Vinyl Outsold CDs for the First Time Since 1987 (gizmodo.com) 129
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has revealed in its annual revenue report that vinyl sales have outpaced CD sales for the first time since 1987. From a report: Sales of physical music formats, like vinyl, CDs, and cassette tapes, saw a 4% increase from 2021 to 2022, but last year vinyl made up $1.2 billion of the $1.7 billion in physical media sales according to the report. In physical units, records outsold CDs 41.3 million to 33.4 million, respectively -- RIAA says this is vinyl's sixteenth consecutive year of growth. CD sales actually fell 18% from $585 million to $482 million in revenue between 2021 to 2022, but the report suggests that 2021 saw a rebound in sales after 2020 took a chunk out of CD manufacturing and sales.
So vinyl is officially booming again, and it may have something to do with the pandemic. The height of the covid-19 pandemic forced concert venues to shut down over health concerns and saw artists and their labels rethinking their music release strategies. Vinyl may have offered a special experience without consumers ever having to leave their homes, and it was an untapped stream of income for artists and labels.
So vinyl is officially booming again, and it may have something to do with the pandemic. The height of the covid-19 pandemic forced concert venues to shut down over health concerns and saw artists and their labels rethinking their music release strategies. Vinyl may have offered a special experience without consumers ever having to leave their homes, and it was an untapped stream of income for artists and labels.
CD's are dying, Netcraft confirms it (Score:4, Funny)
Along with BSD.
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Silly (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously this is more about the complete drop off of people buying CDs, rather than the rather modest vinyl revival.
If I want to even listen to a CD I have to use an XBox LOL. It's a dead format, while vinyl is a niche format.
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Obviously this is more about the complete drop off of people buying CDs, rather than the rather modest vinyl revival.
If I want to even listen to a CD I have to use an XBox LOL. It's a dead format, while vinyl is a niche format.
Unlike every previous format, kids now hang vinyl on the wall as art. Most don't even own a record player.
If by "niche" you mean pointless metric, yes.
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I doubt that's true. Looking on Target, it looks like "Harry's House" (a big recent album) sells for $38, while turntables start at $50.
I also don't see much in the way of LP display cases. I know they exist, but (for instance) it looks like Target doesn't sell any.
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I also don't see much in the way of LP display cases. I know they exist, but (for instance) it looks like Target doesn't sell any.
Thumbtacks are still a thing. A lot of the people buying them for aesthetic reasons aren't overly concerned about dust/scratches, because the actual listening to the album takes place through streaming services.
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I also don't see much in the way of LP display cases. I know they exist, but (for instance) it looks like Target doesn't sell any.
https://www.amazon.com/Music-A... [amazon.com]
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I doubt that's true. Looking on Target, it looks like "Harry's House" (a big recent album) sells for $38, while turntables start at $50.
The fact that it's oddly priced at 2x higher than CD format, tends to highlight a rather "artsy" price tag. $50 for the machine but $38 to feed it? Who did they hire in marketing? The Printer Ink mafia?
And ironically, the hipster with the $38 album and $50 portable record player sitting at Starbucks, is doing all that for the 'gram, not the music.
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Unlike every previous format, kids now hang vinyl on the wall as art.
Some people with big CD collections used to buy plastic grids that would hold the jewelcases on the wall as a decoration. It looked a bit busy, though.
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I've got to think that younger people are the driving the most sales, and that they're not going to be as interested in the classical music formats (e.g. symphonies, operas, etc.) suitable for CDs. CDs also provide hi-fidelity, convenient, defined playlists that can be fired up without booting/connecting/controlling via an internet connected device - esp. if you have one of those cassettes that hold multiple discs.
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You mean the Sony 400 disk DVD/CD-SA player?
I have one in my trunk.
talkin' 'bout my generation (Score:2)
I've got to think that younger people are the driving the most sales
Since time immemorial, every generation thinks the succeeding generation are complete idiots. My generation is the first to be given incontrovertible proof that this is true.
