with it - toss it under the bed? If people wanted to pay artists, a t-shirt is way more practical or just send them money.
While I haven't seen vinyl at performances, I've seen plenty of CD's. My family enjoys attending shows given by smaller indie acts in areas such as folk, jazz, and classical. There's often a merch table with CD's to buy. We often buy them, then I take them home and rip them onto an NAS.
I've asked some of the musicians flat-out: Which way of buying your material will get the most money directly to you? The answer is always: Buy the CD. Of course I can also make donations, and have done so.
> I oversee pressing for over 150k+ records a year. We eliminated download cards a while ago because the redemption rate was so low.
Maybe you are right, but I wouldn't discount the possibility that people are willing to pay for the idea that they could some day download it even if it never ends up actually happening. Kinda like getting an insurance policy you probably wont need you know?
Do they want the vinyl itself or do they want the cover art and so forth?
I'd say it's varied & most often a combination of multiple things.
- They want the cover art
- They want a physical token representing an artist they like
- They want to financially support the artist in a direct way
- They speculate they might get a player someday (much akin to book buyers leaving books on their shelves unread for years on end)
1 of the above might be the primary driver for any given buyer but I'd assume all of the above play some part in their motivations.
Makes me wonder if bands produced something like a Displate wall hanging (no promotion intended) whether that would satisfy the same itches.
For my part, there's something visceral about owning a piece of "physical music", as it were, even if I never play it.
While I'm sure there are plenty of vinyl collectors out there with some Displates up, I feel like vinyl has a lot of elements that make its audience significantly broader (even excluding player owners) - mainly that it has a cultural history associated with it.
I also think people generally underestimate "potential playability" or aspirational record player ownership as factors in buying vinyl. A LOT of people who may never own a record player in their lifetime still think they might, & even if they don't their kids or grandkids might. Vinyl collections are heirlooms.
They want the expense without the inconvenience?
Anecdotal data from my Gen-Z daughter, currently a college freshman, is that they want the cover art. Her dorm room walls are decorated with vinyl albums in frames where they cannot be listened to.
Playing vinyl is a bit like making espresso on a manual machine: a small ritual. Bit without the machine, it's a cargo cult.
I buy vinyl for the album cover. If somebody were to sell me a digital download which also ships me an empty slipcase, I would buy it, for almost the same price that I pay for vinyl. I do have the record player, but I don't think I've used it more than a dozen days in my life.
There's a lot of value to the physical artifact, but the precise nature of the physical artifact is up for playing with.
The best example to me why I buy vinyl without a record player is the Flying Lotus - Your Dead album art. It is an incredible work of art:
https://www.turntablelab.com/products/flying-lotus-youre-dea...
More and more though I would rather just buy merch to support the artist.
A friend was selling a parent's vinyl collection on eBay, and a couple of times buyers asked to be sent only the slipcase to save weight and therefore postage costs.
My dad grew up in the 50s & 60s. During COVID he purchased my daughters' the, I quote, "shittiest briefcase record players" he could find. Both girls listen to their music on their devices, but also buy vinyl. The other day, my eldest came down from her room complaining that her vinyl "sounded awful". I told her to bring it up with their Grampy. His response: "you can't appreciate good playback until you've heard awful playback on shitty record players like I had to.". My eldest is now plotting a complete hifi system, and is learning all about how to transfer "vinyl" to "digital" without losing the parts of the vinyl she likes.
This was a 5 year play by my dad. Shout out.
>"you can't appreciate good playback until you've heard awful playback on shitty record players like I had to.". My eldest is now plotting a complete hifi system
This has strong energy of "Teach your kids how to play Magic, they won't have money for drugs."
"Teach your kids how to grow weed, they won't need money for drugs."
Is this a metaphor for me learning how to fix old AV equipment in my basement when I was a kid?
I got into hydroponics first because I wanted to research closed loop food production.
I was going to ask, when are the youngsters going to discover CDs? Much less prone to degradation to vinyl, lossless ripping, superior quality.
I am the youngster in this case and I am going to tell you something but we really need to move off of spotify.
I never really got onto spotify. I was always the youtube kind of guy, although I recently started listening to youtube music when I realized that my youtube feed was being impacted and youtube music's a better way to listen I guess
We really need to get to pen-drives first before CD as well I guess. Like downloading songs from youtube to run them in pen-drive or just listen to locally would show us youngsters something
I have been recently thinking of downloading all of my songs and uploading it to some vps so that I can listen to from anywhere. I feel like steps like these with media ownership would gradually help rediscovery of CD perhaps as well as we people would really love supporting the artists then as well and buying their CD might be the way if we end up downloading their musics.
Pen-drives are ubiquotus as well so perhaps we might need the pen-drive era in between
Also computers are absolutely removing the CD port. Even my desktop doesn't have it. I think it has the slot but I had my PC built in the store so they didnt really add it but literally no devices have CD except perhaps our car but I think even some new Cars might not have any CD's
If someone is forced to buy a CD player just to play CD's, it just adds more friction and I would argue that Vinyl is much more so for the aesthetics itself as well which I feel like CD's aren't really that much for.
So my point is, People aren't really using Vinyl for quality, they are using it for aesthetics. If CD's have a chance, they really need to get more on the ease of starting and pen-drives can help start the local-music movement.
2nd hand CD players are abundant and cheap. New CD players are also rather abundant and cheap (and also have burning capability + DVD read/write) and are available e.g. on Amazon - some are USB, some are standalone units (like we all bought in the 90s). There are tons of options, and as the article says, plenty of people are still buying CDs.
Otherwise I totally agree about aesthetics of vinyl. I have a rather large collection and still buy from time to time, but usually only 2nd hand. I threw away all my CDs because they stopped working after 20-30 years from being stored improperly, being scratched from being played too often, and overall I just prefer the convenience of MP3s.
Internet radio is also lovely (outside of Spotify of course), check out https://directory.shoutcast.com/ which works great with WinAmp (even the old versions from the 90s still run fine in Windows 11). There are of course other smartphone apps that use other directories, but Shoutcast was/is the first and still my favorite place to discover new music.
A couple of decades ago most people I knew were spending considerable time thinking about the best folder structure to use to manage large collections of MP3s (and then making them available on Limewire). Then you'd move over selections to your or someone else's MP3 player.
One great product of this among my friends was the MP3 mix tape swap parties. You'd select a bunch of your favourite songs and put them on a thumb drive, then go hang out at a friend's house. All the MP3s would be put together, virus checked and then copied to everyone's thumb drives. It was a great way of discovering new music.
> If someone is forced to buy a CD player just to play CD's, it just adds more friction
I recently had a relative complain that they have to find and buy a CD player to listen to their music when they aren't in the car. I pointed out that they already have several in their home. Multiple game consoles and their bluray player supported playing CDs. The loss of CD drives in computers is unfortunate, but the format is still supported in a lot of devices that take disks.
I was bummed to find out the PS5 cannot play CDs. Ended up buying an Onkyo CD player that I like and it wasn't very expensive, but it would be nice to not have another black rectangle in my living room.
No we don't.
We should stop fantasizing about CDs and Vinyl and shit and just enjoying listen to music.
And if we think we need tokens in the real world, make them yourself or buy that one vinyl.
Come and join the resurgent Minidisc movement!
I'll have to pivot to DAT revival for max hipster cred.
I'll have to pivot to DAT revival for max hipster cred.
Tell that to my uncle who worked on DCC.
You mispelled cassette
> cassette
cassette can get to fuck. They were and always are, a shit medium.
Hard disagree.
Sure the sound quality isn't great, but cassettes have a great user experience.
My kids listen to stories on CD and Cassette. With Cassettes you can just stop and continue later exactly where you were. On CD they have to remember the chapter and the number of minutes. Which they never do so they are less motivated to continue listening.
