7 ms·

Did the Music Business Just Kill the Vinyl Revival?

40 points by AlbertCory 4y ago

tw98521358 4y ago
Honestly it would be pretty cool to have a large vinyl collection. If my kid could just pick one out and drop it on a player and it was pretty durable they probably would have a fan for life. Unfortunately recording companies only want collectors and rich audiophile.
- bayindirh 4y ago
  The biggest problem with large vinyl collections is the space they take. I have a turntable and small vinyl collection, which consists of albums I like to dedicate time listening to them. When I say "a large vinyl collection", I imagine something comparable to Haruki Murakami's one [0]. I neither have the space, nor the time or financial means to collect that amount of vinyl, though I have some collections and albums I'd never exchange with any vinyl. I prefer a good CD or a very nice FLAC rip played via a nice vintage Hi-Fi over vinyl for casual listening. Vinyl has its very place in the music world, and it should be present, but life (at least mine) has no space to accommodate it as the primary source of music. [0]: https://thevinylfactory.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Murakami-collection.jpg https://thevinylfactory.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Murak...
  - pavlov 4y ago
    Maybe the solution is a “Rent the Record Collection” type service, similar to Rent the Runway which is a popular service for renting expensive designer clothing and accessories. It‘s cliché but not very far from the truth that vinyl records are the hipster male equivalent of designer handbags.
    - bayindirh 4y ago
      > It‘s cliché but not very far from the truth that vinyl records are the hipster male equivalent of designer handbags. I don't think so. I for one buy the vinyls of (new and old) albums I love to listen so much that I can put time aside to solely listen to that album and do nothing else. Buying vinyls just for buying them is just plain consumerism, and not different than buying things you don't need, or buying just for impressing others.
- JKCalhoun 4y ago
  Record companies have always held the strings though — they have the artists. A long time ago, when I worked for minimum wage, a record was about two hours of my wages. So when the industry introduced CD's at twice the price of vinyl records that was a pretty significant price hike for me. "Don't worry, the price of CD's will come down," they said. Over the following years, vinyl faded and CD's maintained the same price point. Perhaps, an optimist might point out, the price of the CD did drop — relative to inflation over those following years. I don't know. But when AOL saw fit to flood our mailboxes with CDs to get online, it was clear that the cost to manufacture the compact disc certainly wasn't a factor in dropping the price of the music CD. I'm too old fashioned in my understanding of business, capitalism. I always assumed that you priced a good based on what it cost to produce plus some reasonable amount of profit that would allow you a nice home and car. I assumed therefore that a downloadable eBook would be significantly cheaper than the same "pulp" book from the publisher that had to be manufactured from raw materials, printed, shipped....
  - h2odragon 4y ago
    I resisted CD's for a long time, because I had great turntables collected up from yard sales. What broke my reserve, back when, was the "cheap rack classical CD". They'd churn out cheap "collection" box sets that didn't sell, and then recycle them into $2 to $10 single CD issues for the cheap bin. Some of those were mastered off wire still, I'll swear it.
  - pocketarc 4y ago
    > I always assumed that you priced a good based on what it cost to produce plus some reasonable amount of profit that would allow you a nice home and car. That is completely reasonable if you own and run your own business. But most businesses aren't owned by the people running them. The owner doesn't care what happens, they just have $X and want that money to grow a small % every year. The way that's gonna happen is if the business they bought with that money grows a small % every year. The board, the CEO, the managers, the VPs, they all work to make that % increase happen, whatever it takes. If they can't make it happen, they get fired. If they need to increase prices for that, that's what's going to happen. If they need to milk people, cut corners, move manufacturing overseas, whatever it takes, they will do it. If they don't, someone else will. The owner's money must grow. And "owner" doesn't have to be some fat cat evil billionaire. It's also the retiree living off their 401K savings. It's the 20-year-old starting their contributions. It's the employee pension fund that is there to protect employees. P.S. I'm positive none of this is news to you or anyone reading it, but I love talking about this sort of thing.