Archival format in case of re-ripping in lossless (Score:2)
It's a dead format
Its an archival format should someone ever need to re-rip their own music files, ie lossless. In a box, in a closet or the garage.
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Vinyl is a terrible archival format, because it is the ultimate lossy format. Every time you play it, it degrades. The average persons' storage of it degrades just sitting there.
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Yeah, go back to making them out of 100% all natural shellac!
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shellac was too rigid; it lost the warmth of proper wax . . .
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rather than the rather modest vinyl revival.
If you think the vinyl revival is "modest" then you're clearly not paying attention. 43million vinyl albums were sold last year representing 17 straight years of increasing sales, and in those 17 years growth has trended exponentially. I'm not using that term facetiously. The number of vinyl records sold in 2022 over 2021 (just the growth in that year) is more than the total number of albums sold in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013 combined. Sales would probably be even higher if there there wasn't a severe backl
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Memba when you had to pay tens of dollars for albums on media that wears out and we couldn't all just use youtube-dl to get mp3s? Come on, you know you want a giant disk that spins on a suitcase sized player.
Re: Silly (Score:2)
Re: Silly (Score:5, Interesting)
Vinyl has no purity to it.
Look up the RIAA equalization curve. Vinyl isn't very good at storing sound, so it needs preprocessing to make it actually usable.
Plus the dynamic range and frequency response are lackluster. Plus the turntable itself is imperfect and adds noise.
Re: Silly (Score:5, Informative)
And the needle slowly destroys the groove which creates a nice polluting layer of vinyl dust ie microplastics, which admittedly no one cared about back in the day but matters now.
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Stop licking your records. And definitely stop licking mine.
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For a few years now, a friend of mine has been talking about implementing a player that uses a laser to track the groves - still waiting as I've got some old vinyl I'd like to preserve :)
https://www.elpj.com/ [elpj.com]
It's an enormously difficult job to make such a player, which is why record players with needles still exist. It would be cheaper to buy one.
Re: Silly (Score:5, Interesting)
Fucking nonsense. Nothing has "purity" on it. Literally nothing.
Voice -> Mouth, room dynamics, microphone, microphone preamp, mixing, mastering, OUT, amplifier (DSP potential), speakers, ear.
Even your ear varies in it's ability to perceive. Every last bit of the chain compromises "purity". You never - NEVER - hear what was recorded. Ever, ever, ever.
Vinyl is one part of that chain, and it's compensated for in mastering. It is produced knowing it's destined for vinyl, and it's shaped accordingly.
"Purity" is the single dumbest argument in all of audio. Purity isn't the goal. It's that the final product sounds great.
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Vinyl is one part of that chain, and it's compensated for in mastering. It is produced knowing it's destined for vinyl, and it's shaped accordingly.
Indeed it is. And the sad fact is that this process is completely lossy. Vinyl mastering as a process has audible limitations (e.g. you can't encode certain phase angles at certain frequencies in the groove leading to a loss of stereo below certain frequencies, and not frequencies where ears can't tell). But even more to the point is that the application applied in mastering cannot be perfectly undone.
You're right the concept of purity is stupid. You should see how much DSP actually goes into DAC designs. N
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Nothing has "purity" on it. Literally nothing.
Unmixed, single-microphone-per-track audio on analog media without equalization has legitimate purity. It's the closest thing you can get to the real thing, and more importantly for my argument, it hasn't been tampered with any more than absolutely necessary. Listening to it won't be the same as being there, but nothing has been done to it to make it less like that.
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Sure, if you like. But then it devolves into pointless discussion on even vs. odd order harmonics in distortion, pleasant vs. unpleasant... etc.. Now we're deeply into the subjective, and lots of people "like" the types of distortion that are introduced.
The only goal that matters is whether or you like the result. Everything else is just technical dickwaving that doesn't actually mean anything about what is ultimately a personal experience.
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But then it devolves into pointless discussion on even vs. odd order harmonics in distortion, pleasant vs. unpleasant... etc.. Now we're deeply into the subjective, and lots of people "like" the types of distortion that are introduced.
