'The Insane Resurgence of Vinyl Records' (thehustle.co) 190
"Fueled largely by millenial hipsters under the age of 35, the old, outdated format has risen from the dead," argues the Hustle:
In the 1970s, vinyl sales peaked at 530 million units per year and accounted for 66% of all music format revenues... [B]y the '90s, vinyl sales dipped to less than 10 million units — a mere 0.1% of market share. In recent years, though, something odd has happened: Vinyl has made a small but mighty comeback... In an age of fleeting digital pleasures, vinyl has quenched a thirst for tangible assets.
For each of the past 15 years, sales of new vinyl have gradually increased. In the first half of 2021 alone, 17 million albums were sold — an 86% jump from 2020.
In an extremely rare twist, an old technology came back to surpass a newer one. Last year, for the first time since 1986, vinyl records outranked CDs in annual sales. This year, they're on pace to more than double CD revenue...
These figures don't even include the millions of used records sold through online marketplaces like Discogs (9 million active listings) and eBay (3.5 million), or at the 1,400 local record stores peppered throughout the U.S. Per Forbes, used vinyl sales are likely 1.5 times those of new records, or about 50 million units based on 2021 projections.
84% of the music industry's revenue now comes from sreaming, the article acknowledges. (And a vinyl record creates 12 times as many greenhouse gas emissions as other music formats.)
But for artists, the economics are undeniable. Even though the price of polyvinyl chloride has quadrupled since 2020, "A band would have to amass 450,000 streams on Spotify to match the profit of 100 vinyl sales."
For each of the past 15 years, sales of new vinyl have gradually increased. In the first half of 2021 alone, 17 million albums were sold — an 86% jump from 2020.
In an extremely rare twist, an old technology came back to surpass a newer one. Last year, for the first time since 1986, vinyl records outranked CDs in annual sales. This year, they're on pace to more than double CD revenue...
These figures don't even include the millions of used records sold through online marketplaces like Discogs (9 million active listings) and eBay (3.5 million), or at the 1,400 local record stores peppered throughout the U.S. Per Forbes, used vinyl sales are likely 1.5 times those of new records, or about 50 million units based on 2021 projections.
84% of the music industry's revenue now comes from sreaming, the article acknowledges. (And a vinyl record creates 12 times as many greenhouse gas emissions as other music formats.)
But for artists, the economics are undeniable. Even though the price of polyvinyl chloride has quadrupled since 2020, "A band would have to amass 450,000 streams on Spotify to match the profit of 100 vinyl sales."
People actually still pay for music? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, I'm old and certainly not the target market for any kind of music (I just watched a "best 300 songs of 2015" video and didn't know 90% of the songs there), but I was under the impression that by now everyone is just getting their music for free from YouTube and the like.
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Re:People actually still pay for music? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's sort of funny how we went from a generation that paid for music (vinyl, cassette, CDs), to a generation that laughed at that idea (Napster, Kazaa, Limewire, SoulSeek, Torrents), to a generation that pays for music (Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music)
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from a generation that paid for music (vinyl, cassette, CDs)
If you were paying for music on cassettes, you were using them wrong. Of course, the quality after umpteen copies was crap, but as kids we didn't care.
Re:People actually still pay for music? (Score:5, Informative)
Way back in junior high, my friends and I had an annual ritual of staying up all night on New Year's Eve and listening to Casey Kasem's countdown of the past year's top 100 - sitting there with a cheap tape recorder and a handful of blank tapes, recording the whole thing.
Re: People actually still pay for music? (Score:5, Interesting)
It was never about money. It was about convenience. Spotify is as easy as it gets for listening and access. I do get that Spotify is not friendly to artists but I really don't want to go back to maintaining a collection, whether it be a book shelf full of media or setting the right ID3 tags. Netflix is also easier than pirating and cable tv. Though with the current trend of everyone having their own streaming service things are starting to look more like cable again. At this rate there will be a point where pirating is easier again
Re: People actually still pay for music? (Score:2)
Re: People actually still pay for music? (Score:3)
Music as a tactile experience (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do you love your iphone? it's because it's a fondle slab. A weighty totem in your pocket. It feels good to touch it in the same way a cigarette in the fingers and lips feels good to a smoker. The nicotine adicts you but you soon assocaite the pleasure of the nicotine with the sensations of the biting smoke intake, the rituals of lighting the cigarette. The same is true of many addictions. Poker chips are made to feel good. Iphones feel nice. it's all about turning a mental pleasure inot many channels of sensory experience.
Vinyl records need to be handled with a carful touch. cleaned and brushed. You have to activate them in some mechanical way. It's not the music but your physical involvment in the rituals of making it play.
Tapes were less so but making a mix tape by manually cueing up varied tracks then recording them to tape was a project of many hours all done in real time. It was not dragging mp3s into a different folder. There were mistakes to make, levels could be set wrong. It was engaging to all parts of your brain.
Simply listening to music with the least possible hassle isn't as satisfying an experience. And when you listen to your mix tape, you get to think about not just the music but the act of making the tape or the emotion behind the making of the tape.
I can see why people like vinyl. it's not about the quality or ease of the music at all.
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Sorta, but the whole music industry really is a shadow of its former self:
https://www.visualcapitalist.c... [visualcapitalist.com]
When I got my first job, minimum wage was $3.80 / hr and a compact disc was $14-$16. Think about that, 4 hours' wage for one album. It was lousy.