dale_glass 4y ago
Vinyl is a gimmick. Digital is far beyond anything vinyl achieved, and realistically the vast majority of music on vinyl is going to come from digital sources anyway. Yeah, the tech could be improved I'm sure, but you can also get 24 bit, 192 KHz audio if you want to. It's far easier to produce and to deliver to the end user, even though it's ultimately pointless. As far as consumer-level listening goes, I think it's fair to declare that audio as a technology is done, and has been completed decades ago. We can far outdo human capabilities on cheap, consumer level hardware, not to speak of what we can do on the high end.
- j7ake 4y ago
  Buying vinyl is like buying a tshirt of your favorite band. It’s mostly a physical representation of what the ethereal media you enjoy consuming. Not practical, takes up space, and not as good as listening to the real thing (either live or digital).
- keiferski 4y ago
  I think the hipster obsession with vinyl paraphernalia can definitely be gimmicky, but I wouldn’t discount the value of having a physical representation of music, whether that’s a vinyl album cover or some other future thing. People live in a physical world and digital files, while more convenient and technologically superior, lack tactility.
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    Well, that's kinda why I think that the music industry, evil as they are, got the right idea. Vinyl's resurgence has nothing to do with its technical qualities, and as a result it's enough to dig up some ancient tech and pander to people a bit.
    - empyrrhicist 4y ago
      Profit-wise, that's probably right (especially if people are listening on $5 plastic mechanisms crammed into a $99 decorative suitcase), but I'm now pretty careful to check the reviews on Discogs before I pick up a new pressing. Nothing worse than throwing on a beautifully packaged record to hear a muddy, poorly mastered mess. It doesn't cost all that much more to make sure the pressing sounds good when played on good equipment.
koheripbal 4y ago
No. Main stream interest just isn't there.
causality0 4y ago
I think it'd be cool to have my favorite albums on vinyl on my wall as a combination storage space and art piece. Sure as shit isn't going to happen when they each cost thirty dollars, though.
- tokai 4y ago
  Why not? Posters of good quality costs the same or more.
  - causality0 4y ago
    I don't have a bunch of posters on my wall either.
prepend 4y ago
It is weird seeing the same dumb music industry. It’s strange to see $30-40 records when digital versions are $10-15. I liked buying albums because they were a totem and they included mp3 downloads. Or some even had high resolution flac download (Peter Gabriel was good about this). But the last few didn’t include digital downloads so I had to pirate the digital version. I used to buy a lot of CDs- I think I had 1000+- but the industry just kind of turned me off by suing customers and whatnot. I thought maybe they had learned their lesson, but they still seem like rent seekers sitting on top of artists. As always (like in 2000) there are artists selling directly that are pretty cool. But it’s hard to go to a record store and spend $100 to come away with three records.
mnd999 4y ago
According to the article, only 50% of vinyl buyers actually own a turntable. People are buying music they have no intention of listening to yet the prices keep on rising. This is starting to look like a bubble - people buying things they have no idea what to do with purely because they think they will appreciate in value.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I own a few records but no turntable. I've just been renting digital music (and movies) for an unlimited term at zero cost (downloading them from p2p/torrents) since the late 90's, and now have any music I'd like as flac files tucked away on an archive NAS. Anything I couldn't find online, I'd obtain the CD one way or another and throw it out or return it to its owner after I'd ripped it since I had very little interest in maintaining a shelf full of plastic. I also like reading physical books but don't like having to deal with shelves full of them, so that is easily outsourced to my County's public library system which I think is top notch. All that is to say that I do still like having some physical manifestation of media around once in awhile, so a few vinyl records and the odd negative/slide/print are nice to have, but I only keep the greatest of the greatest hits so to speak - the bits that I find really significant.
- ebiester 4y ago
  I don't think that's what's happening. People are buying them because they are art objects. The vinyl record is useless, but it's attached to a beautiful album cover and liner notes. It also becomes a conversation piece for identity in private spades - e.g. "oh, you're a Mount Eerie fan as well?"
fullshark 4y ago