The same is true for VHS. One of the great benefits of Netflix is that you don't have to keep track of where you were in a series and can quickly continue. DVD or separate downloads never had this, with Netflix you can just continue. The same is true for VHS, you can just pop it back in and continue where you were.
Also, with both cassettes and VHS you could very easily record things. This was never easy with DVDs, so much so that it basically wasn't a feature. HDD recorders were also quite bad.
Quality of sound and image is just one part of the equation. I would never listen to a music album on cassette, but the medium, from a usability point of view, is great for specific use cases such as stories and creating your own mixes.
They are fragile, they sound terrible. Unless you had a very expensive player, they also introduced a wobble in the sound that drives me fucking crazy.
Yes, there is cover art, I miss decent cover art and the thought that some people put into it.
VHS can also fuck right off. Sure I loved the stuff that was on them as a kid, but I fucking hated them as a medium. A nice Humax from the early 2000s obliterated VHSs.
Don't get me wrong, everything else about digital media suck arse, the shitty player and bollocks practices. But the experience of the media it's self is far far better.
I spent too much of my life rewinding cassettes with a pencil to save batteries, get right to fuck.
Cassettes are the perfect medium for a certain music. Punk.
There’s no need for name-calling.
It means Punk music.
Sounds cool, what's a good player?
We generally encourage people to buy a NetMD device as their first player, so they can simply drag-and-drop music onto disks via USB. Probably any working machine, except an Sony N1 or Sony N10.
https://www.minidisc.wiki/guides/getting-started/what-to-get
MD will always be the coolest format
My daughter (16) and her friends are. She's asked for specific CDs as presents, and is now the guardian of my brother and mine CD stashes dragged out of the wardrobes and attics.
She'll trawl thrift shops for CDs too.
New CDs in shops now are much much cheaper than they used to be as well.
Giving up Spotify isn't on the cards yet though. I'll teach her how to rip songs next I reckon.
If it is to happen, CDs and CD packaging would need a rebranding. Part of vinyl popularity is the large sleeve surface that provides a large canvas for a piece of art. Another part is that you get a physically large analogue object that, while previously would be cumbersome, has become interesting in a heavily digital age.
Afaict this has already happened. Vinyl is about the big art, CDs are all about the pack ins. You get small books, pictures, stickers all packed into a cardboard box the size of a novel. Not jewel cases.
At least for the K-pop artists my daughter listens to.
That is quite uncommon outside of the K-pop space - I buy a pretty large volume of new release CDs and don’t own a single one in the K-pop form factor
In my experience your average indie CD these days comes in a cardboard sleeve or a digipak, which are slim and more resilient than jewel cases (which love to crack) but idk how to store them neatly, since the sizes vary in at least two dimensions. And they tend not to come with anything outside the disk, you're lucky if you get a booklet.
My daughter is in to K-Pop and they do an excellent job on CD packaging. It's sometimes a very high quality photo book.
But sadly often horrible mastering.
That’s not the mediums fault. I’m sure during the 70s and 80s there were equally horrible vinyl masterings.
All vinyl mastering is comparably horrible. Everything gets high-passed to hell because sub bass makes the needle jump.
There's also a noise floor that limits your dynamics.
It is partly the medium's fault. A lot of the sins of CD/digital mastering wont fly on vinyl because there's physical constraints around what you can literally press into the record groove.
The mastering problems the early CDs suffered from was the move to analog to digital.
I have a record collection and a cd collection. It was not the same. So many CDs of older music sound bad on CD. Recordings made during the CD era sound fine though, but I'm not an audiophile. Maybe the "loudness wars" are a complaint for some.
The loudness war (in the usual sense of the phrase) on CDs was to not seem weak against other releases. The loudness war (if I may use that phrase very liberally now) on analog media is to not seem weak against hiss and surface noise. The desire to compress and limit dynamic range does exist for both, but for these different reasons.
However, a huge difference is that on CDs you're up against a fixed maximum (0 dBFS) so all peaks are equal, which is fatiguing; on vinyl you're up against the adjacent groove, so your maximum amplitude any given moment depends on the amplitude of things in the recent past and near future! Ways to optimize for this are prevalent, amazingly, and the result is less fatiguing.
There was a stretch of time between when specific mastering for CDs started and before the loudness war kicked in. Plenty of time for good recordings to happen.
I bought my kids all the songs on Tonie. Now I am buying them all the same songs on Yoto. I can't wait to just start burning CDs again.
Introspect my favorite music media was cassette tape. I found them more robust and repairable then CDs.
Huh? IME cassette tapes often begin to stretch after fewer than a hundred plays, which permanently ruins them.
Never noticed that. My experience was that CDs were far from indestructible.
I still have a working copy of AC/DC's Back in Black from 1996. I have older tapes that work fine too, but not sure how much they've been played since they're mostly from thrift stores.
Never. Now we have tiny music (digital), and big music (LPs), so no need for medium music (CDs).
It's about owning the physical object like a concert ticket stub only way more accessible. They already have the music on their phone they don't need to listen to it on a record
CDs suffer from different forms of degradation. I wouldn't trust a 50 year old CD if there was one as I do a vinyl record I picked.
Using the same master a CD would always sound better than a vinyl record, but I and many people would always take vinyl over a CD because of the praxis. Set and setting is important, in the end. Vinyl is more demanding in every aspects, it imposes more care and respect for what you're listening to.
The oldest CDs are from 1982 (43 years old) and are still working perfectly fine.
I don't have any that old, but I have some from the late 1980s which my dad bought. All still fine, my parents listen to them in the car.
> Much less prone to degradation to vinyl
huh... and I thought the vinyl craze happened because it's more durable out of ye old formats
CDs are well known to oxydize in the span of decades of storage
Pressed cds last well in general. Burned cds have a lot of issues. vinyl also wears out from using it, while cds are listen as much as you want with no issuse.
I have ripped all my cds to flac on my NAS and put them on usb in whatever format as needed.
You need to take care of them though. Scratched CDs don’t play good.
Vinyl was infamous for degrading during use to the point where you could identify whether an album had been played more than a dozen times by the reduction in sound quality.
this is perhaps a language barrier, but I'd call "measurement of getting worse during use" *durability*, while degradation is exactly about not-in-use deterioration...
Records are also vastly inferior to CDs on that metric. They're not durable in any sense.
CDs can oxidize in the span of decades. I've got hundreds of burned CDs that are from 2003 that are fine (even if they have changed color) because i store them in a climate controlled environment.
A vinyl record degrades every time you play it in a normal turntable.
Most of my CD collection is from the 80's and 90's and I've never done much to take care of them. Many have spent a decade or more of their life in a car. Most of them spent ten years in my attic that gets very hot and very cold.
Out of 100 disks, only five or six have failed and all have been because of scratches on the foil side (or whatever the media that the music is encoded into is called).
Note that if you don't store your records in a climate-controlled environment, they'll melt. You don't need to play a record to degrade it; just keeping it around is enough to render it completely unplayable.
Pressed CDs do not fail in this way.
I was going to ask, when are the youngsters going to discover CDs? Much less prone to degradation to vinyl, lossless ripping, superior quality.
I think they are. There was an article in the newspaper in the last month or so saying that CD sales are on the rise, and mainstream pop stars are releasing their music on CDs again.
As noted in another comment, I see CDs in music (and other) stores more and more where I live.
They don't, because just about anything available is better than CDs. Vinyl craze is actually not about "warmth", just genuinely more data.
The only additional data that (some) vinyl has over CDs is inaudible ultrasound. Ultrasound is intentionally omitted from CDs because they're intended for humans to listen to. In all audible aspects a correctly mastered CD release is closer to the original sound than any vinyl. And if you really want ultrasound (perhaps your dog enjoys it), you can get digital releases at higher sample rates.
