So... any idea why we're selling music on vinyl again?

Cafe Society
1

I was at Fry’s Electronics the other day and something caught my eye – it was a display shelf of new, shrink wrapped records. And not old “The Monkees” albums either, they had stuff like a recording of a recent Green Day concert on two records, and some recent stuff from Metallica were included among the selection. The prices ranged from about $7-37, and they were selling a digital record player (well, as digital as an analog medium can get) for about $250.

Now, the answer to “why” is obviously because they determined there’s a market for it and they could make money, but… why? It seemed quite odd, I mean, I know people my age (college age) that have unironic Vinyl collections, but they tend to be the people who prefer The Beatles over modern music, and the people who have ironic Vinyl collections would call Green Day too mainstream. Was there suddenly some upswing in the popularity of Vinyl for some reason? There had to be some impetus for the suits to go “yes, now is the perfect time to dust off those LP factories.” For the life of me, I can’t figure out what that impetus is.

It’s not that I’m surprised that records are being sold, per se, just that they’re being sold on premier SHELF space. It would be quaint, but not too horribly surprising if I saw them online.

2

WOnderful… replacing my collection currently… Maybe we can save the concept of record stores… Best times of my teen years was coming across a Hendrix Live at the Isle of Wight record…

3

I remember reading praises of vinyl back when I was in high school in the late nineties, but my guess is that corporate suits are especially happy to back it now just to encourage more people to actually buy music rather than listen to it through an online service or illegally download it. I have no idea whether selling a vinyl record or an iTunes download is better for the record company, but selling the vinyl would be good for stores.

4

Some people prefer the haptic experience of a record. Especially in the age of downloads, having not just a CD, but something that’s a lot bigger, with nicer cover art and such, can maybe add to your enjoyment of the music. Most modern records also come with a download code, so that problem is taken care of as well.

Plus, it sets you apart from the unwashed masses, I’m sure that’s a factor as well.

5

Vinyl must make a pretty decent profit - I’d think that anyone fanatic about a band’s particular LP release would also have the same album in digital format as well for portable use.

6

I wonder if selling music on “quaint” mediums isn’t going to be the only way music stores survive the next ten years. I mean, why buy on CD? Why not just buy a digital copy?

7

I wonder what the buyer demographic is for vinyl.

My daughter (46 this year) buys all her Springsteen on vinyl. She started with him on vinyl, and is tickled pink that the new stuff is also available on vinyl. She’s heavy into nostalgia, mementos, ticket stubs, programs, etc. – won’t throw anything away if there’s any kind of memory attached to it. Vinyl is meant for her.

How many 20-somethings and 30-somethings still have a turntable?

8

Actually, I dunno. Green Day on vinyl seems pretty ironic to me. In fact, the more mainstream and poppy, the better. Nickelback on vinyl. Bieber on vinyl. I would laugh every day if I had a collection like that.

I wouldn’t have a turntable, though. What, actually listen to that stuff?

9

Didn’t read the whole article, but apparently quite a few.

10

Vinyl is popular because of hipness and because it’s a nice display mechanism. Those large covers really show the art better than CDs.

But it’s an almost invisible niche in terms of sales. I doubt if vinyl is 1% of hard copy music sales, which collectively is a small percent of electronic music sales. There’s never been a real upswing. It never went away, especially in dance music; what you’re seeing is a tiny trend to make a few vinyl copies along with everything else.

11

Having actually read the article, it sustains pretty much what I’ve said above. Except the first record store guy, who is pretty much full of shit (he talks about digital music being not the real thing, conveniently forgetting that 99.9% of the records in his store were digital first and then converted back to analog :smack:).

12

I can agree with the “art” comment. But isn’t this retro-hipness? I was never so happy as a musician as when CDs removed the hiss, clicks, and pops from my enjoyment of the musical experience ca. 1990. Do I want to bring that shit back? No way!

13

Vinyl has always been reputed to sound better than digital media, and based on our cheap record player and small record collection - and some articles I’ve read on the topic but only partly understood - I think there’s something to it. So as far as I can tell the market for vinyl is audiophiles who want to listen to something that sounds better than what you get from iPods and similar devices, and some hangers-on who want to project the image that they’re more discerning than your average listener.