Music industry has it right, vinyl is about extracting some more money from your most devoted fans and not worth trying to make mainstream.
usrusr 4y ago
What would definitely kill the vinyl revival: if the music industry started treating vinyl like just another distribution channel checkbox that needs to be filled for a release to reach its full economic potential. Vinyl only happening where people who care coincide on both sides of the transaction is the core of its success.
michaelt 4y ago
> In other words, a technology that is 70 years old—and in which labels have invested almost zero additional dollars—is priced as if it’s a hot new innovation requiring billions of dollars in startup capital. Is there much legacy vinyl manufacturing capacity around? I'd have thought they'd need some capital to set up new factories. Although admittedly not billions of dollars. Given the article says only 50% of vinyl buyers even have record players, this ain't exactly a business on stable foundations IMHO.
- a_f 4y ago
  I was interested in quickly seeing if you could just cut records at home, which led to an article here: https://thevinylfactory.com/features/a-beginners-guide-to-lathe-cutting-your-own-records/ https://thevinylfactory.com/features/a-beginners-guide-to-la... The lathe they mention, Lathe Atom A-101, seems to go second-hand for around £2500. At least judging from the first few results. This feels a bit expensive for a home hobbyist. I also wouldn't want to navigate the laws of trying to sell vinyl to people who wanted some pressed from songs they don't have rights to (in order to make some money back).
breck 4y ago
I love records. Own multiple record players. Recently we started a music label called Music Of a People (https://musicofapeople.com https://musicofapeople.com). We want to help our artists sell physical records, not digital crapware. We put fans first. Fans love the liveness and physicality of music. Digital is a poor substitute, but it's good marketing and can help make one's day more enjoyable. Fans do not want DRM. Never have. Never will. They want mp3 files. Original Napster had it right. We are gonna take this fight all the way to an amendment to the U.S. Constitution when we abolish (c)opywrongs once and for all (https://breckyunits.com/the-intellectual-freedom-amendment.html https://breckyunits.com/the-intellectual-freedom-amendment.h...) In the meantime, do you hear the people sing?
RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago
> I have some experience in these matters—in my alternative career I worked with CEOs chasing after fast growth product categories. I know how they handle these situations. > (1) You add manufacturing capacity aggressively—to make sure you have enough product to fuel growth. The fact that the author is suggesting the music industry add vinyl manufacturing capacity aggressively is enough to make me question his competence as a business adviser. If my CEO was listening to this person, I would show them a copy of this article and recommend they stop.
jurassic 4y ago
I'm one of those folks with a small vinyl collection (~75 albums? Like 25/yr since I got into it) and no turntable. I got into this during the pandemic when the quality mid-range tables were sold out everywhere for months on end so the available hardware option was either a trash-tier Crosley/Victrola player from Target/Walmart or some kind of hi-fi $1000+++ option which seemed like a lot for a newcomer to the hobby. I chose neither, for now, and I'm sure a lot of other folks without turntables are in that state for the same reason; there was no reasonable hardware to buy when the hype was at the peak. The big album art was/is the biggest draw for me anyway. I'm not an audiophile and streaming sounds good enough for my ears but a 1x1 inch album cover on my iPhone can't hold a candle to the full-sized album art in all its glory. Of course I wish they were more affordable, but in some ways the fact they're so expensive is almost a blessing because I don't have space to hoard albums like I would if they cost a lot less. If forces me to weigh the options more carefully and think about what I would really enjoy most having in my collection. I agree the music industry fumbled the trend, that much is obvious. But calling people like me "t-shirt collectors" isn't helpful for the hobby either; music or not, it's a badass art collection and I don't see a problem with approaching it that way.
- empyrrhicist 4y ago
  Quality vintage players are still widely available and affordable.
xrd 4y ago
I own a lot of vinyl, most of which I purchased in Europe in 2002 or so, right before music went fully digital. I'm not saying the quality is better, or that I honestly listen to them that often. There is still a thrill in pulling out a dance record that was underground in London at the time I bought it. I've got quite a few Dr Rockit, which is Herbert before he became Herbert. And, I'm hopeful that somehow, someday the experience of playing records will be better than letting my kids drive YouTube music and play the same song over and over. If vinyl saved me from that, it would be worth any price.