And vinyl has no sub bass, unlike digital formats. They would run it through a high-pass filter (disturbingly close to where the fundamental frequency of a kick drum is) in the mastering process, because record player needless jump from low frequency energy.
It's not really about the data on the vinyl, and not really about sounding closer to the original. The vinyl flavor comes from the equipment. It's an analog device interacting with the real world, so the process of getting the sound from the vinyl to the speakers introduces a different sound. And some music sounds more pleasing with that process. Could you achieve something similar by using the digital release and running it through a filter? Probably. But it definitely does impart a sound difference.
Since CDs are digital sound, there's not really the same reason reason to use CDs over a digital release.
edit: fwiw, I don't agree with the parent talking about more data, either. Since pretty much all the music these days is digital pretty much right through the entire recording process, I don't think this is all that relevant. I guess maybe sometimes they might use a different master for vinyl though? But regardless; if you're looking for "more data", you're not going to use either a CD or a vinyl.
Much of the vinyl noise and distortion is pressed into the vinyl itself. Even if you play it using an optical player it will still sound worse than a good CD.
My point was more that vinyl has a distinct sound, whereas CDs are just the digital files in a physical package. So if someone decides that distortion suits a particular album better, it's not going to "sound worse" to them.
If the artist thinks the distortion of a vinyl record player suits their music, they should add it to the recording on the CD.
And some do. But music listening is a personal experience, and sometimes the preference of the artists doesn't match that of the listener. Should an artist also prescribe the correct speakers/headphones to listen to their album?
And that would be wrong. It's the other way around. It's CDs that has a distinct sound for some reason, not vinyl having "analog warmth".
Saying that vinyl doesn't have a distinct sound is a pretty wild take. It's pretty obvious if you've ever listened to vinyl and switched to a lossless version on the same setup. But here's some reading, nonetheless:
https://now.tufts.edu/2016/07/11/does-music-sound-better-vin... https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/q-why-vinyl-not-be...
IMO, use a lossless digital file if you want to a more accurate sound, and use a vinyl if you prefer the sound/mastering of that release.
CDs have no distinct sound. CD quality (assuming correct dithering) is transparent to human hearing. You could play a vinyl record into a good ADC, dither it to 16 bits, then burn it to CD-R. It will sound 100% identical to the original vinyl in a blind test. The only way to tell the difference is that the vinyl continues to degrade with each playback, while the CD-R will last decades if stored correctly (pressed CDs last even longer).
good cd matters. Loudness wars sometimes mean cds are worse because they got a worse mastering
Phonograph records tend to top out around 20,000 Hz. It's limited by groove and stylus size. CDs top out around 21KHz.
There's some audiophile content on Blu-Ray disks encoded at 24-bit/192 kHz, intended for people who subscribe to The Absolute Sound.[1]
(Typical TAS review: "Their Crystal Cable Infinity power cords markedly lower background noise; increase resolution, density of tone color, and dynamic contrast; and add a more substantial third dimension to images." US$34,000 for a 2 meter AC power cable.)
[1] https://www.theabsolutesound.com
[1]
People used to say human eyes can't perceive >60fps.
It's also just CDs, not digital formats in general. Grab an audiophile and ask their opinions about digital PDM/PCM formats, high bitrate AACs even, against true vinyls. They wouldn't have as much opinions as they do against CDs.
Also: 44.1kHz sampling rate != arbitrary waveform up to 22050Hz, unless music you're listening to consists of pure sine waves(and not even classic Yamaha FM sound chip signals).
Anybody can distinguish 60fps from higher frame rate just by looking at steady motion. The famous Blur Busters Test UFO makes it easy:
But in the case of analog recording, nobody can distinguish a pure analog recording from the same thing but with a good ADC/DAC pair in the signal path in a blind test. It's theoretically possible to hear undithered 16 bit quantization noise if you turn the volume up extremely loud, but correctly mastered CDs should be dithered from higher bit depth.
And 44.1kHz sampling rate can theoretically represent arbitrary waveforms up to 22050Hz. The only complication is that this requires a brickwall filter, which is impossible to implement. That's why the sampling rate is set higher than needed to exceed the 20kHz limit of human hearing (in practice the limit for adult hearing is almost always lower). The higher sample rate allows for a practical filter with a shallower transition band to be used.
> Also: 44.1kHz sampling rate != arbitrary waveform up to 22050Hz, unless music you're listening to consists of pure sine waves
Every signal can be represented as a combination of pure sine waves. That insight is the basis of Fournier analysis / transform.
It's also (pretty much) how sound is processed by the inner ear. The different little hairs each pick up different frequencies.
Joseph Fourier enters the chat…
> just genuinely more data.
Mastering is mostly done purely digital, so only when they are pressed are they converted to analog grooves. This can never add new data / information.
So is mixing and recording. Nobody is dropping $100K for a decades-old mixing console and tape recorders when a couple thousand dollars worth of computers and software will not only suffice but blow away the other for flexibility and fidelity.
Gain staging against an analogue noise floor, not having nonlinear/nondestructive editing, etc. would be, to use a technical term, "fucking stupid."
480i content, CRTs, analog signal chains, non-digital transports, film grain, et. al., provide opportunity for our imagination to step in and produce a better interpolation than the ground truth might otherwise provide.
Music doesn't need so much support from imagination. You could argue that 24 fps film is a good thing (I disagree), because special effects are expensive and the bad motion quality obscures the flaws, but the same doesn't apply with music. Every major city has an orchestra full of skilled musicians and a concert hall with good acoustics. Just record it as it sounds in the room and put it on CD. You can apply the same philosophy to popular music genres too. CD quality is good enough for this to work. The only imagination needed is to pretend that stereo audio is the full surround sound experience, and that's not difficult when you're sitting in the right position.
> CRTs
Its only really recently that CRTs have been surpassed by modern screens in terms of colour.
However I'm not going back to CRTs anytime soon. Just a dumb OLED public signage display, and some high bitrate codec
At least with CRTs, it's not just the imagination. It's the actual analogue interpolation creating a different image than the raw pixel-perfect without blurring/smoothing.
This video and timestamp comes to mind: https://youtu.be/2sxKJeYSBmI?si=ikuOuZl-Ho5_VK4k&t=1613
obligatory supplement: everyone used CRTs for monitors back then, albeit of different resolutions for PCs and for watching TVs. It's not like devs had to mentally simulate the effect.
There is the old quote "I like radio, the pictures are better"
You reminded me of how Marshall McLuhan called TV a "cool" (as opposed to "hot") medium.
My interpretation is that back in his day, TV was grayscale, grainy, and interlaced, and therefore demanded that the viewer exert their imagination to "complete the picture".
I imagine that if he were to see today's 4k full-color 120Hz panels, he would call TV a "hot" medium.
This is fine, but I'd encourage anyone to test all new audio setups with a blind triangle test at least, because most people can't distinguish most differences. If you can't tell a difference, using cheap equipment is great!
Also a lot of the fun of audio is that it comes down to taste more often than you’d think. There are full setups for a few hundred dollars that I love, and fancy expensive setups that I don’t care for. For me the most fun part is hunting for under appreciated equipment in thrift stores. It’s amazing what you can find without much looking
Every child should start the technological hedonic treadmill at a low level and rapidly progress.
Reminds me of one other comment on a different thread about a person trying an old CP/M machine and seeing some restriction like I think it was 50x70 pixel restriction or similar.
The point I am trying to make is that nostalgia can seem really good as that comment also pointed that, we often only remember the good parts of the system.
It's only when we recounter them that the bad parts resurface again.
Now instead of taking the fair criticism and perhaps doing something about it if possible, your dad tried to use the old technique of "back in my day ..."