Distortion can be added but not taken away. If people want that kind of distortion it should be a factor of their listening equipment. If artists want that distortion it should be a factor of the equipment they use to produce music. At no point should we settle for it being the result of a poor storage medium.
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His point about compression has some merit: the high compression in the loudness wars doesn't work on vinyl since the format limitations mean the needle would bounce out out of the groove. So the format's somewhat severe limitations happen to prevent a type of fuckery that the CD can cope with just fine.
Not that it makes a difference: there are precious few cases where only crap digital versions are being made but the perfect mastering is done on vinyl.
As a vinyl fan I say anyone listening to vinyl for the
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Popular misconception. No, analog isn't magic. Eventually you get to a tangible limit of some sort -- plastic can be only molded so precisely. The needle has inertia. These limits can be converted to an equivalent bitrate/bit depth, and it turns out that vinyl is kind of crap, and CD wins this contest by far.
If you don't believe me, watch a video of a wire recorder. Analog, sounds like complete crap. Or try the fact that video on vinyl has been attempted, and only worked to an extent in a much different, mu
Growth yet remaining "noise" statistically (Score:2)
RIAA says this is vinyl's sixteenth consecutive year of growth
0.0001%, 0.0002%, 0.0003%, ... 0.0016% represents 16 consecutive years of growth. Yet all that activity remains on the "noise" level.
Sixteen years of year-after-year growth in unit sales.
The benefit of physical media is typically in the "purity" of the sound, ...
For some small number of playings. Its a format where media literally degrades with use.
Granted, when listening to your music via plastic kernels of corn shoved into your ear canal, it may be hard to discern the difference.
That depends entirely on the design of the device in the ear. The tympanic membrane of the ear does not know the size and distance of the speaker. Compression waves impacting the membrane are compression waves. All the membrane can perhaps differentiate is the quality of the speaker. Which
Re: Growth yet remaining "noise" statistically (Score:2)
The ear pinna makes front and back sounds sound slightly different. The ear also processes sound that's come through the head. This is how we can tell if a sound is up or down,forward and backward, with only 2 ears. A headphone cant replicate that.
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The ear pinna makes front and back sounds sound slightly different. The ear also processes sound that's come through the head. This is how we can tell if a sound is up or down,forward and backward, with only 2 ears. A headphone cant replicate that.
Headphones seem to be superior. "As of April 2022, 3D audio for speakers is not as good as the headset 3d audio. Speaker 3d audio sounds a thinner and not as accurate compared to the headset experience. Most people trying out speaker 3d audio seem to report similar issues, with most of them turning it off in favour of regular audio."
https://thegamingsetup.com/ps5... [thegamingsetup.com].
Re: Growth yet remaining "noise" statistically (Score:2)
Everyone's ears and heads are different with slightly different phasing delays and frequency filtering. I doubt it's possible to build a generic 3d audio system that works well for everyone out the box. It would need to be set up for each individual.
All The Hipsters Know (Score:3)
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8-track tape is the new hotness.
You haven't listened to music until you've hear a live band chained to a radiator.
They get free heating and board, you get free music... It's a win-win-win for everyone.
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8 track tapes were great in cars. They were easy to physically handle, and you could instantly skip the worst parts of the album -- at the cost of jumping elsewhere. Cassettes were a step back. Both of them had a tendency to self-destruct after a while. At home I stuck to vinyl since you had random access to anywhere on the album.
When is reel-to-reel coming back? (Score:2)
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I have an 8-track in my Cadillac, you insensitive clod!
[actually, I'd had the car for a couple of weeks when it occurred to me that a '72 likely did, and I went to the garage to investigate. Sure enough, the radio dial flips up as you push it in. I managed to get a few redneck tapes before the thrift shops stopped bothering to carry them.]
Warning: Manual labor involved (Score:5, Funny)
My son went off to college, enthusiastically telling me how he and his roommate planned to have a turntable in their living room to play vinyl.
"Are you kidding?" I asked. "Do you know what a hassle it is to deal with records?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well, like having to turn the record over half-way through."