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I paid $25 for a 30 minute kpop CD (actually for the booklet), and I paid about $30 for Paris Hilton's hilariously awful album (nice vinyl, though). But I wouldn't pay shit for youtube music. That's what adblockers are for.
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I still have all my napster and Limewire music and you can still buy CDs directly the from the artist at their shows, which I can then rip. So no streaming needed and I directly support the artist while getting to enjoy the music I want to hear. Win Win for everyone.
Re: People actually still pay for music? (Score:2)
So people are paying about the same but getting far lower quality sound in return? OK. (Very few streaming sites will be using FLAC.)
Re:People actually still pay for music? (Score:5, Informative)
I pay for Spotify. I hope to keep Joe Satriani and Tommy Emmanuel in strings.
You're not going to do that with Spotify's "fractions of a cent per play" revenue sharing with artists. You want to keep the makers making you need to be buying merchandise.
Re:People actually still pay for music? (Score:5, Informative)
Buy the albums. Like most people on slashdot I was in my broke-ass 20s around napster and fell into the habit of assuming music is free. And I guess it kind of is.
But its shocking how bad Spotify is for musicians. I assure you , very little of your $9 is actually going to the artists. Its in the order of $0.003 per stream, meaning to earn a dollar you'd have to listen to a song about 300 times. Which means for a $10 album, you have to listen to about 3000 streams to pay for it. And you still don't "own" it at the end.
But spend $10 on the album, and the artist is most likely getting between $7 - $8.50 depending on the platform and if the band is self publishing. That literally can put a meal on a bass players table.
At this point in our lives, most of us can actually afford to buy the albums that mean things to us., Covid has destroyed the touring part of musician incomes that had become the sole remaining sure-fire income. Spending $10 on a bandcamp, itunes, or amazon album means that band can actually afford to not have a shitty day job and keep putting out banging tunes.
Honestly, as a musician, I'd rather you just pirate bay my music than keep funneling money into spotify who are basically pirate bay but your money goes to making some rich guy who isn't me richer.
re: music streaming (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm glad they already modded you up +5 or else I would have thrown a karma point your way for this one.
I was briefly in a band back around 1991-1993 and at that time, there was so such thing as music streaming or buying monthly subscriptions to listen to songs. You simply bought the albums OR you copied them. And the beauty in that was, anyone "pirating" an artist's albums was still indirectly helping them out. Most people didn't just listen to their music in a vacuum. They popped the cassette in the deck while driving around with their friends, or put it on the stereo at home when they had a party going on.... It helped market your music any time someone liked it enough to pirate it and listen to it like that. It created new fans who WOULD eventually go out and buy an album, or motivated people to pay for tickets to a live concert. (Few will go to a concert to see some band they haven't heard of!)
IMO, music streaming became the worst thing that ever happened to musicians, because it cheapened EVERYTHING about it. For some low monthly price, people can just listen to anything in an entire recording catalog. Absolutely no incentive to listen to a whole album to learn to appreciate the tracks that don't jump out at them immediately. (And some of the very best music I've listened to has been the "B side" material on albums I bought initially for a few other songs on them.) When you had to pay for the whole tape or CD, you had that incentive to give all of the material on it a chance. After all, you paid the $10 or whatever to own the whole thing. Heck, even if you just pirated it? Same thing held true. You paid for the blank CDR or tape and took the time to copy the whole thing from someone else who already had it. So you may as well listen to all of it at some point. But there's so much else to dislike about streaming, including the fact that recording levels tend to vary drastically between albums. So when you play a random mix of songs from a streaming service, you're often having to mess with the volume control so one song isn't too loud and the next too quiet to hear the intro or lyrics. But obviously, the way artists barely get compensated for it is the worst.
I think for some people though? Buying the albums on vinyl is a nod to saying, "I appreciate the benefits you used to get from the old-school way of buying music like this. You get those full-size liner notes or at least a nice, big cover with the album artwork on it to look at, etc."
Re:People actually still pay for music? (Score:5, Interesting)
Right. So heres how it works out.
Assume we're talking a self-publishing band. Most are these days. Unless your buying albums from the top of the pops I guess.
Bandcamp takes a 15% cut. iTunes takes out a 30% cut. Amazons 15%.
Nobody is recording music on "webcam mic". Home recordings tend to be using something like a Focusrite 4 channel interface that features pre-amps equivelent to, or actually superior what the Avid Protools systems the LA studios used in the early 2000s. Combined with a $500 Condensor mic and a bit of strategic sound reinforcement, the average Pro-sumer home studio can compete and sometimes even beat the $500/hr studios of two decades ago. Assuming whoevers driving the DAW knows what they are doing (And they often aint).
But even if we record in a pro studio (I've done that in the past, and I'll still send stuff off to a pro studio for mastering, $500 to master an album, its doable on a budget) its not really relevant to the "cut". Going through a label doesnt help that. Usually the label wont cover recording costs. The bigger bands will be loaned the money to record it, but they have to pay it back, which is hard when the label is still taking a huge cut beyond their own costs, its a *really* bad deal. A friend had a band that had number 1 hits in multiple countries for Sony. The label loaned them the money to record and promote it, then took ALL the CD revenue and told them to make the money to pay back the loan from touring. This was in the mid 1990s. That band broke up with hundreds of thousands of fans around the world, multiple gold records, and about $250K of debt to the label that itself had profited around $2Mil from them. Never sign to a labell unless you have a VERY experienced lawyer to read that contract for you. A bunch of stoned 19yo grunge musicians never stood a chance.
