Vinyl Records Outsell CDs For the Second Year Running (theverge.com) 142
People bought 43 million vinyl records last year, according to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). From a report: That's 6 million more than the number of CDs sold in 2023, marking the second time since 1987 that's happened and reflecting the steady 17-year-running growth of vinyl sales. Vinyl, which tends to be pricier than the newer format, also far outstripped CDs in actual money made, raking in $1.4 billion compared to $537 million from CDs. The RIAA's report shows that CD revenue was up, too, but in terms of physical products sold, people actually bought about 700,000 fewer CDs in 2023 than the year before. (If you're curious, nearly half a million cassettes sold last year, too, according to Billboard.)
Isnt the news CDs are trivial collectors items (Score:2)
Why? (Score:2)
They're expensive as shit.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Expense and sound worse.
When you consider what The Loudness Wars did to recording and producing, vinyl is actually the superior recording.
CD audio had the opportunity to sound better. It was pissed away by Greed. You will find a rare exception, but it’s certainly not the norm.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
CD audio had the opportunity to sound better. It was pissed away by Greed. You will find a rare exception, but itâ(TM)s certainly not the norm.
That may be the case for rock and pop, but it's certainly not the case for classical. In classical, the loudness war doesn't exist and CDs are not compressed to within an inch of their lives by greedy record producers.
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CD audio had the opportunity to sound better. It was pissed away by Greed. You will find a rare exception, but itâ(TM)s certainly not the norm.
That may be the case for rock and pop, but it's certainly not the case for classical. In classical, the loudness war doesn't exist and CDs are not compressed to within an inch of their lives by greedy record producers.
You are probably correct about this given the lack of demand for classical compared to others, but feel free to share the specific catalogs to validate.
On a related note, if any music should be preserved properly it’s likely more every other category of music. We’ve managed to preserve “classical” for hundreds of years now. Literally.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Interesting)
CDs are not compressed to within an inch of their lives
I even have seen recordings that came in two masterings so you can choose. I have this particular album https://www.svetlinroussev.net... [svetlinroussev.net] you can read "bonus CD inside Mobility mastering" (the other CD is called "fidelity" mastering).
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Greed manifested itself in other forms for philarmonic music: by removing the 3 letters indicating if the source/master/remix was digital or analog.
My first CDs had DDD, meaning digital from start to end. But AAD CDs did tend to sell less, so they got rid of that information.
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CDs are not compressed to within an inch of their lives by greedy record producers.
Nope but they aren't comparable to hi-res audio either.
CD Quality: 16 bit audio sampled at 44 kHz.
Hi-res audio: 24 bit audio sampled up to 192 kHz.
https://www.whathifi.com/advic... [whathifi.com]
Vinyl and CDs should be dead but any likely replacement will probably be loaded with DRM.
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You might find this article interesting. It's a bit basic in places but looks generally good at first glance.
https://www.mojo-audio.com/blo... [mojo-audio.com]
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I feel like I might be a delusional audiophile after reading that article because I take issue with a few points.
16 to 24 is a dynamic range issue. PCM audio is "wasteful" because it doesn't allocate the bits in ways that make the most sense for human hearing. It's nice and simple mathematically, but it does mean that if you're dealing with music that's got quiet parts and loud parts then your quiet parts will suffer quality loss as it has to top out at 15-bit, 14-bit, 12-bit... Better to just brute force i
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
When you consider what The Loudness Wars did to recording and producing, vinyl is actually the superior recording.
Vinyls haven't been recorded or mastered separately except for rare exceptions for well over a decade now. Those vinyls outselling CDs are the same loud masters.
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When you consider what The Loudness Wars did to recording and producing, vinyl is actually the superior recording.
Vinyls haven't been recorded or mastered separately except for rare exceptions for well over a decade now. Those vinyls outselling CDs are the same loud masters.
Fair point and I stand corrected. Vinyl was the superior medium. That said, vinyl outselling the vinyl player by quite a large margin tends to validate that new vinyl owners aren’t buying them for the sound. They’re buying them for the art, so I guess our point is mute, pun intended.