"What? You don't still have to do that, do you?"
Re:Warning: Manual labor involved (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a good reason that vinyl was replaced by cd and cd was replaced by mp3 or whatever other digital format. My car has a nice sound system but no bluetooth (older car). After adding cheap BT adapter I stopped playing CDs to the extent that my CD changer does not work anymore. Lubricants are all dried up. LPs are pain in the rear end to play and taking care of them is even bigger pain. And CDs while much better, still a huge pain.
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So we got her a player and she bought a few disks. I think only couple were actually playable, the rest were skipping like crazy.
Let me guess, you probably bought a turntable with this awful mechanism [youtube.com]? They're known to be prone to skipping. Realistically, a bare minimum entry-level turntable is the Audio-Technica AT-LP60X. Also, even brand new records usually have bits of paper from the sleeve stuck to them, so a microfiber record brush is also something you'd need.
Yes, it's all a bit of a hassle and costs significantly more money than just using a music steaming service. That's why record collecting is more like a hobby these da
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And de-staticing and cleaning the LPs before playing (which I never got the point because all my LPs still had tons of hiss and pops).
The only person I can imaging wanting a new turntable is someone who's never used one.
Oh, and mention to your kid you have to play the tracks in the order they're on the album and skipping tracks is a royal pain in the ass. The only thing worse is skipping tracks on a cassette.
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"Oh, and mention to your kid you have to play the tracks in the order they're on the album and skipping tracks is a royal pain in the ass. The only thing worse is skipping tracks on a cassette."
This is easily fixed by listening to good music.
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This is easily fixed by listening to good music.
Did you miss the part where I said I was talking to my kids?
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>The only thing worse is skipping tracks on a cassette.
in all fairness, that tended to be easier on a middle to good quality cassette player than on reel to reel . . . [well, at least if the tape didn't tangle . . .]
hawk, who actually has a wire recorder in his garage that he pretends he'll get working someday.
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> and disks now come in all kinds of colors not just black.
*snort*.
*chortle*.
I grew listening to 78s from my father's childhood.
Not simply different colors, but *shapes*. One was a Santa-clause head (with a color picture of Santa), and the Ringmaster of the Circus was also non-round, iirc. [and I *still* get the lyrics echoing through my head from time to time!]
and then there's that famous non-black record from a well-known group of stoners, and . . .
Two lasers, analog, ... (Score:2)
"Well, like having to turn the record over half-way through."
"What? You don't still have to do that, do you?"
Maybe we need a hybrid technology. Shine lasers on an LP to "read" both sides. Keep it analog. No physical contact, no degredation with play.
Re: Two lasers, analog, ... (Score:3)
You're 40 years late. Laser turntables were tried and they were rubbish. Tracking and noise problems were unsurmountable.
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You're 40 years late. Laser turntables were tried and they were rubbish. Tracking and noise problems were unsurmountable.
Digital technology has progressed faster than analog but analog has not stood still.
Re: Two lasers, analog, ... (Score:2)
A modern digital tracking system could probably solve the wobbly groove tracking issue, but I dont see how it would solve the noise issue. A mote of dust a needle would just push aside got read by the laser and you heard a pop.
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A modern digital tracking system could probably solve the wobbly groove tracking issue, but I dont see how it would solve the noise issue. A mote of dust a needle would just push aside got read by the laser and you heard a pop.
Keeping with the analog approach add an airstream to blow such material away.
Re: Two lasers, analog, ... (Score:2)
It would probably have to be a mini leaf blower to overcome the static gluing the dust to the vinyl.
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It would probably have to be a mini leaf blower to overcome the static gluing the dust to the vinyl.
Fine, add an anti-static spray. :-)
Also I was expected a expecting a vigorous stream of air, just a very small focused one.