With all that said, the situation in THAT regard is much better now. Even larger bands are going the self-publishing route, due to the proliferation of services like CD-Baby that just take a $40 fee to set up the connections, then take no cut of any streaming revenue.
Oh and the example cited earlier of Steve Vai. That dude is actually a *very* smart businessman. He owns his own rights, and you can damn well bet he is earning his own royalties. Buying his music instead of Spotifying it is totally money into his own pocket. He learned the business from the best, Frank Zappa (who was also an incredibly astute businessman. To the point the record companies where terrified of him and his avenging wife when it came to business deals)
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but I was under the impression that by now everyone is just getting their music for free from YouTube and the like.
Oddly, that is what I am doing right now [youtube.com]. Other times is more synthwave and dark synthwave. But still, I have my CDs since I don't have to worry about commercials interrupting the music. I'm still looking to complete my collection at my local 2nd and Charles, but it's been a while since I picked up anything. I'm guessing my tastes don't coincide with most people in my area.
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(I just watched a "best 300 songs of 2015" video and didn't know 90% of the songs there)
Did they define "best"? 'Cause it probably doesn't mean what they think it does.
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Yeah, it's kinda weird, too. Like, my band started on vinyl. Then when the digital takeover happened and we were sitting on vinyl, we pushed everything to digital like everyone else because no one was buying vinyl anymore (like, we'd do a 1000 unit batch that we would have sold out of in our first releases, but now we were literally selling.. 50-100 over a years' period). Anyway, after 4 or 5 years of digital only releases we did a Cassette Tape release. Sold out within 2 days of announcement. Over the next
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I bought like 20 albums the past 2 years, most of them vinyl. Including Paris Hilton's latest.
If you think old people aren't a target for music, you're an idiot.
Who do you think sells more records, now; that kid the teevee talks about all the time, or Bob Dylan?
The top 50 best-selling musicians of all time only has 2 people younger than Britney Spears. You heard of her, right?
What about Guns and Roses? They're on the list. So is Simon and Garfunkel. You know who isn't on the list? Me neither. But U2 is on t
Love vinyl (Score:2)
Re:Love vinyl (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the experience comes from three things:
1. It's a self-contained, physical package; you pick the album and are fairly committed to listening to it
2. The imperfections in the audio make it less clean and "more real" than a digital reproduction
3. The slightly fragile nature of the vinyl, player, needle, and necessity of specialized equipment gives it fragility that makes you treat it with some base level of respect
Re: Love vinyl (Score:2)
I wonder how this quirk of human psychology will fare if we ever achieve a post-scarcity world. Maybe it in itself makes such an achievement hard or impossible.
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I was chuckling a bit at the thought of a vinyl resurgence after my last visit to my parent's house, where my dad was playing some of his records. It's all vintage stuff - it's like fifty or sixty years old, still works fine. The only thing that's new is the turntable. For their stake, I'm sort of glad they still make them.
I have to admit, there's something wonderfully tactile about an LP. In some ways, I can sort of see why people enjoy collecting them purely for fun.
Vinyl (Score:3)
Target sells Vinyl. It comes with a big attractive picture on the front. I assume that's why people buy it.
Re:Vinyl (Score:5, Insightful)
Vinyl imposes limits on the master. Any idiot can mix down for digital, and evidence suggests that many do. If they try that with vinyl, they'll severely damage some very expensive equipment, so the people mastering for vinyl tend to be more skilled and experienced. So much so that the improved quality from that skill outweighs the degradation inherent in the older medium.
In theory, CD and streaming offer a dynamic range well beyond anything vinyl can dream of. In practice, due to the loudness wars, digital tends to have it's entire dynamic range crammed into the top percentage point. It might as well be 20KHz 8 bit.
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I don't think anyone is buying vinyl at Target because of sound quality.
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Target gets their stuff from the same masters and the same press that any snotty "High Fidelity" inspired independent shop does. What the hell difference does it make to the sound quality what retailer you buy it from?
Re:Vinyl (Score:5, Insightful)
Meanwhile movies have gone the complete opposite direction. They have too much dynamic range. Back in the VHS days did anyone complain about dialog being drowned out by minor sound effects? No.
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No such thing. The only people who think movies have to much dynamic range are those who haven't setup their sound system property. As part of the spec your playback device should compress dynamic range the way you choose. Just because you have neighbors or sleeping children doesn't mean the world should be restricted to explosions as quite as a loud conversation.
Realism is the name of the game. If you don't want that in your living room then use the tools at your disposal.
Re:Vinyl (Score:5, Informative)
Any idiot can mix down for digital, and evidence suggests that many do. If they try that with vinyl, they'll severely damage some very expensive equipment
No they can't because it's not the engineer in the studio's job to prepare for vinyl. They can send a digital file full of nothing but square waves and it won't make a difference, the cutting engineer's job is adjust the final mix for vinyl. This is *always* a downgrade over the files they are given.
With the exception of the odd recording here and there which was remastered by fanatics for vinyl, a vinyl mix is nothing more than the CD mix adjusted by the the cutting engineer. Vinyl is no more dynamic, it suffered just as much from the loudness wars, and about the only thing that gives *some* vinyl the edge is that older masters which were never put to CD were available. Where a remaster was done during the height of the loudness war you could sometimes get more dynamic range if you found an original pre-CD vinyl. But that remaster very likely was also out on vinyl with just as much (actually probably even less) dynamic range.