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So what about music mastered and recorded before then - 2010 and earlier? 2011-2024 hasn't exactly been a golden era for music. Plenty of current vinyl sales are people buying classic albums released decades previously.
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Plenty of current vinyl sales are people buying classic albums released decades previously.
That isn't what is contributing to vinyl sales now. The majority of music sales are (as they always have been) new releases. Vinyl is no exception, virtually every modern musician no matter big or small releases their stuff on vinyl and that has largely led to the resurgence of the format.
The minority of people chasing dynamics of older releases have always been buying vinyl (including myself). That hasn't changed, and those people were reflected in vinyl sales going back quite a few years and has nothing t
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Looking at vinyl sales over a longer period of time, there seems to be a lot more representation of older albums, these are the top selling albums from the 2010s according to the NME:
01. The Beatles – ‘Abbey Road’ (558,000 copies)
02. Pink Floyd – ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ (376,000 copies)
03. Guardians of the Galaxy Awesome Mix Vol. 1 (367,000 copies)
04. Bob Marley & The Wailers – Legend (364,000 copies)
05. Amy Winehouse – Back to Black (351,000 copies)
06. Mi
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It's very possible for the vinyl to sound better even from the same master mixtape. Radiohead OK Computer is one example.
It's a total mixed bag. Many albums from the 80s sound shit on CD because they were just in a mad rush to release everything to CD. In the 90s, it could go either way. If the master mixtape was decent,
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CD Audio is digital. It literally offers no difference to all other Digital Formats, excepting for bitrate differences. Most listening is via some sort of digital conversion.
Vinyl is analog. There is a real benefit to analog, as it does not have some of the clipping effects digital is known for. Can most people tell the difference? Probably not.
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There is clipping in low bitrate Digital. It USED To be a thing back in the day of the very first digital playback devices (not CD players). CDs haven't changed since then.
I know "Okay Boomer"
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Low bitrate digital recordings suffer from quantization noise, not clipping. Get your terms straight. However with CD (16-bit) recordings the ratio between the music and this noise is 96 dB which beats any analog medium by several orders of magnitude. Even you admit that this "clipping" phenomenon does not exist in CD, so why did you even mention it?
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And I'm out of mod points at the moment. Yes, this.
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To be clear, Vinyl is an analog copy of a digital recording. If the original had clipping, the vinyl will also have it
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Re: Why? (Score:2)
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Here the price between CDs and Vinyl isn't very different. As for sound, a lot of people collect vinyl and don't listen to them. What you do get is far nicer album cover art and additional collectables which you can enjoy looking at while you stream the songs from Spotify.
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That's really the only thing I miss about vinyl -- Thos great big album covers. Especially the two disc sets, which had covers that opened like books, or even were books.
Anyone who doesn't remember this can get an idea of what it was like here [youtube.com].
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Re: Why? (Score:2)
My husband uses reel to reel at home. Sounds a lot better than vinyl to me. No comparison.
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Expense and sound worse.
So don't listen to them using your AirPods. Problem Solved.
If you must, get some first class BEATS earplugs or a top quality Grado headset.
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They look cool. I've see a couple of articles lately where the younger crowds buy vinyl to use as a decorative "retro" music library. Many don't even have record players so what they sound like is irrelevant.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm going to invest in a wax cylinder factory to beat the next trend. So long suckers...
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This. Vinyl sales are more about art, not music.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Informative)
It's also about providing an additional revenue stream to artists to help make up for the loss of revenue from streaming.
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The article says CD players are way less common now. A lot of new cars don't include them. A lot of new computers don't include them. So, if you gotta buy something to play the physical media, might as well get the better-quality vinyl. Regular CDs always have been, and always will be, garbage.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Funny)
The worst part about CDs is the mechanical wear from the laser touching it. Or if you don't pick the laser off the CD properly it can scratch it.
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I wonder if vinyl is better at preventing loudness creep. Bigger grooves seem like they'd hit a limit at some point.
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I wonder if vinyl is better at preventing loudness creep. Bigger grooves seem like they'd hit a limit at some point.