And I will tell you kids ABSOLUTELY hate this. It's more so, Gramps you were forced to deal with this thing, we got digital and you aren't willing to understand my problem so why should I be stuck with the problem or the countless other examples.
I don't know much about vinyl but if it's the record players, perhaps your father can buy them a good one which could help them solve the issue they are facing.
This! If you just care sound quality it becomes "product", no more an experience where you feel it. You tell me your story with your dad, all started by he buying his children "shittiest briefcase record players". An elderly woman gifted me a Brockhaus encyclopedia, making me see the stark contrast between Google's billion-dollar presence and the noiseless authority of the printed word.
“There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.”
Sometimes I wonder how much INTENTIONAL engineering people's discontent for good or ill happens across the spectrum of human activity. One thing is for sure, people don't talk about it much.
I can think of many examples.
Nobody would work if housing and food were super cheap, for instance.
Saving the economy by turning water into a luxury item. The op-eds basically write themselves.
Your cynicism is too close to the truth.
Liquid Death, CocaCola branded water, and household water filtration are unbelievable luxuries. Manufactured status for the masses. And my examines are truly luxuries: they are unnecessary for drinking water in developed countries.
Pools and green lawns have higher status when water is more expensive/scarcer.
I don't hang out with extremely high-status people, or the extremely wealthy, but I'm sure both of those groups have some surprisingly luxury water.
Luxury is a human concept that is completely disconnected from the underlying product.
Provenance, Branding, Myth, Environmental, Science all matter for status.
There are overwhelming examples of people who continue to work when all of their basic needs are met. Some work because they love to, some work because they have to; we, collectively, should be trying as hard as possible to make work optional (automation, etc), because the point of life is to live, not to work. Some combination of Abundance [1], Solarpunk [2], etc. The entire planet will eventually be in population decline [3] (with most of the world already below fertility replacement rate), so optimizing for endless growth is unnecessary. So keep spinning up flywheels towards these ends if we want to optimize for the human experience, art, creativity, and innovation (to distribute opportunity to parity with talent).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_(Klein_and_Thompson_...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/12/supply-b...
[3] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf
(think in systems)
Nay, work is one of the pillars of a fulfilling life. Though for most of humanity relative freedom to choose what work one does is more of a modern achievement, the original commandment (“be fruitful”) was so general it might suggest God knew what he was talking about.
> the point of life is to live, not to work
I'd love to learn how you came to this definitive conclusion. At no point in human history have humans not worked (I'm sure there are some limited exceptions, none of which have been sustainable).
Perhaps you meant to say the point of life is to survive, but you have to work to make that happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Top_Five_Regrets_of_the_Dy...
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson
“Art is the proper task of life” -- Nietzsche
"Art is to console those who are broken by life." -- Vincent van Gogh
Broadly speaking, creation is the meaning of life, not work, although some creation could be considered work. Survival is table stakes to achieve self actualization and a chance at finding meaning and contributing to the commons during a lifetime.
> At no point in human history have humans not worked
This is a non sequitur. The discussion is about the point of life. At no point in history have humans not pooped, but I would imagine that few consider pooping the point of life.
> people who continue to work when all of their basic needs are met
There are no such things as "basic needs". If people can easily satisfy their basic needs, they simply expands this concept until it ceases to be easily satisfied
In other words, abundance is a myth promoted by mentally ill cultists, and meeting the basic needs of all people is unattainable.
… Eh? Are you contending that peoples’ lifestyles necessarily expand to compensate for higher earnings? I mean, that’s definitely not true.
Disagree. Citations below. Please consume more data and update priors accordingly.
How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? Insights from needs-based analysis - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245229292... | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2024.100612
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43465127 - March 2025 (26 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42529256 - December 2024 (10 comments)
(TLDR Decent living standards for 8.5B people would require 30% of current resource use)
>> If people can easily satisfy their basic needs, they simply expands this concept until it ceases to be easily satisfied.
> Decent living standards for 8.5B people would require 30% of current resource use
That claims seems to be based on your first link.
1. They define decent living standards as including things like 1 cooking appliance, a mobile phone, and internet, but not things like a dishwasher/microwave/Netflix account, etc.
2. To achieve this, they specifically say that existing resource uses that are wasteful, such as buying extra clothing, wasteful entertainment, etc, should be “reallocated” to the basic needs of society, as without reallocation they explicitly point to how the basic needs like food and shelter become too expensive.
So in the context of the grandparent commenter’s argument, we would have to take away a lot of the luxuries (which is probably a fair description) that most Americans have like entertainment, buying more clothes than they need, etc and would not include things like any trips/travel, eating out, etc - and you believe people would react the opposite of what the grandparent claimed, that they would not consider those things to be “basic needs”? I guess if we were truly able to eliminate most inequality and all millionaires, etc, then maybe people would accept life without those existing things they have as basic needs? But I am not sure if your argument is meant to be a thing that could happen in real life, or merely a “If I was dictator I'd ensure peace on earth” type idea?
There’s an equilibrium. If no one worked, housing and food would not be super cheap.
Or people would do things they were genuinely interested in rather than from desperation
If people were broadly socialized for collaboration and collective good, people could and would achieve as much with many fewer hours of work, and with the many more hours available for personal creative pursuit and play. There is no innate human nature that prevents this, only a prevailing social order which reinforces individualism and competition at the expense of the many.
respect
At least some vinyl buyers who don’t own record players may be buying them as gifts for people who have them.
Last Christmas, I bought 3 vinyl records as gifts. I don’t own a record player.
I buy vinyl for one reason - it forces me to actively listen to the music. My teen daughter does the same.
I have many happy memories of getting a new record as kid, laying in the floor and listening from start to finish while poring over liner notes and album art. There was a level of connection with the music that I just don’t get from listening to Spotify while I’m washing the dishes or something.
I know it’s sentimental, but I get so much joy out of watching my daughter do the same thing now. She has a blast going to our local record store, finding records from her favorite bands old and new and then coming home and just listening. No devices, no distractions, just her and the music she loves. In a sometimes horrible and depressing world, it’s a sweet escape.
I guess buying the vinyl is like buying a shirt or a poster now?
I support artists I like by going to their shows and buying lossless digital copies where possible (even if I listen to their music elsewhere).
But I don't want or need more physical "stuff".
> I guess buying the vinyl is like buying a shirt or a poster now?
Yeah, in some way that's true. In the house music scene almost every producer also sells vinyls of their best songs, sometimes "collectors editions", and also DJs obviously sometimes pride themselves on only playing vinyl. For the artists I really do enjoy, I tend to buy their songs + with the vinyl, as a way to support them, but I indeed have no way of actually playing them, and haven't had for more than a decade.
So here I sit with 20+ vinyl records, most of them unopened, and no record player. But I don't mind, I just want to give money to the artists that provide me joy.
Are these smaller artists that also have a Patreon? The first time I moved and had to move and get rid of all my stuff I swore I wouldn’t accumulate it anymore. As much as I like the idea of a vinyl collection I would not want to lug it around during my next move…Stuff is heavy.
I still have my old BluRay collection which I build up from the mid 2000. This already was the replacement of the DVDs I had before. They still sit in the shelve because I don’t know what else to do with the space. Same goes for books etc. I mean I really like the covers etc and the fact one has a physical token. But I simply have too much of it in my house already. And replacing the stuff yet again feels useless. I also like the feeling that if I wanted I could simply let go. Before someone asks: The unit the BluRays are located is a TV unit. And getting rid of them would mean I have an empty shelve. They also cover the cable / power cord mess behind it a bit. So removing is actually not a solution. I would either need a replacement to put there as a cover or get rid of the TV unit shelve thing :). Typical 1st world problem that is.
About 15 years ago I got rid of almost all of my physical media. I was moving a lot at the time (I've moved 13 times over the last 20 years, several times to different cities) and I had hundreds of CDs, DVDs and books.. It was literally a quarter of my boxes every time I moved..
