CD Sales Continue To Plummet, Vinyl Records Soar 431
Lucas123 writes "Over the past four years, vinyl record sales have been soaring, jumping almost 300% from 858,000 in 2006 to 2.5 million in 2009, and sales this year are on track to reach new peaks, according to Nielsen Entertainment. Meanwhile, as digital music sales are also continuing a steady rise, CD sales have been on a fast downward slope over the same period of time. In the first half of this year alone, CD album sales were down about 18% over the same period last year. David Bakula, senior vice president of analytics at Nielsen Entertainment, said it's not just audiophiles expanding their collections that is driving vinyl record sales but a whole new generation of young music aficionados who are digging the album art, liner notes and other features that records bring to the table. 'The trend sure does seem sustainable. And the record industry is really doing a lot of cool things to not only make the format come alive but to make it more exciting for consumers,' Bakula said."
I bet "The Industry" loves it.... (Score:4, Insightful)
I can see why this is popular (Score:5, Insightful)
Disco record sales (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976? If these trends continues... Aaay!
Cassette vs. CD (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I can see why this is popular (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the fragility of vinyl lends some perceived value to it as well. I can toss a CD on the desk without much thought, but I would never do that with vinyl because of the risk of damaging it even with a tiny scratch.
Re:I can see why this is popular (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice observation. This is the kind of stuff that the dry analytics and reductionism of geeks/businessmen/economists sometimes miss. There are psychological aspects of value that can be very hard to quantify and run contrary to practical utility.
In fact, I think one of the things that have lead to the decline in value of music overall is its ready availability and the immense practicality of the players. You don't have to take time out of your day to listen. You don't have to spend time thinking about music, choosing what to listen to. You aren't bound to stay in one place while you listen. You can stick your headphones in and hit "shuffle", and you're done.
People don't value things that come easily.
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:5, Insightful)
What's the point of buying it on vinyl for great quality and ripping it to digital? You'll certainly get better quality by directly downloading FLACs from the internet. It's astonishing how clueless record companies are. Release lossless audio on data DVDs, or for digital download if you want quality.
I think the impetus behind vinyl sales is that they're a collector's item. They come in a big envelope with big art instead of a tacky plastic jewel case, and they usually come with inserts or collectibles. Everyone has albums on CD but it commands a lot more cred to say "I have that on vinyl." Some people collect records of great music they already own, and store them (playing vinyl reduces its quality and value).
Re:multi-track please (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I'm sure Moby got straight A's at Juilliard.
You there, creating art without a license, halt, I say!
Re:Best of both worlds (Score:4, Insightful)
I buy the vast majority of my albums on vinyl, even at a 5 or 10 dollar premium mainly because I love having a permanent physical copy,
I punch out my code on cards with an old IBM 026 keypunch because I love having a permanent physical copy...
Re:The reason is? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a response from Virgil Dickerson of Suburban Home Records and the Vinyl Collective to a Wired article written a few years ago about the "recent rise in vinyl sales." I think it covers fairly well why records are making a resurgence, while downplaying the hype surrounding it (it seems "vinyl comeback!" is a great rainy day article).
Have fun reading.
Wired recently published a piece called, “Vinyl May Be Final Nail in CD’s Coffin”. It is an interesting look at Vinyl’s recent rise in popularity which has become a hot topic amongst various publications. Since this piece ran on Monday, I have had at least a dozen links to the story forwarded to me. I would like to offer my own thoughts on the post.
I run a vinyl-only online store and vinyl imprint called Vinyl Collective. I started this in August of 2006 when I had a strong feeling that a focused vinyl site and community might receive a favorable response. I had been releasing vinyl through my label, Suburban Home, since the very beginning and as a music fan, I have long loved the format. I have released vinyl for bands like Every Time I Die, Minus the Bear, Fear Before the March of Flames, Portugal the Man, Drag the River, Tim Barry, and I have upcoming records coming out from Sparta, the Playing Favorites, Minus the Bear, Every Time I Die, Norma Jean, Poison the Well, Portugal the Man, and more.
As I type this on the final day of October, I can attest to the fact that Vinyl’s momentum is on the rise. Our sales for the month doubled what we did in September and September was previously our best month. We have been so busy that we have decided to hire a part-timer to help out with orders, a decision we were very careful in making as we recently downsized our operations in May of this year due to our declining revenue from CD sales.