The answer to this is "it depends". Sometimes vinyl records are mastered using a better version of the mix with less dynamic range compression applied (counterintuitively, dynamic range compression makes a digital recordings sound louder), but it's also possible to cut a record using the same mix as a CD by attenuating the bass a bit and reducing the recording level. That basically just results in a nosier, worse sounding version of the CD.
But hey, if you stamp it on some really cool looking colored vinyl
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Recording Engineers generally try to master separately for vinyl if they are allowed to do so, but whether or not that is actually done depends on the record label and artist's wishes. Most of the time, the label wants to do the thing that costs the least. Given the opportunity, those same engineers will also create separate mixes for mono and stereo and possibly some flavors of multichannel (e.g. Atmos) as well.
I don't like the way vinyl sounds and I hate the idea of a medium that degrades every time it's
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I wonder if vinyl is better at preventing loudness creep. Bigger grooves seem like they'd hit a limit at some point.
No they aren't for 2 reasons: a) music on vinyl has trivially hit saturation limits of phono stages ever since the RIAA curve was introduced. b) 99.9% of vinyl is the digital master pressed on vinyl.
What may actually work the best against loudness creep is Spotify and Apple music telling producers their shitty over loud recordings will be normalised to -12LUFS defeating any purpose of trying to master hotter, in fact the hotter the master the less loud it will sound on streaming services.
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Mostly because they're collectible and the large album covers can be hung on the wall (whether that's tacky or cool is entirely in the eye of the beholder).
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Very future-proof. Properly cared for, it may be possible to play vinyl centuries from now. There are already Edison cylinders over 100 years old, and the composition of modern records may be even more stable.
The CD-format hasn't changed in decades, but it's still wrapped up with some fairly advanced technology that's much more easily lost if society breaks down. CDs have only been subject to simulated aging tests at best, no real world experience with it as a century-long archiving format.
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Why not?
They're expensive as shit.
They're not that expensive. CDs albums were something like £15-£20 in the 90s. I was listening to a new album today, and I looked it up on a whim since I bought two albums from that band on CD in the 90s and one on tape, and the vinyl is £15 plus shipping so, realistically under 20 quid with no fuckery. Probably around £18.
It's a good bit less than half the price that I regularly used to pay for music when I was at school and
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Also, let's just take a moment to remember that the RIAA are a right bag of festering dicks.
Ironically, every vinyl record is mastered with what's called the RIAA curve [wikipedia.org], which attenuates the bass and boosts the treble, with the inverse curve being applied upon playback (Meghan Trainor approves [youtube.com]).
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CDs are a now-inconvenient media format for the sake of playing music inherently, superseded by digital purchased music (which is generally DRM-free) or streaming. For the sake of convenience of the 90s, the packaging compromises on art and liner notes to avoid being more intrusive than the music media.
Vinyl records are accessories that come with big expressive album covers and liner notes. I wouldn't doubt most newly sold vinyl never gets played.
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Nostalgia is big business.
I too would rather have a vinyl record (Score:2)
Discs will come back as retrofuturism. (Score:5, Insightful)
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CD players are complicated devices. Sure, there's a few companies still making them but once that stops it'll be like the current situation with VHS VCRs - there will be only aging used equipment available. Turntables are comparably simple to manufacture, so vinyl records will probably still be around long after CD players become unobtainium.
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Any bluray player can play CDs.
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Nah, discs are only good for whipping at people you don't like. Homemade server filled with SSDs streamable to every device in the house best way to go.
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Homemade server filled with SSDs streamable to every device in the house best way to go.
Why would you use SSDs for storing media content? That's the ideal use case for those extremely cheap SMR drives; they work fine in media servers and you can't beat the dollar-per-GB ratio.
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Mostly because I just don't like them. I'm impatient and don't enjoy their slow read/write times. While the read time isn't really an issue, I don't like waiting on writing to them when I need to.
Re: Discs will come back as retrofuturism. (Score:2)
I use a striped array for my NAS . ZFS raid z2. 8 x 14TB. Excellent write times. Does not quite saturate the 10Gbps LAN, but close.
112 TB of SSD was quite costly back when I bought these drives in 2019.
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Says the retard.
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I like using old floppy drives because they make interesting noises, and it's cool that you tell how they work and what they're doing by listening to them. It's a novelty.