So I sold and donated all of it, kept what had special value, and re-acquired a lot of it digitally.
I still think I made the right decision, although every now and then I miss something specific and regret it, but I get over it pretty fast.
I also moved many times in the past. Once CD-quality settled, I gifted my vinyls to a thrift store. (The 'art' was immaterial.)
20 years ago, I ripped all of my CDs into 192K MP3s (perfect enough for my ears) using an online metadata service. Getting rid of the 'jewel cases' (and eventually all of their non-CD content) but retaining the CDs (4 Logic cases worth, 3 sq. feet) saved a ton of room.
For backup I archived the thousands of MP3s onto an 80GB Seagate which I organized by genre, then stored in a shoebox. 12 years later I copied the Seagate to two more HDs. It worked fine (but gave-up-the-ghost later that year).
I've relied on those files since. Unlike several dead self-burned CD-Rs, the manu'd CDs (I never use) seem to have remained healthy in the cases at room temp.
I did the same as you about 20 years ago. And about three years ago, I started reinvesting in physical ownership again for my music and movies. For me this started from a desire to reduce my reliance on major tech companies, especially licensed content like media. But since moving in that direction, I've found it very rewarding to curate a collection reflective of my evolving taste, and find I treat my time with a spinning record or blu-ray I had to insert with more focus and attention.
I don't share the anecdote to suggest in any way that you or anyone else would feel the same.
Moving that many times is enough to make a person give up interest in all physical possessions, not just media.
yeah it's just something for display. I wish vinyl packaging came with a spine.
Yeah, I've done this. I've bought records for years but only bought a record player recently. I would want to buy something at the merch table for a small band I like. They don't always have a shirt in my size but they always have records. Oftentimes the records went on loan to friends, which was a nice way of gently spreading my taste.
some do it as speculative collectible too
Yeah, I also buy digital for this reason.
Albums are art that can be displayed and one of the most accessible forms of real-art-connected-to-the-artist.
On the wall above the table with my turntables hang the album covers of some of the albums that were influential in my musical path as a dj. The records are still in their sleeves in a flight case
Analog purchases have become much more of a signaling mechanism than for direct consumption.
In my family group there were a good numbers of vinyls gifted this past christmas and none of them are going to be regularly listened to as the majority of music consumption they do is "on the go" in the car or mobile.
Similarly, I'm seeing them make more purchases of "trophy books" where they read the book on their phone or listened to the audiobook but liked the book so much that they want to have it on their shelf (there are also special editions with elaborate edge decorations, etc. that seem to feed into this).
I would buy and play vinyl if the music I listen to (renaissance, baroque) was actually released on vinyl.
I am one of these people. I buy to support the artist (usually $40-$50 for an album), but listen to the digital versions via Jellyfin and Plex (to avoid Spotify). I’ll also donate directly to artists, or buy tickets to their shows even if I cannot attend. Great analysis.
IMO, please continue buying records, but don’t buy tickets to shows you can’t attend. I can’t speak for live music, but in SF there is/was an issue of club nights selling out, but having low attendance due to people buying tickets as an “option”. This is a problem because it screws up venues planning for bar sales as a revenue source and deterring last minute buyers/door sales (who may either be heads or punters) who see a sold out show online.
I have some friends on the east coast of Canada playing in a indie band. They have experienced this many times, that the venue is sold out but then only 15-20 people show up. Supposedly a lot of these places have people buying annual access packages to support the venue, but don't end up going.
They have now started touring in Europe instead. Many cities with short distances, and people actually show up for the show. Much more rewarding to play with actuall audience.
I gift the tickets to those seeking them. Someone is still attending, it’s just not me. Good call out regardless to not mess with venue ops.
> but in SF there is/was an issue of club nights selling out, but having low attendance due to people buying tickets as an “option”.
As a bar/restaurant owner who sometimes host electronic parties, that sucks and does mess up a lot. But as a dance party attender, that sounds like a good thing, the parties tend to have way too high attendance, and if there is no space for people to actually move around and dance, I don't really know what the point of it even is anymore.
Affording tickets is already a first-world problem; I have no idea what level this is when not attending has some knock-on impact or attendance hurts another person's experience. Maybe y'all should plan to stay home and make a donation to the food bank...
I don’t disagree. Parties are often oversold and I may be overstating the under attendance problem.
I sometimes see how artists who I follow on Bandcamp write about their struggle with ordering the production of vinyls, shipping delays and troubles, etc.
I'd rather them spend this time on doing their art, or going on with their lives. If you want to give an artist a token of appreciation, send them money. I always increase the suggested price of an album or track on Bandcamp to some interesting-looking number.
To produce, ship, and store an otherwise unused complex artifact just as a token of appreciation which is not otherwise enjoyed by the parties looks wasteful for me.
I struggle to figure out how you came to the conclusion that a soulless money transaction is somehow comparable to buying a custom made vinyl album someone spent time on.
The cover might gotten the relevant input from the band but the vinyl itself has only a handful of options and plenty of them are just black.
But come on do you listen to music of a band becase they are great in taking pictures? Or because they are really really good in standing next to a vinyl press?
No
You appreiciate their music and you don't need a commercial token to do so.
Tbh I would like to have a donation button on a artist website so I can donate and than download the album I like where I like.
Bandcamp is pretty close to this experience if they set it as "pay what you want" (which a lot of artists do)
> (which a lot of artists do)
And those who don’t almost always only set a minimum price, so you can still pay more if you want. And if you buy on BC Friday [0] (next is February 6th), Bandcamp doesn’t even take a cut of the revenue.
> And if you buy on BC Friday [0] (next is February 6th), Bandcamp doesn’t even take a cut of the revenue.
Bandcamp Friday is such a fun day, I always have +5 purchases lined up from the previous month, and usually keep track of the social media of the artists I buy from that day, and many of them post something really wholesome about how much they made on that day :) Such a fun time all around.
Spotify has this as an option for artists.
https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/fan-support/
https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/getting-a-fan...
Wouldn’t the artist offering you to buy the album from them, DRM free, accomplish the same thing while clarifying the transaction that’s happening?
In my band, we sell digital lossless albums on bandcamp for just that reason.
Same. Let me just pay you to be an artist, and keep putting art into the world (while avoiding middlemen and platforms whenever possible).
I’ve wanted something like this ever since the early Napster days. Patreon is the closest thing but that puts an onus on the artists to produce content all of the time. If some of my favorite less popular artists had their Venmo in their Instagram profile I would probably use that.
Ask them to! I’ve had good luck with this. “I want to give you money, pls put Venmo, Zelle, Cash App, Patreon, etc handles in your linktree thx”
I bought the vinyl release which also came with the digital download of an album last year. When the vinyl arrived, there was a handwritten personalized thank you note from the artist. Best of all worlds
I’m in a similar boat. Many artists I listen to on Bandcamp offer cassettes(!) at a fair price and will charge a comparable price for the digital. However, I’ve seen some artists charge thousands for digital only but $10 for a tape that includes the digital version.
I don’t know why they do this, but I do know I have an ever growing stack of tapes I can’t listen to…
> However, I’ve seen some artists charge thousands for digital
What? Do you have an example?
I've also done it once... it was a track that was vinyl only. I sent it to a guy who digitizes vinyl as a service.
I should offer this to people as well ha. I love doing it and love having all my records on my server.
Also just in:
Half of all buyers of scented candles actually burn them.
Half the buyers of those fancy soap bars in the shapes of fruit or whatever actually use them as soap .
Half of all shutters on houses can actually be closed to "shutter" the windows
As someone who grew up with only vinyl in the 60s and 70s, I would never choose it over a CD for audio quality.