The loudness war itself is close to pretty much over thanks to Spotify, Youtube and Apple standardising on applying normalisation to somewhere between -12 and -14LUFS which means you don't get to be louder than your competition, even if you attempt to do so you only screw up your own track.
That said I don't know anyone who buys vinyl for sound quality. I personally buy it because many songs aren't available on CD and some not even on streaming services.
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My understanding (perhaps I'm mistaken?) is that this is the main draw of vinyl. You get a different mix. Different.
No. The draw sound quality wise was that it used to come from a different master. It's one of those perceptions that has just dragged on long past its point of relevance. In the late 80s/90s it very much was the case that CD remasters *sucked* (see comments about the loudness war), and that people flocked to vinyls due to them being actual different masters. They were more dynamic, they did actually sound better. These days the overwhelming majority are just the CD master cut onto vinyl, and the perceived b
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Any idiot can mix down for digital, and evidence suggests that many do.
I think it's usually a matter of good engineers forced by stupid clients to deliver crushed shit. "Why is my record not as loud as Metallica's? Make it louder!"
Re:Vinyl (Score:5, Interesting)
Target sells Vinyl. It comes with a big attractive picture on the front. I assume that's why people buy it.
I'm old enough that I was a kid when vinyl albums were still the market leader in the 70's and early 80's. My parents had nice vinyl collections and and the big fat headphones and home stereo systems with speakers 4 feet tall, etc. The whole late 70's thing. I listened to quite a lot of music. But I never.... never thought vinyl was higher quality than tape (my grandfather had what was then an expensive reel-to-reel player, and then of course, cassettes came along). All the pops and scratches annoyed me even then. I embraced tape, CD's, and then MP3's as fast as I could.
The ONLY thing I miss about vinyl is the cover art. That was truly part of the vinyl experience. When Star Wars first came out and the country went into the whole craze, my family bought the John Williams double album with the poster inside. I miss that part of the experience. The posters. The cover art and inserts and notes. It was just never the same on tape or CD's. There's no substitute for all that visual real estate.Vinyl album cover art really was a superior experience than anything since.
Vinyl allows you to include lots of notes, and art (Score:5, Interesting)
And they can be easily displayed, as they don't have to be shrunk down to CD size. Albums can be opened up like a book, or even have multiple folds.
The album Blows Against the Empire by Paul Kantner and Jefferson Starship, which was from before the somewhat different lineup of the later band, included a really nice booklet. Lol, it even listed the job openings for the proposed Starship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"The original vinyl album was a single platter in a gatefold sleeve. The cover featured a piece of Russian folk art from a painted lacquer box, attributed to CCCP (U.S.S.R. in Russian). Kantner said he enjoyed stealing the art from Russia because many Jefferson Airplane albums were bootlegged on the Russian black market. The back cover painting depicts a partially opened parcel revealing a room inside with Jerry Garcia peeking out, behind him a Heavy Naked Woman standing on an American Flag the parcel being flown on a string by a trio of breasts with wings. Inside the gatefold is more artwork with track listings and credits, done in silver ink on black background and featuring a Paul Kantner caricature with a head of marijuana-leaf hair rising over a mountainous planetscape and inkblot pair of marijuana leaves in the lower fold. A mushroom on the left hemi-sphere pyramid on the right and the mountainous planetscape is nearly a mirror image. The inner dust jacket was decorated with collages of musician photos, writings and doodles. Original pressings included a full-color booklet as well, with lyrics, poetry and drawings mostly done by Slick during the recording sessions and collected daily by Kantner. Subsequent pressings included a black & white version of the booklet. A small number of promotional copies of the album were released to radio stations on clear translucent vinyl; these are now coveted by vinyl record collectors. "
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theoretically you could put CDs into a cereal box packed with rolled up posters, full magazine size books. Not even that expensive, how expensive a cardboard box if they can fill it with cheerios and sell it for $3?
I think if I had any musical talent, and could make something worth listening to. I'd release my CDs with a magazine. Get lots of cool art to flip through while you listen to my album. It's not like stores don't know how to put a magazine on a shelf and sell it. Jewel cases are kind of shit anywa
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Jewel cases are kind of shit anyways. They are small enough to get stolen and the plastic seems to shatter the first time you open it.
The concern of theft is half the reason why CDs were sold/displayed in foot long boxes or sleeves when first introduced. The other half is that retailers didn't have to build new shelves to display the CD, they would fit in the old LP display cases, just put two side by side to fill in the space.
I think if I had any musical talent, and could make something worth listening to. I'd release my CDs with a magazine.
That's a great idea, just expect every music label to shoot it down in an instant. You could have got away with that when LPs were still a thing but today if the case doesn't fit in the display then no record stor
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then no record store is going to carry it.
Yeah, record stores. I remember those, really cool places to checking out music. What ever happened to those? Oooh Amazon.com
don't want customers asking
The new generation of customers won't ask anyways. They'll search for it themselves and minimize human interaction. The more like a vending machine you can operate your store, the better.
Besides, physical media is mainly for the fans and sold at shows.
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Good points. I'll have to ponder over that some.
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The surprises inside.
Heart's Greatest Hits (first one) had a collection of photo album pictures.
Tanya Tucker TNT had a "centerfold" of sorts. The little girl had grown up.
Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds came with a picture book.
There was so much room to work with, just as you said.
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"War of the Worlds" is a blast.