Fuck CDs. They just suck.
I still buy CDs (Score:3)
Then I rip them and use them just like streaming, except I own them forever.
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Glad I'm not the only one. Used CDs are where its at. Rip, Stream, Enjoy the lossless quality.
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I have a CD transport and do occasionally play a CD directly. It sounds marginally better than the Pi2AES I use for digital files, but if for s
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I still buy them too. I can usually get them on Amazon with a free digital download for less than the digital download alone.
Thoughts on why this is (Score:4, Interesting)
Totally aside from being both a trendy fashion and a reactionary response, I think a major contributor is sound. Before you groan, here me out - my reasoning may be different than what you're thinking.
First off, I think well-executed digital reproduction is inherently superior to even the best vinyl on the best deck with the best cartridge and tonearm. But the problem is that digital has enabled the most extreme abuses in what have been called the "loudness war". Most recorded music has been compressed so much - in order to make it sound louder and gain more attention - that there's no dynamic range left. With CD's you can get away with that - but with vinyl there are inherent limitations in both cutting the master and playing back the record. The medium just won't handle it, so the music on vinyl is much less heavily compressed than that on CD's.
I hear old songs which I know well, where the compression on recent releases is such that even the bass player competes with the lead singer for loudness. It sounds brilliant and exciting for about 30 seconds, then it just starts to be tiring. Sometimes it even hurts. It's not only audible, it's plainly visible in programs like Audacity.
I've compared new releases of a piece of music, side by side, with older releases. The new ones are so heavily compressed that they almost look clipped. Even when I introduce negative gain to the newer track to match the older one, it still sounds louder and crappier. In extreme cases, it's difficult to tell by looking at the screen that both sets of tracks are in fact the same piece of music.
So yeah, I can believe that vinyl sounds better, or at least is more listenable for longer periods. That's not because vinyl is great - it's because CD's and other all-digital sources of music have been enshittified.
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it's because CD's and other all-digital sources of music have been enshittified.
Which, by default, makes vinyl great - at least until something consistently better comes along.
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So yeah, I can believe that vinyl sounds better, or at least is more listenable for longer periods. That's not because vinyl is great - it's because CD's and other all-digital sources of music have been enshittified.,/quote> Keep in mind the music word isn't entirely rock and pop (and related genres)--other genres, such as classical, hasn't been "enshittified" by the loudness war.
Re:Thoughts on why this is (Score:5, Insightful)
Your points are very 2005. Nearly all music put to vinyl right now *is* the CD master. Unless you're collecting some analogue masters of classics and comparing them to the late 90s early 00s era remasters, 99% of your typical vinyl of today is just as compressed as the digital masters because they *are* the digital masters. Studios sell vinyl, they don't master separately for it, they just hand the digital file over to the cutting engineer who makes a few minor tweaks to it. On a really good record player, a lot of vinyl sounds... almost the same as a CD.
But that's irrelevant. The vinyl reassurance isn't driven by audiophiles suddenly going mainstream. Most people driving these sales don't give two shits about their sound, heck many don't even play them, and those who do throw it on a whatever cheap arse record player they find at best buy. They are just collectors items. Pretty colours with wonderful patterns attract people who like to own stuff. I'm no exception by the way. I buy quite a bit of vinyl. I really enjoy looking at the album art and lyric books while I listen to the album on CD or streaming service.
That's not because vinyl is great - it's because CD's and other all-digital sources of music have been enshittified.
And that's actually false too. One of the strongest drivers to removing the enshittification of the loudness war is ... streaming services. Because unlike CDs or even analogue sources the likes of Spotify very clearly say whatever you upload will be normalised to -12LUFS. What that means in practice is if your album doesn't have at least that much dynamic range (which is on par with older well mastered music of the music golden age) then it will actually sound quieter, not louder.
That said we do still need to wait for a couple of old senile fuckers who don't understand this to retire / die out before music will actually revert properly for decent dynamics.
But no the vinyl being talked about (sales of modern music) does not sound better than the CD, but original vinyl masters of classics definitely sound better than their 90s/00s remasters.
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Your points are very 2005. Nearly all music put to vinyl right now *is* the CD master.