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There's a reason why depleted uranium (or similar radioactive substance) was used for the anti-static dust cleaners - the dust was stuck to the record via static electricity. The radioactive element basically
Trash for the Trash God! (Score:2)
Hell yes! (Score:3)
A direct-to-disc recording on my Miracord 50H connected to an all-tube Philips Reverbeo B7x43a produces sound you just have to hear to believe. And when the tubes are glowing, and amazing classics of music that I OWN are playing, it makes me wonder how we got lost in all this digital/streaming/DRM/social-media craziness. That is, I wonder that until the unbridled enjoyment of it takes even that away. There is no better way to unplug, my friends.
You don't have to be an Audiophile [pinterest.ca] to be an audiophile.
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A direct-to-disc recording on my Miracord 50H connected to an all-tube Philips Reverbeo B7x43a produces sound you just have to hear to believe. And when the tubes are glowing, and amazing classics of music that I OWN are playing, it makes me wonder how we got lost in all this digital/streaming/DRM/social-media craziness. That is, I wonder that until the unbridled enjoyment of it takes even that away. There is no better way to unplug, my friends.
You don't have to be an Audiophile [pinterest.ca] to be an audiophile.
And listen to the wonderfully re-created clicks and pops if you haven't kept up with your cleaning and even IF you cleaned it before every play, there is still some dirt that sticks around. Don't have to deal with that with digital recordings.
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Oooh! (Score:2)
BTW, I didn't know you could get Spotify on vinyl.
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So hip, it hurts!
No, hip would be using a laser to read the record grooves. :-)
Small numbers (Score:3)
One vanishingly small number is recently slightly greater than another vanishingly small number. And yes, 41.3 million units is a vanishing small number for mass market physical media. During the 80's people were buying a billion audio CDs annually in the US alone.
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Physical media still makes up 20% of music sales revenue. The number is small, but hardly "vanishingly" small.
During the 80's people were buying a billion audio CDs annually in the US alone.
No they weren't. CDs never sold 1 billion units a year in the US alone, ever. Not even in 2000 when their popularity peaked (900million) and definitely not in the 80s throughout most of which they sold less than vinyl did last year, because ... and I can't stress this enough: They weren't even released until 1982, and it would years before rich people bought that cutting edge thing known as the comp
Unsurprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Vinyl tends to be sold at much higher prices; it's more about a collector's item than being a music format; the number of people buying a vinyl record as the primary means of listening to a song are extraordinarily small - if you're buying the record, you've probably got the album saved in a playlist on Spotify.
This means that records can sell for much higher premiums; $30-$40 for a vinyl record is not at all unheard of, but nobody is dropping $40 on a CD for anything.
Similarly, there don't tend to be vinyl pressings of debut albums. "Dark Side of the Moon" and "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" will sell on vinyl, because they've been iconic albums for decades. Some up-and-coming artists have some vinyl pressings of their release singles, but full album presses seem to be the purview of known quantities. Taylor Swift's name can sell wax cylinders, so of course all of her albums get vinyl pressings on release day. Pink Pantheress needs a bit more time to coagulate before a full album press is getting made.
So yes, if you look at the revenue, it's pretty easy to see that a vanity format at much higher prices limited to known sellers is going to do better than a utilitarian format with far less collector appeal.
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High-quality vinyl seems pretty accessible for bands, actually.
Almost every small indie band I listen to has managed to debut albums with vinyl -- sites like Bandcamp allow fans to preorder and if it gets over some amount (I think 200) it'll get pressed. Buying collector packs with vinyl is one way I love to give money to these small bands, since we know they won't make any on Spotify.
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High-quality vinyl seems pretty accessible for bands, actually.
Almost every small indie band I listen to has managed to debut albums with vinyl -- sites like Bandcamp allow fans to preorder and if it gets over some amount (I think 200) it'll get pressed. Buying collector packs with vinyl is one way I love to give money to these small bands, since we know they won't make any on Spotify.
True, but I think you're proving my point. Bandcamp pressings, based on your example, are pressed based on demonstrated demand for collector's items, rather than because people are listening to the records as the sole audio medium. The indie bands will do a 200-record pressing if they hit 200 preorders, but they aren't proactively doing 100,000 unit pressings - that's the purview of Taylor Swift, The Grateful Dead, and Serato Timecode...all of which cost more on vinyl than CD or MP3 download or streaming, a
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I'd add several releases are exclusive to vinyl or (horror) cassette.