14

Here’s my experience of history as someone born in 1971; i.e., I was a teenager as vinyl was going out and CDs were coming in. I still have a large (2,500+ disc) vinyl collection but do not buy new vinyl any more (I buy used still, mostly to get stuff that can’t be found on CD).

CDs first hit the market in 1983 and were touted, at first, as the best thing since sliced bread to classical music fans. No pops, no clicks–and it would sound amazing! That was the pitch.

CDs started appearing in local record stores very slowly. At first the CD section was tiny and remained pretty small until around 1988-89. Around that time, a new record cost about $12 and a CD cost a lot more. I don’t remember the exact pricing–$15 to just under $20.

Record companies wanted everyone to switch to CD for obvious reasons. Not only would people pay a premium for CDs but they’d replace all of their old vinyl too. So they went about destroying vinyl. They pushed vinyl out of the stores so you couldn’t get it any more, and, whether on purpose or not, vinyl quality drastically declined in the late 80s. Records starting coming with all kinds of skips and crap.

By 1991, the game was up. I bought my last new vinyl in that year, and it was hard to get. I have pretty rare (though not necessarily worth anything) Bel Biv Devoe, C+C Music Factory, and Technotronic vinyl albums.

Personally, I see the changes as mostly led by the dickhead record industry trying to milk the public for all they were worth and not by consumer demand, but of course it was both. That’s why I have very little sympathy for the industry not seeing that by switching to a digital format, they’d ensure that pretty soon customers would be ripping and downloading tracks and not paying for music any more. Whoops!

There’s been a debate over what sounds better, CD or vinyl. Well, there are definitely good thing about both formats. Rather than get into that, I’d say I wish we had a format that offered the best of both. Mark my words, the garbage MP3 format will not be around for all that much longer as the standard. As storage gets easier and better–and once we finally agree as a society that we all don’t need our own copies, which is ridiculous in the age of the Cloud–we are going to go back to the master recordings and rip them good and right for posterity. Or such is my hope.

One thing the record album had going for it was a much more substantial user experience: the big cover art, the inner sleeve, and so on. People want that, and they want the vinyl sound. I think that’s why people buy vinyl today.

15

Speaking as a person with a completely un-ironic 22’ of shelf space devoted to vinyl…

Vinyl sucks!

The only reason I have it is because a lot of the music I love has never been released on CD. But the only time the vinyl gets played I’d when I get in a mood to digitize it. Then it gets captured, and I run noise removal software on it. It doesn’t sound as good as a cd, but it sounds better than the record being played directly.

16

My understanding is that vinyl albums are theoretically better than CD - but only under near-perfect conditions. If you have a virgin album with a studio quality sound system, you’ll get a better quality sound from the album. Although the improvement in quality might not be detectable by human hearing.

Of course, in the real world people don’t play virgin albums on studio systems. And the drop off of vinyl quality is a lot steeper than the drop off of digital quality. So under normal conditions you’re going to get a much better sound from digital.

17

I feel this summarizes why we’re seeing vinyl sales being pushed. Corporations see it as being cheaper to resell us old music in a new format than to convince us to buy new music. And now they’re just getting lazy about it - they’re trying to convince us to buy a format that we already had. Twenty years ago they were telling us we should replace all our vinyl with CDs and now they’re telling us we should replace all our CDs with vinyl.

The reality is that most people have just stopped buying formats altogether. They’re just buying the content (or not buying it in many cases) and then putting that content on whatever format they wish to use. Which is anathema to the corporations - they’ve always made a huge profit from the mark-up on format sales.

The fact that the corporations are trying to keep a dying business model alive on life support probably explains why they came up with this retro-format concept. On the one hand, they no longer have the resources to develop and push a new format. And psychologically, vinyl reminds them of the good old days when everyone was buying their product.

18

No, it is not. Vinyl is inferior to CD even under optimum vinyl playback circumstances. Two equally well mastered releases of the same material, the CD has dramatically greater dynamic range, lacks the bass channel summing needed to avoid destroying the record cutting head, lacks the degrading of audio quality that happens as the groove radius gets tighter towards the end of the record and a number of other problems that CD let us see the ass end of years ago.

Why does this myth persist? Because a huge number of CDs are poorly mastered. In order to sound louder, many, if not most pop records are heavily compressed. The greater dynamic range is thrown away.

19

You forgot “wishful thinking.”

20

Because Hipsters just can’t let go of an idea.

That’s certainly my experience.