How do you know?
Re:Thoughts on why this is (Score:4, Informative)
How do you know?
a) There are sites which track this. Release numbers can be traced back to the masters which for vinyl often match the CD. ... in the admittedly niche audiophile circles.
b) It's common knowledge in the industry. Mastering is done once, a digital master. Mastering is expensive, there's no reason to do it separately for vinyl since the overwhelming super majority of people just don't give a shit and will buy the product anyway. Additional processing steps are applied at for certain releases from this master, but they do not include compressing things to all hell - that's done at the mastering stage. You can read about that in many sources (remember magazines? Yeah I still read those), or hear it in interviews, or talk to people in the industry.
c) You know about it when it's unique. It's quite often a major selling point that is heavily advertised when a vinyl has a separate master because this is needlessly expensive to do. Incidentally there was a *scandal* in the audiophile world (yeah first world problems) last year when it was determined that one company had been lying for years claiming they mastered their vinyl one way when in fact they were using a different process. The stupid part about their scandal is they were actually remastering, just not the way they advertised, but the point is this information is tracked to the point that it made news,
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No not the only ones, but they are the 1%. Some do it. And why do you know about it? They tell you. It's a selling point. It's actually advertised when it happens.
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Your points are very 2005. Nearly all music put to vinyl right now *is* the CD master... Studios sell vinyl, they don't master separately for it, they just hand the digital file over to the cutting engineer who makes a few minor tweaks to it.
These up-to-date sources [masteringthemix.com] beg [musicguymixing.com] to [veniamastering.studio] differ [weraveyou.com].
And that's actually false too. One of the strongest drivers to removing the enshittification of the loudness war is ... streaming services.
The loudness war began in the 90's [wikipedia.org] and was hitting its stride in the early 2000's when streaming was still in its infancy. Streaming may be contributing to the entrenchment of over-compression, but it had nothing to do with its genesis.
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I was going to say the same thing, albeit without as many links. With that said, the best vinyl I've ever heard just barely approaches the levels of CDs but with all of the downsides of vinyl and almost no other perceptible benefits.
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No that beg to differ anything. Your 4 sources talk about how to do things properly. I don't deny that happens, but properly is not what drives the entire music industry. The overwhelming majority of what is driving the vinyl resurgence is sales of new music, just as poorly mastered on vinyl as it is on CD because... again they start with the CD master. Two of your links even state as such. Additional processing is done to this master for vinyl but you can't un-fuck that which has been fucked, and ... I can
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Thanks!
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Damn man, you sure made it hard on the know-it-all "audiophile" children to sound smart. Couldn't you have just chilled out with all those facts and stuff? You hurt a lot of feels, man.
He didn't hurt any feels, just made himself look like a fool by posting 4 links that agree with what I wrote, followed by a rant about loudness that aggressively agreed with me - presumably not actually reading the part of my post he quoted.
But sure circle jerk away with your buddy.
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The vinyl format physically can't be the same master as the CD. If they made a disc that loud, the needle would jump out of the tracks. When the sound turns into a maximum range modulated square wave, you can't put that on vinyl and expect it to play back properly.
It's not much extra work at all to produce a second master for the vinyl. Many sound engineers do it anyway, creating a well mixed version of a track, and then compressing the hell out of it at the end. They just need to take the copy they saved b
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Totally aside from being both a trendy fashion and a reactionary response, I think a major contributor is sound. Before you groan, here me out - my reasoning may be different than what you're thinking.
First off, I think well-executed digital reproduction is inherently superior to even the best vinyl on the best deck with the best cartridge and tonearm. But the problem is that digital has enabled the most extreme abuses in what have been called the "loudness war".
I don't think sound has anything to do with it, except as a secondary factor.
The appeal of vinyl isn't the sound, it's the experience.
Think about listening to an Album on spotify, you type in the name, click play, click skip over that crappy song, and then it finishes at some point and it starts playing similar music. There's no challenge a billion distractions.
With vinyl you need to seek out the album (could be a story in itself), pull it out of the sleeve (nice big artwork), go through the physical proces
video vinyl (Score:2)
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I'm going to corner the market in 8' diameter 4500 rpm video vinyl. First title will be star wars, flip the recording mid-film to watch the second half.