Hard to do an apples to apples comparison.
I have noticed some companies offering box set CDs with extensive liner notes of lesser known albums on the cheap, with extensive liner notes.
As long as the keep making CDs, I'll keep buying them.
psycho girl (Score:2)
>Taylor Swift's name can sell wax cylinders,
sure, but she'd still stalk you and publish songs about you for dumping her . . .
Her going to pure bubblegum pop is one of few good things to happen to country music in the last couple of decades . . .
Physical quality Vs Audio Quality (Score:5, Interesting)
In the music sphere, the pinacle of Audio Quality were the SACD and the DVD-Audio. The only thing that could come even close is lossless compressed high bit rate high sample rate music*. Sadly, the respective backers engaged in a format war that was won by no-one.
But in the music sphere, the pinacle of Physical Object quality was the Vynil, with it's huge sizes came the creative freedom of intrincate cover art and/or booklets.
No wonder that, in this age of downloads/streams/Plex/iTunes, Vinyl is making a comeback.
After all, if you want a physical object to give enbodyment to your music, why not choose the best physical object there is? Is not the best sounding one, or the one with the best fidelity, but is the best at the task of being a physical object that embodies music.
* In uncompressed mode and 5.1 mixes SACD has a data rate of 5.6Mbps, while DVD-Audio has a rate of 9.6Mbps. Meanwhile SACD has an astronomicaly-ludicrus-overkill sample rate of 2.8Mhz (whether that is usefull, useless or detrimental, is another matter entirely), while DVD-Audio's is 96Khz @24b per sample (176Khz and 192Khz are possible in stereo and mono).
PS: Please, if someone knnows point me to some music service (streaming or otherwise) that beats those figures in lossless compressed mode. Thanks in advance
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Vinyl does not have dynamic range of CD or even MP3. The absolute silence on vinyl is not possible due to microscopic imperfections. The upper volume is limited by the width of the track. MP3 can be encoded in nearly lossless quality given enough bandwidth. And there are much better formats including lossless codecs that can achieve dynamic range and quality much better than vinyl. But hey , there is always suckers that would buy some gold cables or some other BS gadgets designed to separate fool and his money.
It's not about the sound, it's about the experience. It's for the same reason that regardless of how good your TV and speaker system is you'll have a more profound viewing experience in a theatre.
The larger artwork, the grooves on the record, the physical understanding of how the sound is generated, the understanding you're locked into that particular progression of songs, that all enhances the listening experience.
If I'm just playing music while working on the computer of course I just play some digital fi
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I think you also have to consider that vinyl has a huge legacy base of content, dating back to the 1930s. CD's, for all their technical superiority, had a relatively short run before being superseded by digital formats.
I suspect people who are buying new vinyl aren't buying new vinyl exclusively. If you're consuming vintage content, the variety available on vinyl still dwarfs that available on CD's.
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>I think you also have to consider that vinyl has a huge legacy base of content, dating back to the 1930s.
newbies.
[rolls eyes]
bakelite, shellac, and even wax. Now *that's* legacy audio! :)
hawk
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Vinyl does not have dynamic range of CD or even MP3.
Dynamic range comes down more to mastering rather than the format itself. Read about the "loudness wars" if you want to know why it's not uncommon to find vinyl records with more dynamic range than the same album remastered for digital release.
Keep in mind that mostly applies to significantly older releases. Just about everything newly pressed to vinyl today is mastered from the same source as the CD.
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From my own observations, the Loudness Wars are still raging. I mean, perhaps not as bad as the worst times of the early 2000s, but still. . . Everything is still mastered "hot" instead of mastered for dynamic range, and the difference between today's releases and those from the pre-war era remains very obvious.
If record companies ever start mastering CDs for sound quality again, I'll pop the champagne cork and start buying new discs. But, sadly, I just don't see any trend in that direction.