BUT I would enjoy recreating the rituals that go with playing vinyl: obsessive cleaning of the disks, the gentle manipulation of a delicate tone arm, and the soft thud when the turntable cover drops. Playing a record was a minor event to be savored. I doubt the younger generations are getting all of that right.
Yeah, this.
Vinyl absolutely CAN sound great. If you have a nice amp and good speakers, modern listeners will be amazed at the fidelity possible from vinyl played back on a good turntable with a decent signal chain.
BUT.
CD is still better. CD is simpler. You don't have to faff about with cleaning them, or treat them like hothouse flowers. The platform is incredibly portable.
And yet: Vinyl is more fun.
We moved last year. Our audio room can play streaming, CD, or vinyl. It's the first and third options that get by FAR the most usage. CD comes up once in a blue moon.
Vinyl record covers are nicely-sized artworks for displaying in a room.
Listening to an album you love, while taking the time to flip the record or tape, or taking the time listen to an entire album in your streaming service of choice, helps you to notice things and be present.
Recommended film: Perfect Days by Wim Wenders - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Days
Recommended book: Bridge of Waves by W.A. Mathieu - https://www.shambhala.com/bridge-of-waves-288.html
In 02026: Slow down, and fix things.
Slow is smooth.
Smooth is fast.
So, the advantages of physical media are much touted these days, but all the actual physical media we have are yesteryear's technology, and each come with their own unique problems, plus there is the problem of waste. Why isn't a new physical format taking hold?
Something like Bandcamp-style downloads, which you put on a micro SD card. You put the card in a 3d-printable piece of plastic, resembling a cassette case. When you buy the download, the band sends you a printed piece of paper (the inlay for the cassette case thing) saying “limited edition run #1, Sequence Number 465/2000; thanks for your support”. If you want to get fancy, maybe record the transaction in some kind of ledger; perhaps put the buyer's name on the band webpage as a patron.
For the software, perhaps there could be something open source based on hardware like the anbernic rg355xxsp and similar devices (multipurpose, portable, hackable by design, …)
It would take very little to get it established: A critical mass of bands in some genre getting together, their fans getting on board, and things spreading from there.
Guilty party, here. I feel I can explain myself though, or at least offer context about why I own about a dozen records and no way whatsoever to play them.
I’m a recovering audiophile. I got into the hobby because I enjoy technology in its myriad aspects, and had discovered that good speakers can make things sound better. As I began accruing CDs and re-ripping into lossless audio, I also began collecting vinyls via Record Store Day events of bands or artists I found interesting at the time, or the odd Collector’s Edition bundles of albums or games. The thinking was that when I finally settled into my own place, I could invest into some Hi-Fi kit to play them back.
Well, I fell out of the audiophile sphere when I got into data analysis, physics, human biology, and psychology: I had become inoculated against the bullshit that permeates the space, but still recognized the value of my album collection. I’d also pivoted into preservation, and so I began accepting relatives’ collections of older formats, like 78s. I still lacked playback mechanisms, though I now had the space and budget - just more pressing projects than a record playback setup.
And so here I am in 2025, in an apartment that transmits energy between units, with an upstairs neighbor that does somersaults and tumbles all day (thus shaking the space slightly). The cost of everything has skyrocketed, but it’s no longer a matter of a turntable and a phono stage to get going (need isolation as well, and that ain’t cheap). I’ve also - shockingly - got other, more pressing projects in front of me, one of which is a bedroom Hi-Fi setup that has physical controls for music streaming instead of smartphone apps - again, not remotely cheap.
Right now, my meager collection sits in a crate under the sofa, languishing. One day I’ll get to enjoy them, but today is sadly not that day.
>> One day I’ll get to enjoy them, but today is sadly not that day.
I've got news for you: you won't. Your post reads like you're letting perfect be the enemy of good enough. Also it's 2026, and being the first day of the new year the PERFECT time to just go ahead and do it. You could probably buy a used record player today for < $50 and be listening to a record.
You are not a recovering audiophile at all, you are still fully in that rabbithole. Instead of enjoying music you ramble about your neighbor shaking and isolation etc.
You also didn't pivoted into preservation, it just happened because of whatever 'audiophile' thinking you think you have.
At the end you just stream music as everyone else.
Which is fine.
To second the other commenter, just go for it! Music doesn’t have to be blaring to be enjoyed. Just buy some turntable and begin enjoying your collection. Heck, you could even use headphones. I have a pair of open back headphones with a cable that is like 15 feet in length. So I can easily connect to my receiver and sit back and listen on the couch.
I have a USB record player in storage. I have a number of old albums; mostly for keepsakes. I have a few Tangerine Dream picture disks (including one, cut into the shape of Poland), and a few records that have been out of print for ages.
I don't think of them as "investments," though. I don't think they're actually worth that much.
I have the music on them as digital files that I got from Apple Music, though (I have an Apple One sub). Much better quality sound.
I make up for them buy currently owning 10 of the damn things. One for the main house stereo, 2 in a DJ setup in the basement, one for my all-tube Harman-Kardon setup in the office, 4 in the ready-to-sell stack, and 2 nostalgic display pieces that just collect dust.
880 full length albums in my 12" collection, with pressing dates between sometime in 1955 and this October 2025. 70 years... They all get fairly regular rotation, I alternate between choosing something I feel like listening to, and using the Randomize button in Discogs.com where I track my collection.
A someday project is to figure out how set up an automated workflow to use ambient song detection/recognition to magically recognize when I am playing an album and scrobble it to last.fm to track my plays. It's nothing I want to do manually but it would be neat to see my own analog spotify wrapped summary.
What do people do with the vinyl then? Collect it like baseball cards?
Funnily I'm in the complete opposite cohort. I own a record player, because stereo sets used to come with one even when vinyl was on the decline already. I have less than a handful of records which I ever only played out of curiosity.
Seems relevant to bring up that I'm currently working on a device that I hope will bridge the gap between vinyl and digital for some people: https://sleevenote.com
I myself am a DVD enthusiast (in so far as I have a copy of TDK trilogy and Raimi trilogy plus a few other classic movies/shows and songs from the 00s). There are a few shows that I enjoyed as a teen and the fact is I no longer have a way to even legally watch them in my country, so for me the ability to never lose those movies despite streaming platforms being around is the main motivator. (However I do not have a functional DVD player anymore which sucks).
So I think lets not shame people for what they do on their own time that affects none of us really.
In a music shop a few weeks ago, I had to explain to a young man that the opening of the inner sleeve should be inside the outer cover so that the record that he'd just purchased (for a crapload of cash) did not fall out. Sweet really.
I was in this demographic for a log time. I wanted to support small artists in ways past just going to their shows. This seemed like a nice way to do that (not a big shirt guy for bands). It also helps that you are not only getting music but a large(ish) art piece as well with the vinyl covers. It also feels good to physically have and own something. I recently bought a Portable CD player as well. I think a lot of the Gen Z folks I talk to are starting to (if just wishfully) drift back towards physicality in some ways.
It also feels good to physically have and own something.
I gave all my CDs (probably more than a 1000) away about a decade ago. I find physical media annoying, they take up space and require more effort to use them. All those CDs became more of a burden. I guess it's because I grew up with cassette tapes, portable tape players, then CDs, then Discman, then Discman with buffering. Having gone through all of that, being able to play music on your phone is... excessively nice. I also care more about the music than the packaging -- if I want something nice on the wall, I would get a painting, litho, etc. instead.
The only thing I really miss is old-school music discovery. Reading reviews, then going to a record shop, listening a stack of records to decide, talking to record shop owners and friends for scoops, etc. was so much more fun than letting algorithms do recommendations. And after spending your monthly pocket money on two albums, you were invested in the music.
Surprisingly, chat GPT is amazing at recommendations. (I guess that it is also an algorithm). But it recommended me some great artists and explained why I might like them.