As much as I can back up Wired’s claim in a rise in vinyl sales, it is in no way the final nail in CD’s coffin. I offer the following data with a release we licensed for vinyl, Minus the Bear’s “Planet of Ice”. As of last week, the album has soundscanned 31,000 copies (digital and CD sales combined); we have sold nearly 3,000 copies of the double LP version of the album. I expect this album to soundscan around 100,000 copies by this time next year and IF we continue to repress the album on vinyl, it might be possible that we could do 10,000 copies on wax. I might also add that when speaking of Soundscan (they were quoted in the Wired piece as saying, “Our numbers, at least, don’t really point to a resurgence,”), they have no idea what they are talking about. I mentioned selling nearly 3,000 copies of “Planet of Ice” and you know how many were registered through Soundscan? Zero! I made the decision not to put a barcode on the record and have made no attempts to sell it to chain stores. Chain stores don’t know what to do with vinyl and I would rather indie stores make money off of my products. Nearly all of the records have been sold through the Vinyl Collective website or through mom and pop retailers, many of which don’t even report to Soundscan. Soundscan is an antiquated gauge of sales and only scratches the surface with regards to vinyl sales. Labels like No Idea, Fat Wreck, Death Wish, Bridge 9, Asbestos, and so many more sell a bulk of their vinyl pressings directly to customers and not one of them report those sales to soundscan.
I would like to offer my opinion on why I think vinyl sales are on the rise. In this absolutely fucked up, fast paced world we live in, there is something therapeutic about physically picking up a needle, placing it on Side A of a record, and sitting back enjoying the music that comes out of your speakers. CDs and digital has made music disposable and of little to no value and in most cases, it has become background noise for our crazy lives. With vinyl, you have something real, something tangible, something with beautiful artwork, something that soun
Re:Disco record sales (Score:3, Insightful)
Now were disco to be up by that margin in the mid 90s, that would be analogous.
Re:Few problem (Score:3, Insightful)
Sometimes that's cool, but it really takes a lot of trust to do it. Not just that it won't be exploited, but that people won't be passing it off as something it isn't.
There's also the issue of proving the ownership of the copyright. If I have the best quality version, including all the parts in a form which can't be derived from the final version, it's much easier to demonstrate that I do indeed own it.
Re:The reason is? (Score:3, Insightful)
Vinyl just plain sounds better most of the time. Save your technical BS for those that have not listened to the same track on both using good equipment.
Nobody can argue whether vinyl sounds better, that's a purely subjective judgment. Objectively, CDs are more accurate. It is fortunate for the vinyl fans that the distortions introduced by the format are pleasing to the ear.
BTW, did you ABX when you tested vinyl vs CD? A test without a blind is useless.
Re:I bet "The Industry" loves it.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Cassette vs. CD (Score:3, Insightful)
How did the industery react when cassette sales started to slip and CDs soared?
You really want to know? They jacked up the price of CDs, opened up their vault, republished every old artist, and told everyone to buy them on the new format! And we did, because the sound quality really was better, especially if you listen to classical music. Classical musicians really got excited about digital music.
It gave them a nice boost in profits, because everyone was re-buying songs they already had. Then around 1998, when the profits from that boost started dropping, they blamed the drop on piracy.
Re:Argh (Score:3, Insightful)
And wanna-be audiophiles. Oooh, look at my fancy vinyl collection of all new music! Wow! OOoh, it's so much better than the CD version, with its digitally mastered, compressed audio! Sure, the music on the vinyl was digitally mastered, exactly like on the CD, but once it gets pressed to vinyl it magically transforms into an analog recording! Taking no chances, the line out from the record player and between all components is highest quality oxygen-free copper with solid gold plated connectors (truly a bargain at $599 each). The speaker cable is made from purest silver 0000 gauge welding cable, all measured and cut to the same length within 1 thousandth of a millimeter by celestial virgins. The speakers themselves were more expensive than the house in which I live. Now, if only my damn hearing aids would quit acting up, I could enjoy this track...
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:5, Insightful)
Generally the vinyl is not over-compressed.
It certainly was back in the record era, at least for pop or rock records from the 60's-70's on, with rare exceptions. It almost had to be to sound recognizable on AM radio or in cars (since the radio stations all played the records). Only in the mid-late 70s were there many pop or rock records that were mixed for FM or home listening on quality equipment. Early 70's pop records were horrifically compressed, easily as bad as your average Britney Spears crap. Even back as far as the "Wall of Sound" where the dynamics were intentionally compressed "up front" is an example.