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You are limiting your analysis to music that has been digitally sampled. As an alternative, consider sitting in the middle of a theater with decent acoustics, with the orchestra spread out before you, each musician playing an actual, physical instrument, not a synthesizer. No matter how high your sample rate, no matter how many bits per sample, no matter how many channels, even with the world's best speakers you can't beat that.
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Unit sales, vs. dollars would be more useful (Score:2)
Have CD's decreased in price with unit sales up? Can't tell from article. Similarly for vinyl, are prices up that much, with unit sales down? It's like the fake box-office sales on movies as an indicator of popularity, which it isn't but could be a litmus for how much ticket prices have gone up per year, or the increased prevalence of luxury movie accommodations with reclining chairs, individual rooms looking out over the theater but with surround sound tuned per room. How about dinner served while you
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As for CD vs. vinyl, the 1st time you listen to vinyl with a standard player using a needle stylus, you've degraded the copy as the needle rubs off the highest tones.
That's why I record my records at 24/96 on their initial, usually singular play.
Electronic / cloud sales don't really count as sales -- as they are only rentals.
Where are you buying digital music that doesn't allow downloading in flac or wav?
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i'm not / I don't.
The argument is too complex - and pointless. (Score:2)
Let it go. I don't give a crap about arguments about audio accuracy, theoretical limitations, why nostalgia is nonsense... I won't spend any time reading some fucking teenager's angsty analysis of the subject. If you spend more than a paragraph explaining your point of view, you're pissing in the wind. People who don't like vinyl are on your side already, and people who do don't care to review your math. I like records. I like them vastly more than any other form of physical media. I think the guy who buys
In other news, (Score:2)
nostalgia sells. Big time.
CD Prices Skyrocketed in the 2000s (Score:2)
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I was in my 20's in the 90's CDs were between $15-$18, not affordable.
false logic (Score:2)
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No Vinyl is not booming, physical media is collapsing, just CD's are going faster.
Completely false. Neither have CD sales haven't changed in the past 5 years, nor has physical media in total changed in terms of percentage of total revenue from the music industry. In fact sales are up in all categories. The only form of music which has collapsed at all in the past 4 years is paid for downloaded music (supplanted entirely by streaming increase).
Bring back cylinders (Score:2)
Not even joking. Go out there and search for Amberol on YouTube. That's a type of Edison cylinder that was particularly durable, but even lower quality ones are still playable after over 100 years. The fidelity is superior because you get constant velocity of the needle over the surface without any compensation. Discs won because you can pack more surface area in to a given volume of platters than you can for a given volume of cylinders. It reminds me of the whole Beta vs. VHS thing. Beta was higher q
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Yes. That's the compensation to which I'm referring. It's not perfect. With cylinders, there's no need to modify the raw audio like that on either end.
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I had never really thought it through like that before. You're right. As long as the player plays at the same RPMs the master was cut at, there should be no need to modify the raw audio.
I guess the whole process seemed like "black magic" back in the day, and so this false idea got planted and I never questioned it.
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that's why it's "rpm" instead of "inches/second"
varying radial velocity or recording rate was used to take advantage of the greater amount of magnetic data in another ring of a magnetic disks. Most varied write speed, but the original Mac varied disk speed to keep write speed constant [saved a few chips when the CUP was running the disk. as a bonus, it "sang" to you while loading"
hawk
The CD Revival (Score:2)
There have been rumors of a CD revival making the rounds, but is it really happening? From my observations, CD interest and activity seems to be up, but it's almost all oriented around used CDs. It's thrift shops, it's the used CD bin in the record store, it's eBay and Discogs. They've reported a steady upward trend in CDs sales on Discogs for a few years now. None of that shows up in the record industry's sales statistics.
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That's just old people buying CDs before it gets cancelled from the streaming services and never heard again.
Haha charming obsolescence (Score:2)
Two obsolete technologies. One of them has panache, though. This is like telling me that bullwhips outsold buggy whips.
Collectible? (Score:2)