Word-of-mouth recommendations worked better across genres. I want great, unique, high-quality music, not necessarily music that is similar to what I already listen to.
Welcome to CD ownership! You should rip the music to a lossless format (e.g. FLAC) so you can play those and keep the CD from getting scratched.
This will also so let you listen to it on computers (including cell phones). You can also transcode the music to e.g. MP3 to allow easier storage.
I'm not buying vinyl records, but I still have a ton of them, and my ancient record player broke down ages ago. Similarly, I've got tons of CDs I'm not using anymore. The fate of old media, I guess. But I do miss selecting a specific album to listen to. Spotify is not the same.
I guess I'm in the market for a new record player. Is that market picking up again?
I have a couple of vinyls, no player too :-)
I buy them because I like to see the cover & lyrics while listing to it (mp3).
I've been buying LPs after concerts just to have a nice souvenir, I can always listen to them on Spotify. I only just got a turntable this Christmas and it's cool to actually listen to them.
It gives me hope for the future to see the young'uns recognizing instances where progress isn't necessarily progress. If you oversimplify audio history as 70s=vinyl, 80s=cassettes, 90s=CDs, 00s=MP3s, and 10s=streaming, they've parted ways somewhat with the current moment and gone all the way back to the 70s. Ironically as an older fart myself, who once owned numerous records ("vinyls" is a newer term), and later cassettes, and later CDs, I guess I eventually decided I'd had enough authenticity and converted the whole lot to MP3s and stuck with that when streaming came around. So when I parted ways with the now, I only went back to the 00s, and that was mainly to retain control/ownership rather than having yet another damn algorithm mediating my experience. It's a sweet spot for me - maximum convenience while not giving up intentionality.
I've been on a physical media craze lately. It's been quite a few years since I stopped using Spotify, and I've been rebuilding my collection. Usually by hunting CDs at thrift stores to rip in iTunes to Apple Lossless. I own a bunch of vinyl records, and I've also ripped several of them.
After buying one vinyl album from a niche artist (djpoolboi), he actually then sent me a link to download the same tracks on flac, which I appreciated.
Lately I've found myself buying the same album both on vinyl for listening to at home, and on CD to rip for my digital music collection.
I work from home a lot so having to get up to flip the record gives me an excuse not to stare at my screen all day too.
Physical media collecting is about a lot of things but one of them is to have a physical artifact representing your relationship with an artist and the art to have in your home to touch, hold, pick up, and display. Makes sense to me.
This. Vinyls are the most "special" of media formats, because they require the most care. They function as wall art. If you actually want to listen to them, it's a ritual - something you have to make time and space for. You don't have that with anything else - an Artifact is a great way of putting it, but I would also suggest some other words: relic, totem, effigy, charm
Makes sense. Most kids I know put records up on their wall as art. or as a way to pay artists directly by purchasing their album at a concert
If you want to listen to music then Spotify runs circles around vinyl as a medium. Records really suck for music quality which is why everyone dumped them when tapes came along and then even more so when cd's became a thing.
If Vinyl was a good medium to listen to music then no one would have bought cd's or had a Spotify subscriptions.
I can't imagine people going back to old school crt televisions to watch sports or movies either, but I do see people
Minor nit, cassettes were and are mostly worse audio quality than records and they coexisted for decades with their respective compromises. Cassettes replaced 8-track in the portable space and eventually enabled the Walkman.
CDs killed both.
CD didn't really killed cassette. They coexisted peacefully for 2 decades. CD was nice, transportable but cassette was still more convenient to carry around because a walkman was much smaller[1], wouldn't skip when running/jumping[2], a cassette was less fragile and it was simply so much easier to leave a cassette in a deck and record anything you would ear on the radio on the go. Virtually nobody could/would live burn a dj mix from the radio.
Napster + portable mp3 player and smartphoned did kilómetros ll the cassette.
[1] especially the late 90's early 00's ones that were barely bigger than a standard cassette case.
[2] there was buffering for discmans but it wasn't 100% effective if skipping happened for longer than the buffer
I won't ever go back, but my teenage daughter wanted (and bought) a low-fi digital camera, "dad cam" videos are a common format, polaroid prints had a resurgence and I would not be surprised if we saw a retro tv/video movement. Go figure...
Spotify is popular because it is cheap, convenient and has all the music in the world.
No one uses it because of quality or because it is the best medium for music.
> Spotify is popular because it is cheap, convenient and has all the music in the world.
Glad you agree with me:)
I have a handful without a record player; they make fantastic, cool wall art. That is the extent of why i buy them. I have no intention of ever buying a record player.
And 50% of that are for showing off their oddity in their social networks. The WTF factor. Do something archaic.
The same thing's happening to books where being seen as 'a reader' is a much higher priority than being well read.
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/booktok-tiktok...
Or people just enjoy things. Let’s let people enjoy things.
You're both right of course, but it does seem to be an enjoyment filtered through the social media promoter lens, which makes me a little sad. Unlike say, the enjoyment I got listening to a record (and then CD) as I examined the liner notes and insert, this go-around feels like external validation by casual (or no) acquaintances. Historically this is not as valuable and can lead to some bad outcomes...
I've never seen "Let people enjoy things." used as anything other than a thought-terminating cliché. Just because something brings someone happiness doesn't mean it is immune to criticism.
But why feel the need to criticize something that doesnt hurt anyone?
It's just a cool piece of merch to me.
Artist make no money off streaming. This is a real artifact I get to own, keep sealed and maybe get signed.
I did have the unfortunate experience of buying a D12 Devil's Night vinyl to find the cover image quality to look like some intern copied it off Google images.
OP here. I wrote an analysis on the divergence between streaming saturation and physical media growth. Physical media has shifted from an audio format to a "token of identity" or a support mechanism for artists in an era where streaming payouts (marginal value) approach zero.
There’s also a very real utility to non-streaming media. It turns out that a system that lets you listen to anything is terrible for actually building a collection. Your „library” fills up with tons of stuff you „liked” at some point and saved as some sort of a bookmark. Over time it actually works against the goal of keeping track of the group of records you enjoy. When you introduce friction to the system, whether it’s having to buy something, or even hunt down and download an mp3, it results in better libraries.
Guilty! I have bought a handful of vinyls (limited edition, colored vinyl, etc.) in anticipation of saving up to buy a good quality turntable.
And these were all artists and albums I know and love through CDs or streaming, so it's not like I'm buying them blind.
The actual title of the article is "Why Gen Z is Driving the Vinyl Record Boom?".
that is so dumb, but also buying shirts and merch that you are not going to wear at all is also dumb and i guess the vinyl is smaller size
People like to support artists or own physical media for art appreciation.
99% of toy collectors don't take their toys out of the boxes to play with them.
What half am I supposed to be surprised by?
Lots of negative comments about vinyl here, from people who have no clue. I collect vinyl because it sounds better. Vinyl has a warmer sound that is missing from digital formats.
Streaming is convenient for travel and great for previewing music, getting recommendations etc. But if I want to sit back and truly enjoy albums that I love, that’s where vinyl comes in.
I have a decent sound system. Buying albums on vinyl that I’ve listened to 100’s of times and playing through the system blows me away. I’ve been unable to get the same effect or quality from digital, despite trying everything aside from a $2000+ DAC. Wired streaming. Lossless. Various services and formats. CDs. Technically better quality. My ears disagree.
At the end of the day, vinyl is more enjoyable for me and many others. It’s a better experience.