Also, the London Symphony Orchestra double album of "Tommy" has a great picture book.
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And they can be easily displayed, as they don't have to be shrunk down to CD size. Albums can be opened up like a book, or even have multiple folds.
Me twenty years ago would have loved this, when I was living with my parents in a nice big house and had plenty of room.
Now I'm a grown-ass adult with a family of my own living in a small two bedroom flat, trying to buy a small three bedroom house somewhere in my hometown that isn't so far out of town it will mean an hour commute.
My focus is on reducing the amount of stuff I have. I get the nostalgia of vinyl, having grown up with it, but I have three big bookshelves full of books that I've been hauling ar
Vinyl (Score:3)
I have a huge record collection, mainly because I couldn't afford CDs and records in the 90's were *CHEAP* Instead of buying one CD I could buy four or five records. And, if you lucked out at a Salvation Army, you could buy dozens of records for $0.50 each. The luck part was their condition, of course.
Nowadays I still play them sometimes. It's nice to have physical copies of things, and the packaging on some of them are works of art in and of themselves. I don't buy so many new records, but I still go crate digging, mostly for weird things. I like obscure and oddball stuff. I have a collection of recordings of ancient calliopes, circus organs, player pianos and other automated instruments that is pretty neat. A small selection of synthesizer demo records, record soundtracks to film strips - oddball stuff like that. Otherwise, I don't really seen the appeal of buying a vinyl record of music you could otherwise get digitally.
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I have a huge record collection, mainly because I couldn't afford CDs and records in the 90's were *CHEAP* ...
I have two milk crates of albums on vinyl from before CDs were invented -- most from my wife, who was 19 years older than me and a couple from overseas, like Japan from an exchange student when I was in 10th grade. They're all still in pretty good shape and play well. The album art is much nicer than what you can get with a CD...
The insane resurgence of the middle-man (Score:5, Insightful)
Never in my lifetime has so much money been creamed off artists by a pointless middle-man like Spotify.
I just buy CDs and at least the people who actually create the work get a half-decent cut while I still don't have to listen to shitty vinyl.
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by a pointless middle-man like Spotify
While most of the record industry is full of pointless middlemen, at least Spotify provide an actual service. Their underpaying of artists is a disgrace, but not every artists can start their own streaming service or music distribution business. Unlike the classic RIAA Spotify at least provides something of value.
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The counterpoint to your Spotify assesment us that never befote could an artist rent a studeo for a few hoers, self publish and and moments kater have thesingke avalabke workd voide with no record label contract at all. Ok discovery might be harder but how was discovery fir those that did not get contracts before?
The purpose of a record contract was to rip the artist off. Spotify does that as part of the service.
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If bands even offer CDs anymore.
I've noted artist (mostly independent) either offer digital downloads for $15 or vinyl for $30.
So if you want artwork and liner notes, you're paying a premium. And if you want a better format, you're paying on top of that.
I suppose it makes sense to bandwagon with trends with vinyl and whatnot, but anymore it feels like dry-humping the cash cow.
Vinyl today = best of both worlds (Score:2)
With vinyl, from many labels and/or resellers you get digital audio downloads along with the physical record. So you're not limited to listening to the vinyl on your living room stereo, you also get the digital files for everywhere else. Me, I love it.
Cassette tape (Score:3)
Me I like cassette tape. Nothing like that background hiss.
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8-track FTW, baby!! There's nothin' like a five-second gap in the middle of a song...
I had one of these Panasonic portable 8-track players [radiomuseum.org] as a kid. We loved banging on the "change track" bar at the top. In retrospect, it's surprising that thing lasted more than a month.
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That looks familiar. Oh, this is where I saw it before, on a Techmoan video... https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
In some cases vinyl is the only answer (Score:3)
It's not about the sound, it's about the availability. Many vinyl releases come with limited edition bonuses, magazines, posters, additional tracks... some whole albums aren't available on CD. Can't get the Dee Gees on CD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
People say (Score:2)
The reason people say "music sounds better on vinyl" is because music was better back then.
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No, I think it was their hearing that was better, back then...
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No, I think it was their hearing that was better, back then...
Yes, which allowed them to hear that the music was also better. :)
These days, hearing loss is almost a blessing. lol
Vinly records do not contain the same signal (Score:5, Interesting)
There is so much misunderstanding and misinformation about vinyl records versus CD and other high-quality digital formats including most streams, much of which is expressed in this Slashdot page.
Vinyl is not a technically better medium than digital, say, CD-quality digital or high-quality bit-reduced digital. Vinyl has worse signal-to-noise ratio which gets worse every time a record is played, it has less bandwidth (bandwidth is the range of frequencies that can be correctly reproduced) which also gets worse each time the record is played, and has less longevity. Vinyl records can warp which causes wow upon playback (wow is a frequency modulation at 33 1/3 rpm due to misshapen records). Record players become part of a feedback loop in which the player vibrates from the sound impinging upon it from the loudspeakers which causes uneven frequency response and in extreme cases can howl with a sustained oscillation. The life of records can be extended somewhat by meticulously cleaning them each time before playing but CDs etc. are extremely robust.
Vinyl records are not better than digital simply because they are analog because vinyl records these days are recorded and processed digitally before being converted to analog for pressing into vinyl. A completely analog-produced recording can bypass any controversial issues about the analog-to-digital conversion process but in contemporary practice that step is taken in preparing a digital recording for analog reproduction on vinyl and the end user doesn't even have a choice in D-to-A converter.