Star Wars through Return of the Jedi were available as CED discs, which is basically what you're describing.
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They were 12" in diameter and rotated at 450RPM (375 for PAL).
I know you were kidding thinking what it would be like to scale a record up to play video, but amazingly that did actually happen. There's a 2.5 hour documentary about it on youtube over 5 parts. I recommend watching, it's fascinating. Like, you obviously think video on vinyl is dumb, and it kind of is, but also kind of not and not as bad as you might think.
https://www.youtube.com/playli... [youtube.com]
If you spend enough time scouring ebay, you too may be a
Vinyl is good but (Score:2)
All vinyl produced in last 30 years were digital (Score:3)
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People are still recording and mixing on analog tape. Rick Rubin loves tape. https://www.analogplanet.com/c... [analogplanet.com]
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People are not the industry. You can find strange people doing all sorts of things, but they barely represent a rounding error in the statistics we are discussing in this thread.
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Even if the mastering is digital, the analogue nature of the vinyl format softens the sound a lot.
Vinyl has a few limitations. It can't reproduce very high frequencies, so some of the aliasing from the digital master is removed with a low pass filter. You also can't apply too much compression (audio compression that makes quiet things louder, giving that "wall of sound" effect, not digital data compression) because the stylus will come out of the groove or get damaged if you do, so you are forced to have mo
How long until... (Score:2)
We resurrect LaserDiscs?
They had the same size for displaying cover art as vinyls. Even more as some discs had art imprinted directly on them.
probably a bad idea to collect vinyl (Score:3)
Benn Jordan [youtube.com] ended up setting up a little experiment, and vinyl is a rather nasty thing to have in your house. It out gasses continuously throughout its life, and a single record on a turntable has a detectable affect on the air quality. You also shouldn't throw them away into a landfill, and you can't recycle them.
This saddens me because I have about 50 LPs from small artists because I thought it was cool to have something physical and to support the bands I like. I'll enjoy the ones I have, but I probably won't be taking them out and playing them my small library nor will I be buying any more of them.
Maybe I'll get a sticker or small poster or something if I feel the need for baubles, bric-a-brac, gewgaws, or objets d'art.
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Crikey.
I do wonder about some of the outgassing, though. I've got some records from the late 1950s which play OK. Eventually outgassing will degrade the plastic presumably.
Anyhoo my house is er well ventilated (draughty), so it'll go well with my PVC waste pipes, uPVC windows and lead water main. :/
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some people (often illegally) have PVC water pipes. The video specifically suggests you deal with that first before worrying about your vinyl collection. :D
Benn must think we're made of money, he deals with audiophiles too much I think.
My Guess (Score:2)
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Why = for the romance (Score:2)
Sometimes I just like to enjoy the engineering elegance of a needle along a spinning being amplified to make amazing music.
Sometimes I enjoy the physicality of picking a record from a collection, putting it on, and not worrying about hitting skip.
Sometimes I like the genuine replication of scratches and that occasionally wobbly sound of my childhood.
Meanwhile - CDs don't really fit any niche. They were good enough for their time, but don't really have any emotional benefits over streaming music. I will neve
User Experience (Score:2)
For all the UX gurus of the digital age, they certainly miss the reason why people prefer vinyl. No it isn't some hipster bullshit, it's just a better listening experience. The fact that YouTube, Spotify, etc. will just play forever is actually a negative. It causes the music to become background noise. Now maybe that's how you want to use your music (it is for many people), but for people that like to listen, having the music stop every once in a while is actually a positive experience.
When a record pl
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It's astounding to me how many people think this is about "audio quality." It has nothing to do with audio quality. It's about user experience.
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More uniformed consumers following a fad.
You'd like to think so, but no people are buying records for plenty of good reasons.
And speaking of uninformed:
We have had 2 superior music formats for decades - DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD.
No, we've had 3. CDs are superior to records.
SACD and others offer multi channel and longer playing times. The audio quality is no better for humans. It's a pretty minor increment, and very few people even have audio kit good enough to get the best out of a CD anyway.
Thing is