To quote Trent Reznor:
VINYL MISSION STATEMENT
IN THESE TIMES OF NEARLY UNLIMITED ACCESS TO ALL THE MUSIC IN THE WORLD, WE'VE COME TO APPRECIATE THE VALUE AND BEAUTY OF THE PHYSICAL OBJECT. OUR STORE'S FOCUS IS ON PRESENTING THESE ITEMS TO YOU. VINYL HAS RETURNED TO BEING A PRIORITY FOR US - NOT JUST FOR THE WARMTH OF THE SOUND, BUT THE INTERACTION IT DEMANDS FROM THE LISTENER. THE CANVAS OF ARTWORK, THE WEIGHT OF THE RECORD, THE SMELL OF THE VINYL, THE DROPPING OF THE NEEDLE, THE DIFFICULTY OF SKIPPING TRACKS, THE CHANGING OF SIDES, THE SECRETS HIDDEN WITHIN, AND HAVING A PHYSICAL OBJECT THAT EXISTS IN THE REAL WORLD WITH YOU. ALL PART OF THE EXPERIENCE AND MAGIC. DIGITAL FORMATS AND STREAMING ARE GREAT AND CERTAINLY CONVENIENT, BUT THE IDEAL WAY I'D HOPE A LISTENER EXPERIENCE MY MUSIC IS TO GRAB A GREAT SET OF HEADPHONES, SIT WITH THE VINYL, DROP THE NEEDLE, HOLD THE JACKET IN YOUR HANDS LOOKING AT THE ARTWORK (WITH YOUR FUCKING PHONE TURNED OFF) AND GO ON A JOURNEY WITH ME. -TRENT REZNOR
I think a lot of people in the comments here are missing the point in a lot of ways.
The first is that even if people don't own a record player at the moment doesn't mean that they don't plan on getting one. I have multiple nieces/nephews who got record players (at their request!) this year for Christmas. Briefcase record players are becoming ridiculously more popular. The thing is there's no point in buying a record player if you don't already have some records, and artists are doing a lot more limited prints so sometimes you need to buy immediately to be sure you're going to get one.
My wife and I bought a new sound system in 2024, and we decided to include a record player. We have used it way more we had expected to. We still have streaming services (Tidal) but listening to a record has a ton of benefits. There's the fact that the entire album itself is an organized experience, not just random tracks, and the tactile nature of it is really appealing. The albums themselves are like pieces of artwork in a way that a CD or screensaver would never be.
It's also nice knowing that the artist I'm buying from is getting real money from the purchase, unlike the pennies they get from streaming.
So I had a year or two in the same situation, old sony turntable had door mechanism fail and the stylus I had wore out and didn't have an easy replacement. Got a sound burger for Christmas and it’s pretty great for casual use (it stows away nicely).
Most of my collection I did get for the art or to support the artist more directly (there’s one I always buy the test pressings from on every album he puts out, I get to hear it like a month before release).
My dad has a pretty big record collection, he didn’t play them a ton, what we would do was dub them to metal cassette and listen to those so it wouldnt degrade the records. So there’s a boomer equivalent to using streaming over playing the original physical copy.
I buy for someone who does own a player, but I do not own one.
Another aspect of this is that a band or label really need to hit a minimum sales quota to justify pressing albums, so people buying vinyl are actually helping them more than they would be by simply donating the profit of a vinyl purchase (which is of course not the retail price of vinyl). Bands want to release, and this helps them do it.
Preordering product – whether books, vinyl, or digital – really, really helps self-funded artists and indy arts business.
Keep it up, kids! :-)
Yup, sold my turntable a while ago but kept my favorite ~20 albums. I rotate through them, displaying them on my bookshelf. They look great. They're art, they're vibe, they're decoration.
(Ultimately I went all-in on smart speakers, so I couldn't just hook up the turntable anymore, and getting a turntable/adapter that digitizes the audio to send over Bluetooth, just no...)
As a millennial I think I was probably in the first generation who first started buying vinyl not because we had record players, or preferred the sound of vinyl (although some claimed to), but because when most of us came of age during the time of iPods and mp3 players, if you were going to buy physical media to support an artist, vinyl was probably your best option.
CDs were rapidly heading in the same direction as tape (and continue to), and both were less romantic and felt in many ways a less "authentic" format than vinyl did. The physical aspect of vinyl has a beauty that simply isn't replicated by the CDs optical storage system or the tapes magnetic storage.
Another thing I'd add is that I have a craving for analog more and more in my life these days, especially in music and other media formats. Everything is so polished and so clean that the novelty of the quality has worn off, and everything around you instead feel increasingly unnatural.
As an analogy, I've always thought it was interesting how awful the hologram quality is in Star Wars given they have extremely advanced technology otherwise. But if they were in perfect HD although they would be better from a functional perspective, there would also be something less romantic about them. It's hard to put my finger on why I feel that way, but I think the same is true of lots of technologies. When street lights are replaced with LED lights, they are more functional, but they're also less romantic. Or if you look at food packaging from the 50s, there's something romantic about the materials, colours and print used vs today's plastic packaging and digitally designed labels.
Anyway, I guess this doesn't surprise me at all and I think it totally makes sense, although I suspect most people don't even really rationalise why they're doing it. Vinyl just feels right because there's something more authentic and real about the format.
Anemoia exists, I guess.
I have 2 (and a spare for parts) tts and a DJ mixer to allow crossfading (it's a 4 channel because it was the cheapest usable thing available). I threw in moderate Audio-Technica MicroLine cartridges in both and had to get a digital scale and some other calibration crap because these tts are some relatively cheap with a bunch of adjustments lacking interchangeable cartridges. I'm at around 10 milk-crate sized storage boxes and have stopped buying almost entirely. It's not a "purist" rig at all (I'm allergic to audiophiles) considering it feeds into a Marantz NR1711 that has Tidal and a PlexAmp Pi that drives a couple of Elac Debut mains and an SVS PB16.
It's all NFTs
Not too surprising. Most vinyl records come with a digital download code. So you can still listen to it on your phone or wheverever else, and have a nice collectable to go with it.
I know a lot of people who use them as decoration. As someone who has been buying and listening to vinyl records for a long time I find it a bit odd but I understand it. Going into a friends home and checking out their book collection or record collection used to be a fun thing and tells you a bit about someone. Now that everything is digital that is completely gone so having a few of your favourite records around, even if you don't listen to them fills that void.
It seems like a silly cargo cult to me. It feels like ewaste compared to a poster
If it really is cargo culting, and the people buying the physical product are not keeping the manufacturers in check because they never play the vinyl, then I can see a potential situation where manufacturers ramp up to meet "demand" but at lower quality (improved profits).
The secondhand market becomes saturated with inferior pressings that are inevitably bound for landfills since they don't meet the quality/expectations of the people who actually play vinyl.
Hypothetically.
This doesn't make any sense; there's no craft here, where it's cheaper to press "bad" records vs "good" ones. You would literally need multiple production lines to intentionally execute this "strategy". Also a record cost next to nothing to make.
What's the *e*-waste from a record and sleeve?
PVC releases potentially harmful vapors and is difficult to properly dispose of.
records rarely end up in waste, and the relatively small amount of waste from production is not where we should be focusing our energies.
What cargo do the cultists think is coming?
A wonderful sonic experience from ritualistic handling of a vinyl disc in a paper envelope?
Little do they know, the true sonic experience comes from wetting the disc with a special felt pad and watching the stroboscopic markings on the edge of a turntable platter...
If they really want the old-school analog experience, you need a turntable and a cassette recorder so you can make mix tapes for your friends. We didn't have 'playlists', we had mix tapes. Also, to have in the car for road trips. Also, I must go and yell at that cloud now. Excuse me.
I would be pretty happy if I could get the Android version of Winmmp back... or something very similar... my phone has as much storage open as the biggest ipod I ever had, and it's pretty much always with me. That said, it's just easier to use a streaming service... the issue is that new music discovery just sucks at this point.
Maybe they call it a Vinyl Disc Player?
Ive got 1300 records and I dont live in the USA. So there!