Perhaps the single most important reason that vinyl is experiencing a resurgence besides hipsterism is that in many if not most cases **the vinyl record does not contain the same signal as the digital version such as CD.** It is a fact, although not a well-known fact, that many vinyl releases contain versions of the music which has been subject to **less dynamic range compression.** I have seen this personally by listening and by comparing waveforms and artist-producers such as Jack White have commented explicitly about this. It is not clear why this bizzare-seeming practice is employed since, as stated earlier, digital has more dynamic range than vinyl.
Other factors have already been mentioned, such as taking pleasure in holding something physical and having liner notes to learn about the music and artists—CDs obviously can also have liner notes so this argues against streaming media only.
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"The life of records can be extended somewhat by meticulously cleaning them each time before playing but CDs etc. are extremely robust."
1. Yes, clean them, carefully, but also - play 'em wet. A usenet post many years ago detailed a trick used at radio stations. A 50/50 mix of distilled water and ethanol, with a couple of drops of dishwashing detergent (technically, you needed ethylene glycol for a wetting agent, but dishwashing detergent is soooo much cheaper). Wet a cloth with this mix and wring it out unt
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The only people who consider ADC controversial are the same science deniers as those who think climate change is fake, or that vaccines contain bill gates microchips.
No one working with audio considers it controversial.
Used to be a musician... (Score:5, Interesting)
...so I've used them all extensively. Vinyl's fine as long as you have a deck that you can tune (adjust the speed) so that it's in tune with your piano/keyboard. Cassettes were crap but cheap & convenient & the easiest portable playback & recording medium for a long time. CDs were a big improvement on vinyl, & 8mm digital & mini-disc were big improvements on cassettes. In the 2000s, portable PCM WAV recorders were amazingly good.
Right now, my phone has 128GB storage card on it & it comfortably holds my MP3 collection (currently 19,525 tracks) & I add to it whenever I want. I just need a free music library app with decent search & playlist functions & I'm golden. For me, the medium isn't the message - I just wanna listen to the music I wanna listen to when I wanna listen to it. Whatever technology makes that convenient for me is great. Today's portable audio quality is great for the price, especially ear-buds.
What I miss more than anything is friends playing me their latest favourite album when I visit them. Doesn't happen anywhere near as much as it used to. More & more, people are just treating music like it's the radio rather than albums that they want to listen to closely over & over in order to hear more detail, depth & feeling in it, you know, the craftsmanship of playing instruments & singing. But maybe that's a thing only musicians are interested in?
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What I miss more than anything is friends playing me their latest favourite album when I visit them. Doesn't happen anywhere near as much as it used to. More & more, people are just treating music like it's the radio rather than albums that they want to listen to closely over & over in order to hear more detail, depth & feeling in it, you know, the craftsmanship of playing instruments & singing. But maybe that's a thing only musicians are interested in?
I hear you. I was in college during the LP era and we’d play albums over and over to enjoy the tunes and pickup new things each time. Sometimes we’d try to get multiple rooms in sync for an album. Hours were spent recording songs from vinyl to reel to reel to make party tapes, curating the playlist to create various moods. Good times.
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I spent 40 years as a muso and live sound engineer, and I found it interesting that a good band with good gear would always sound better than their recording played thru the same sound system. I only use slight amounts of compresion and the high dynamic range was great, gave a clarity and punch the recording couldnt match. Of course top grade mics and mixers and amps were used.
Direct comparison is false (Score:2)
Vinyl records are a “store of value” and “medium of exchange” which supports artistic expression.
NFT’s would be the closer analogy.
Vinyl is king (Score:2)
Low tech is its own reward (Score:2)
Sure you can get better sound quality in a digital format, but nobody's going to remotely take away your license to listen to your vinyl. Even CDs can be infected with copy protection measures that make them untrustworthy.
I can't decide what I like best about vinyl... (Score:2)
I can't decide what I like best about vinyl. It's either the convenience, or the low cost to buy music on LP.
I admit to buying vinyl when (Score:2)
the CD is not available, never was available, or costs much more than the vinyl.
a vinyl record creates 12 times as many greenhouse (Score:2)
... but you can keep listening to it long after your streaming service has decided you no longer have the rights to hear the song you paid for.
several reasons (Score:2)
My late wife and I both have a copy of "Demons and Wizards" (Uriah Heep). I bought mine in Germany, she bought hers at Wherehouse (typical vendor of American-pressed crap vinyl). Hold my copy by a pencil through the center and it is a flat disk, while hers looks like an umbrella. Americans bought a lot of really cheap crap vinyl: floor sweepings tossed back in the vinyl pool along with the dirt, over-use of production tools stampers and mothers, and very thin vinyl.
Despite the nay-sayers, I can hear the
I suffered through the vinyl era (Score:2)
I endured clicks, pops, skips, de-essed highs and squashed lows. I was very happy to see it end. I can't imagine why anyone would want to see it return. As for me, I use Spotify. The recommendation robot is amazingly accurate at picking stuff I like
Pro tip: Phono pre-amp (Score:2)
If you buy a cheap record player, you should really consider moding it to add a decent pre-amp. This can be done for under $10 in parts. Or maybe $20 if you have to order it all and pay shipping.