fedeb95 4y ago
Vinyl is a collectible or a niche product that appeals to some people, like me. It's priced as such. I don't see how it could go mainstream. I think the author mistakes his own bubble for the "main"
college_physics 4y ago
There are some technologies that are just completely dominated by others. Encoding audio on vinyl seems to be one them. From a pure sound perspective its hard to think why one would want to use a sub-par option (ready to stand corrected if true audiophiles have an argument besides nostalgia / retro feeling = valuing the scratches and jumps of the needle). BUT. Vinyl is not just the audio experience. Its the tangible artifact: the artwork, supporting information, a physical place in a music library etc. For a period CD's/DVD's provided a limited emulation of those attributes but even those are now deprecated. An mp3 or even worse, a stream is not quite the same, is it. Maybe what we "need" is a reincarnation of a some sort of LaserDisc [0], with the exactly the same form factor as vinyl but dramatically larger storage (including e.g. videos from band performances or other audiovisual material) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserDisc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserDisc
- hugg 4y ago
  One major thing for me as well is that Vinyl doesn't really degrade the same way as a CD or LaserDisc eventually will
  - college_physics 4y ago
    it does degrade when played a lot, though I would imagine new materials could prolong expected life. but indeed as storage its rather more robust / purely "mechanical"
- empyrrhicist 4y ago
  I listen to a lot of digital music, and also vinyl records. Using laserdiscs sounds like less fun than both IMHO.
zanderz 4y ago
"In other words, the record business became the only entertainment industry in the world with no plan for technological innovation." Hasn't this been true since people started listening to the radio instead of buying sheet music? Who can be surprised at the cluelessness and intransigence of the music industry after 100+ years of the same? They were so busy fighting digital music, seemingly with the ridiculous pretense they could stop it altogether, they let spotify come in and take a big piece of the pie they could have kept for themselves.
JackFr 4y ago
I am an old guy. I am nostalgic. I want vinyl. The old guy music I used to listen to isn’t available. Therefore the record labels are lazy and greedy. Here are some cherry-picked market statistics from other self-interested parties presented with no context. See? I am right.
omar_alt 4y ago
The thing I noticed was that the price of an average record skyrocketed in price but the demand for an adequate turntable has not been as noticeable.
Balgair 4y ago
My SO collect vinyl. One of the main reasons they do it is because they don't want to lose the music and sounds. Their collection spans 40+ years with records going back further. With other media like cassettes or CDs, the degradation in players or the music itself is large enough that vinyl is the only workable solution for storage. I've seen it on some of my most favorite music from YouTube. One day, poof, the tracks are gone. YT or the creator decided to pull the music to never be heard again. Nothing exists of the music on the internet anymore. I've ripped them and burned them to CDs, but if I could get them in vinyl, I'd be much happier for the long term safety of the music I love.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  I wouldn't think a CD would degrade within a few human lifetimes when properly stored. (Though there were issues with early optical media). Vinyl has the advantage of being nearly human-readable though - if all of society and technology vanished, you could still run a needle over it and hear the sounds within. I believe repeated plays do cause some degradation though which should not be a factor for CDs. I believe major movies are still archived onto color separated black and white negatives and stored away in vaults for reasons like the above. Personally, I keep flac audio files on an archive NAS server using ECC RAM and ZFS filesystems plus backups. The open source and lossless nature of flac is appealing as it should not be locked into one proprietary vendor and should never have to undergo any lossy transcoding from one format to another. I'm sure my system is imperfect as all things are, but I'm satisfied. I do also have a very small selection of vinyl records as I can appreciate them for the reasons I mentioned above.
lowken 4y ago
I just don’t understand people who still want to play music from huge plastic disks.
teknico 4y ago
I wish. Here’s hoping.