I would also note that most full-dynamic-range records *can't be played* on anything less that pretty expensive cartridges on perfectly-adjusted equipment. I have one Sheffield direct-to-disk "Harry James" records that I could only reliably track after extensive adjustments to the tracking force and cartridge moment of inertia and tonearm mass. Almost anything I tried, and any conventional inexpensive cart ($50) is sends the tonearm off the record 1/8". If for nothing else, it would play much better in the majority of cases if there *was* some compression applied. It HAS to be.
I have been a high-fidelity guy (not an audiophool "cable consumer") for the past 40 years. CDs and digital music has been such a tremendous advance. Compression is hardly a new idea and absurdly compressed range was common for as long as records have existed. Vinyl is no solution, it's the engineering, no matter what the delivery medium.
Brett
Re:multi-track please (Score:4, Insightful)
bah (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Ever heard of DJ's? Electronic music... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the impetus behind vinyl sales is that they're a collector's item.
There's your key bit of information right there. They are collectors items often produced by enthusiasts. Record companies these days don't view vinyl as a killer medium to out-do the competition, so they don't push stupid unrealistic expectations on the people who master the stuff, which may I add also usually needs to be mastered separately. You often end up with a case where the digital releases are dynamically compressed to all buggery. I mean what's the point of having 96dB of dynamic range if you only ever use the top 5 and then horrendously clip the peaks in an attempt to make the records sound loud?
Take for instance this quote from wikipedia's entry of Stadium Arcadium by the Red Hot Chili Peppers: "A problem often pointed out by audiophiles is Vlado Meller's mastering for the CD release. It can be regarded as a product of the loudness war, with heavy use of dynamic range compression, and suffering of frequent clipping.[14] In contrast, Steve Hoffman's mastering for the vinyl release was praised for its quality."
The quality inherent in vinyl is about attitude of the producers.
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:2, Insightful)
That is one of my "go-to" albums for testing out stereo systems. Although recorded over 50 years ago, it is so incredibly well recorded (quite apart from being fucking good music), it exposes the slightest defect in any sound system.
Re:You have to halve the Nyquist limit (Score:2, Insightful)
"You have to halve the Nyquist limit because that limit only barely renders the sound FREQUENCY. It doesn't mean you can get the sound AMPLITUDE right."
Huh? WTF are you talking about? Go, take a lesson in signal processing.
Re:I can see why this is popular (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:5, Insightful)
The loudness war didn't start cranking up until about 1990, so most CDs pressed before then don't suffer from it. (This is why so many "digital remaster" CD releases sound crummy compared with the earlier CD release!) Those early CDs often sound better than the LP version.
The CD format is really fantastic when it's used properly and not abused. It was billed as a technological wonder when it was introduced, and it mostly lived up to the billing. The only things I would change are the fragile little jewel boxes and setting some kind of mastering standard to reverse sonic havoc wreaked by the Loudness War.
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, music has to be compressed to go on vinyl. . . Playing time is also a big factor. Highest sound quality can be achieved from a 12-inch 45 RPM single, such as some promo discs that were sent to radio stations. At the opposite extreme, some hyper-compressed, sonically crushed CDs published today are also being fed right into the record cutter for the LP release, with results that are practically unlistenable.
Vinyl is no solution, but it does provide a benchmark of sorts. When today's CDs are so sonically crushed that even full-length LPs from the 1980s sound dramatically better, that just proves something has gone badly wrong in the industry.
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:4, Insightful)
or just buy the mp3 and ignore the foolish idea that you get better quality from a non digital format. Notice that sound quality was NOT one of the drivers noted in the article
Re:All well and good, until... (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't imagine a $99 plastic turntable will do them any justice.
Re:Don't compare sound quality of... (Score:4, Insightful)
You need to remember that digital downloads from iTunes and the Amazon MP3 Download service are using 256 kilobits per second minimum variable bit rate compression, and as such they're still inferior to the Compact Disc original for overall sound quality.
A better comparison between an LP and digital format would be comparing an LP to audio encoded in Apple Lossless or Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) formats. Since Apple Lossless and FLAC are non-lossy compression formats, the audio quality should be excellent, and unlike LP's (which are subject to all kinds of mechanical issues like physical wear, wow and flutter, turntable rumble and needle mistracking) the sound quality will not degrade over time.,
"Sounds Better" (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, you lose.
Technically, digital is better. In terms of "sounds better", that's arguable, and completely dependent on the tastes of the listener.
There is often a nice distortion that happens on vinyl, and people crave it. Sounds better to them, and where music is concerned, perception is reality.