On slashdot we're used to thinking that the RIAA is good for nothing, but they were good for one thing; they standardized the construction of record players. However, modern cheapo units do not have a RIAA pre-amp; they feed the signal from the needle straight into a power amp. It works fine, you hear music come out
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I think that you don't need a RIAA preamp with a ceramic cartridge (which is what some of the cheap record players use), but you need a preamp with high input impedance. Ceramic cartridge has frequency response with a "built-in" RIAA curve (IIRC that's one of the reasons why the RIAA curve is like that).
I'm curious (Score:2)
I have to admit a lot of curiosity as to the quality you could obtain using modern vinyl techniques and modern turntable technology, if you made 78s (so essentially EPs, much like Metallica's Kill Em All except with less dead space). In principle, the higher speed should give you higher quality but with physical needles, there would likely also be more damage (although there are plenty of laser turntables these days). I'm specifying modern methods because obviously the original 78s weren't great and 33s and
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Re:CD=10 LP=30 (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, vinyl - no matter the price point - can be cleaned up to sound amazing.
Some of my 45's are beat half to hell from a few years of heavy use. Nothing is going to return them to form again. Though the ex jukebox ones are much heavier than the consumer versions, and often not as battered.
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But CD if produced well still sounds better. I know people like the imperfections, but they're still imperfections. Plus it's a lot easier to get the CD onto a player or thumb drive than buying a lot of more complicated hardware to deal with vinyl.
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I have always been told that Vinyl has the best fidelity to the original recording.
CDs are mixed to be loud (look up "loudness wars") and you physically can't do that to vinyl so the same album might sound better on vinyl... the first time you play it. These days you can buy straight up USB-outfitted record players that let you record it that time so that you can have a high quality digital copy that will last. But every time you play a vinyl record the quality decreases.
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Re:Highest Quality (Score:5, Interesting)
I think his point was that people who mix for LP are more AWARE of the format's limitations, and by necessity MUST observe them to create a master that can even be manufactured in the first place, let alone one that sounds good. The good and bad thing about digital formats is that they can hide a LOT of sins and shortcuts that would absolutely SLAUGHTER you if you tried getting away with them in analog formats.
Insofar as frequency response and dynamic range go, there's also the fact that with records, it's no so much a hard limit as a continuum of, "how much are you willing to spend manufacturing a thicker record (and is your equipment capable of making them), and how many minutes of audio do you need to cram into it?" As I understand it, you can actually GET shockingly good fidelity from a vinyl record... IF you make it thicker than normal, with wider grooves, and possibly spin it at 45RPM instead of 33-1/3RPM. The infamous "RIAA curve" was mostly about value-engineering to reduce materials cost, shipping weight & bulk, and increase the number of minutes you could put on each side.
Put another way, LP records circa 1980 had shit audio fidelity partly because everyone EXPECTED them to have shit audio fidelity, and record companies were more than happy to meet that expectation by cutting costs.
There's a similar story with cassette tapes. Pre-recorded cassette tapes sounded like shit, because they were never INTENDED to sound like anything BESIDES shit. They used shit tape, duplicated at high speed, and were manufactured with as many cut corners as possible. In comparison, high-quality metal tapes in precision-engineered cassettes, recorded from a first-rate master (like a DDD CD) with Dolby-C compression, sounded SHOCKINGLY good. I'd go so far as to say that in a car, you'd have been seriously hard-pressed to reliably distinguish (via double-blind testing) between a DDD CD and a Dolby-C metal tape recorded FROM that same CD.
The audio master matters, too. CDs and DDD mixing kind of drove each other in the market. DDD mixing existed before CDs, but was rare. Back around 1979 or 1980, my parents bought me "Christmas in the Stars" (the one with classics like, "Merry, Merry Christmas!", "What can you get a Wookie for Christmas (when he already has a comb?", "Bells, Bells, Bells!", and the first known commercial recording with teenage Jon Bon Jovi in "R2D2 we wish you a Merry Christmas"). At the time, I had no idea why, but even then, I noticed that there was something DIFFERENT about its audio quality. It was a record, but somehow, it sounded "cleaner", with "sharper" stereo effects and more "punch". Years later, I was looking at the jacket, and noticed the fine print that said it was digitally mastered. Suddenly, it all made perfect sense.
Are you certain? (Re:Highest Quality) (Score:2)
duplicated at high speed
They used high speed duplication not just for more product in less time but because high speed recording produced a better product. I believe this was pointed out in a video on the Techmoan YouTube channel.
I agree that most store bought cassettes used crap material on the tape, among other corners cut to keep costs low. The use of high speed duplication was a cost cutting tactic but that was actually an improvement over the original real time duplication.
CDs and DDD mixing kind of drove each other in the market.
Sure, sounds about right.
Back around 1979 or 1980
Audio CDs were barely a th
Re: Are you certain? (Re:Highest Quality) (Score:2)
Oh, DDD mastering WAS extraordinarily rare. That's one of the things that made "Christmas in the Stars" so UNIQUE... it was "DDD" before "DDD" even had a trademark & logo. I'm not sure whether Jon Bon Jovi's cousin (uncle?) was insanely rich, or whether George Lucas just let them borrow/rent ILM's digital gear for a few days, but like I said, even knowing nothing at the time about the nature of the record's mastering and its significance, the difference was night & day. You could hear the difference
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No. People do not "mix for the format" period. The matter is prepared without consideration as to any limits. This digital matter is handed to a cutting engineer who modifies it to make it work. This is always a step down in quality.