40 points by AlbertCory 4y ago

Honestly it would be pretty cool to have a large vinyl collection. If my kid could just pick one out and drop it on a player and it was pretty durable they probably would have a fan for life. Unfortunately recording companies only want collectors and rich audiophile.

bayindirh 4y ago
The biggest problem with large vinyl collections is the space they take. I have a turntable and small vinyl collection, which consists of albums I like to dedicate time listening to them. When I say "a large vinyl collection", I imagine something comparable to Haruki Murakami's one [0]. I neither have the space, nor the time or financial means to collect that amount of vinyl, though I have some collections and albums I'd never exchange with any vinyl. I prefer a good CD or a very nice FLAC rip played via a nice vintage Hi-Fi over vinyl for casual listening. Vinyl has its very place in the music world, and it should be present, but life (at least mine) has no space to accommodate it as the primary source of music. [0]: https://thevinylfactory.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Murakami-collection.jpg https://thevinylfactory.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Murak...
- pavlov 4y ago
  Maybe the solution is a “Rent the Record Collection” type service, similar to Rent the Runway which is a popular service for renting expensive designer clothing and accessories. It‘s cliché but not very far from the truth that vinyl records are the hipster male equivalent of designer handbags.
  - bayindirh 4y ago
    > It‘s cliché but not very far from the truth that vinyl records are the hipster male equivalent of designer handbags. I don't think so. I for one buy the vinyls of (new and old) albums I love to listen so much that I can put time aside to solely listen to that album and do nothing else. Buying vinyls just for buying them is just plain consumerism, and not different than buying things you don't need, or buying just for impressing others.
JKCalhoun 4y ago
Record companies have always held the strings though — they have the artists. A long time ago, when I worked for minimum wage, a record was about two hours of my wages. So when the industry introduced CD's at twice the price of vinyl records that was a pretty significant price hike for me. "Don't worry, the price of CD's will come down," they said. Over the following years, vinyl faded and CD's maintained the same price point. Perhaps, an optimist might point out, the price of the CD did drop — relative to inflation over those following years. I don't know. But when AOL saw fit to flood our mailboxes with CDs to get online, it was clear that the cost to manufacture the compact disc certainly wasn't a factor in dropping the price of the music CD. I'm too old fashioned in my understanding of business, capitalism. I always assumed that you priced a good based on what it cost to produce plus some reasonable amount of profit that would allow you a nice home and car. I assumed therefore that a downloadable eBook would be significantly cheaper than the same "pulp" book from the publisher that had to be manufactured from raw materials, printed, shipped....
- h2odragon 4y ago
  I resisted CD's for a long time, because I had great turntables collected up from yard sales. What broke my reserve, back when, was the "cheap rack classical CD". They'd churn out cheap "collection" box sets that didn't sell, and then recycle them into $2 to $10 single CD issues for the cheap bin. Some of those were mastered off wire still, I'll swear it.
- pocketarc 4y ago
  > I always assumed that you priced a good based on what it cost to produce plus some reasonable amount of profit that would allow you a nice home and car. That is completely reasonable if you own and run your own business. But most businesses aren't owned by the people running them. The owner doesn't care what happens, they just have $X and want that money to grow a small % every year. The way that's gonna happen is if the business they bought with that money grows a small % every year. The board, the CEO, the managers, the VPs, they all work to make that % increase happen, whatever it takes. If they can't make it happen, they get fired. If they need to increase prices for that, that's what's going to happen. If they need to milk people, cut corners, move manufacturing overseas, whatever it takes, they will do it. If they don't, someone else will. The owner's money must grow. And "owner" doesn't have to be some fat cat evil billionaire. It's also the retiree living off their 401K savings. It's the 20-year-old starting their contributions. It's the employee pension fund that is there to protect employees. P.S. I'm positive none of this is news to you or anyone reading it, but I love talking about this sort of thing.

dale_glass 4y ago

Vinyl is a gimmick. Digital is far beyond anything vinyl achieved, and realistically the vast majority of music on vinyl is going to come from digital sources anyway. Yeah, the tech could be improved I'm sure, but you can also get 24 bit, 192 KHz audio if you want to. It's far easier to produce and to deliver to the end user, even though it's ultimately pointless. As far as consumer-level listening goes, I think it's fair to declare that audio as a technology is done, and has been completed decades ago. We can far outdo human capabilities on cheap, consumer level hardware, not to speak of what we can do on the high end.

j7ake 4y ago
Buying vinyl is like buying a tshirt of your favorite band. It’s mostly a physical representation of what the ethereal media you enjoy consuming. Not practical, takes up space, and not as good as listening to the real thing (either live or digital).
keiferski 4y ago
I think the hipster obsession with vinyl paraphernalia can definitely be gimmicky, but I wouldn’t discount the value of having a physical representation of music, whether that’s a vinyl album cover or some other future thing. People live in a physical world and digital files, while more convenient and technologically superior, lack tactility.
- dale_glass 4y ago
  Well, that's kinda why I think that the music industry, evil as they are, got the right idea. Vinyl's resurgence has nothing to do with its technical qualities, and as a result it's enough to dig up some ancient tech and pander to people a bit.
  - empyrrhicist 4y ago
    Profit-wise, that's probably right (especially if people are listening on $5 plastic mechanisms crammed into a $99 decorative suitcase), but I'm now pretty careful to check the reviews on Discogs before I pick up a new pressing. Nothing worse than throwing on a beautifully packaged record to hear a muddy, poorly mastered mess. It doesn't cost all that much more to make sure the pressing sounds good when played on good equipment.