The idea that LP was mastered for the format is misinformation rooted in the 90s where CD remasters sounded like shit and the vinyl LP sounded awesome because they *weren't* remastered. These days basically 100% of vinyl users the same master as the CD / Streaming service
Re:Highest Quality (Score:5, Informative)
I have always been told that Vinyl has the best fidelity to the original recording.
Not by a musician you haven't. Professional musicians literally laugh at vinyl's quality and always have, even when it was the only option. Vinyl is shit at reproducing the original. In some cases, it can't even reproduce the original order of an album:
https://youtu.be/xPL7cebKI5o?t... [youtu.be]
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Not by a musician you haven't. Professional musicians literally laugh at vinyl's quality and always have, even when it was the only option. Vinyl is shit at reproducing the original. In some cases, it can't even reproduce the original order of an album:
Not relevant to the issue of vinyl but to the limits of technology of the time...
We are seeing re-releases of music videos from the 1980s and 1990s in higher quality because musicians and music labels are going back to find the original film and tape to put on DVD and Blu-ray. Some of the music videos of the 1980s and 1990s were captured on videotape, some on film. Those captured on film would have considerably higher quality than the VHS and laser disc releases of the time, the audio would be quite impro
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It may have been true at one point, but music isn't recorded in analog format these days. It'll be recorded as a digital file, mixed, then compressed appropriately to be recorded on vinyl. The original digital version will always be closer to the original.
That being said, some people like the compression of vinyl and the way the music is changed ever so slightly by the turntable and process of being read by a needle
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the best quality is from a the original tapes that were used to produce the vinyl masters. Get those into the hands of a decent audio engineer and produce a CD, which has a much higher dynamic range than an LP, and you'll have something really special. It's not even that complicated to hire the right people and make these releases. It's been done before.
If you're producing a million CDs, mostly selling radio edits and remixes of pop music. Then whatever sounds loud on a car stereo or a set of ear buds is th
Re:Highest Quality (Score:5, Informative)
I have always been told that Vinyl has the best fidelity to the original recording.
Vinyl fan here.
They're full of shit. The one saving grace is you can't fuck with music quite as badly with vinyl in terms of volume since it makes the tracks too wide. There are a few things you simply can't physically do with vinyl that you can otherwise which removes one axis for fucking up. As a result some vinyl albums might possibly in optimal circumstances be better than the CD versions.
Provided of course you don't play the record too many times, your needle is brand new and you live in a clean room.
Vinyl is analog and the recording equipment was analog, from my understanding, which produces a better match.
Nope. Nyquist and Shannon knew their shit. We know what it takes to reproduce an analogue signal from a digital one. We also know lot about the human auditory system and how vinyl records work. We know how many bits are needed to drop the noise floor to below either what the vinyl noise floor is or the threshold of hearing, and we know how many samples per second we need to exceed what information our ears can pick up.
We can construct exquisitely detailed analogue signals from digital ones, and it's much easier to keep noise out because the signal can be digital right up until you need it (you can even drive your power MOSFETs directly with a sigma-delta modulator if you have a mind to).
When it comes to accurately reproducing whatever your transducer picks up you are much better off making it digital as soon as possible and keeping it there as long as possible.
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Nope. Nyquist and Shannon knew their shit. We know what it takes to reproduce an analogue signal from a digital one. We also know lot about the human auditory system and how vinyl records work. We know how many bits are needed to drop the noise floor to below either what the vinyl noise floor is or the threshold of hearing, and we know how many samples per second we need to exceed what information our ears can pick up
Then why was the blu ray spec increased to 24bit 192khz?
Re:Highest Quality (Score:4, Insightful)
Then why was the blu ray spec increased to 24bit 192khz?
Because bits got cheaper to store and more is better when marketing a product.
Re:Highest Quality (Score:5, Interesting)
Then why was the blu ray spec increased to 24bit 192khz?
Due to an unfortunate historical quirk. Nyquist was right in theory. That theory includes perfect reconstruction filters which were impossible to achieve in practice which contributed a lot to crap sounding digital of the 80s and very early 90s. Along comes Don't and Toshiba with an idea: increase the sampling rate and the reconstruction filter becomes less critical. And it was all good. But in the meantime clever engineers thought... Well the benefit is achieved only at conversion, there's not point in having the source format in that resolution. So they baked the principle into modern DACs, oversampling, digital filtering, all standard in even $2 crappy DACs and achieve the same thing as higher sample rates did: reduce the reliance on the reconstruction filter. And by the time this was standardised the blu ray spec was as well. Too late.
That's the sample rate, the bit depth has a different reason. Cinema level sound has some insane dynamic range. While that isn't relevant in your living room, a digital modification such as e.g. dynamic volume control benefits from the extra headroom 24 bits offered, just like a JPEG looks pretty good until you try and change is colour balance or brightness.
It's for this reason music is often mastered at 24bit/48kHz. Anything above that (high res audio) is these days pure irrelevant marketing wank.
Re: Highest Quality (Score:2)
Not all turntables use needles. Laser-based turntables are popular with the audiophiles.
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Laser-based turntables are popular with the audiophiles.
I'm gonna need a source on that. They're popular with archivists, who have a need for minimal physical contact with historical recordings that are possibly in very fragile condition. But they're really not that great in terms of general high-fidelity playback. Perhaps you misspelled "audiophools", who I can definitely see dropping $8k for a laser player to hook up with their oxygen-free cables on little stands that keep them exactly horizontal six inches above the floor, and played on an amp with a $500 woo