koheripbal 4y ago

No. Main stream interest just isn't there.

causality0 4y ago

I think it'd be cool to have my favorite albums on vinyl on my wall as a combination storage space and art piece. Sure as shit isn't going to happen when they each cost thirty dollars, though.

tokai 4y ago
Why not? Posters of good quality costs the same or more.
- causality0 4y ago
  I don't have a bunch of posters on my wall either.

prepend 4y ago

It is weird seeing the same dumb music industry. It’s strange to see $30-40 records when digital versions are $10-15. I liked buying albums because they were a totem and they included mp3 downloads. Or some even had high resolution flac download (Peter Gabriel was good about this). But the last few didn’t include digital downloads so I had to pirate the digital version. I used to buy a lot of CDs- I think I had 1000+- but the industry just kind of turned me off by suing customers and whatnot. I thought maybe they had learned their lesson, but they still seem like rent seekers sitting on top of artists. As always (like in 2000) there are artists selling directly that are pretty cool. But it’s hard to go to a record store and spend $100 to come away with three records.

mnd999 4y ago

According to the article, only 50% of vinyl buyers actually own a turntable. People are buying music they have no intention of listening to yet the prices keep on rising. This is starting to look like a bubble - people buying things they have no idea what to do with purely because they think they will appreciate in value.

hotpotamus 4y ago
I own a few records but no turntable. I've just been renting digital music (and movies) for an unlimited term at zero cost (downloading them from p2p/torrents) since the late 90's, and now have any music I'd like as flac files tucked away on an archive NAS. Anything I couldn't find online, I'd obtain the CD one way or another and throw it out or return it to its owner after I'd ripped it since I had very little interest in maintaining a shelf full of plastic. I also like reading physical books but don't like having to deal with shelves full of them, so that is easily outsourced to my County's public library system which I think is top notch. All that is to say that I do still like having some physical manifestation of media around once in awhile, so a few vinyl records and the odd negative/slide/print are nice to have, but I only keep the greatest of the greatest hits so to speak - the bits that I find really significant.
ebiester 4y ago
I don't think that's what's happening. People are buying them because they are art objects. The vinyl record is useless, but it's attached to a beautiful album cover and liner notes. It also becomes a conversation piece for identity in private spades - e.g. "oh, you're a Mount Eerie fan as well?"

fullshark 4y ago

Music industry has it right, vinyl is about extracting some more money from your most devoted fans and not worth trying to make mainstream.

usrusr 4y ago

What would definitely kill the vinyl revival: if the music industry started treating vinyl like just another distribution channel checkbox that needs to be filled for a release to reach its full economic potential. Vinyl only happening where people who care coincide on both sides of the transaction is the core of its success.

michaelt 4y ago

> In other words, a technology that is 70 years old—and in which labels have invested almost zero additional dollars—is priced as if it’s a hot new innovation requiring billions of dollars in startup capital. Is there much legacy vinyl manufacturing capacity around? I'd have thought they'd need some capital to set up new factories. Although admittedly not billions of dollars. Given the article says only 50% of vinyl buyers even have record players, this ain't exactly a business on stable foundations IMHO.

a_f 4y ago
I was interested in quickly seeing if you could just cut records at home, which led to an article here: https://thevinylfactory.com/features/a-beginners-guide-to-lathe-cutting-your-own-records/ https://thevinylfactory.com/features/a-beginners-guide-to-la... The lathe they mention, Lathe Atom A-101, seems to go second-hand for around £2500. At least judging from the first few results. This feels a bit expensive for a home hobbyist. I also wouldn't want to navigate the laws of trying to sell vinyl to people who wanted some pressed from songs they don't have rights to (in order to make some money back).

breck 4y ago

I love records. Own multiple record players. Recently we started a music label called Music Of a People (https://musicofapeople.com https://musicofapeople.com). We want to help our artists sell physical records, not digital crapware. We put fans first. Fans love the liveness and physicality of music. Digital is a poor substitute, but it's good marketing and can help make one's day more enjoyable. Fans do not want DRM. Never have. Never will. They want mp3 files. Original Napster had it right. We are gonna take this fight all the way to an amendment to the U.S. Constitution when we abolish (c)opywrongs once and for all (https://breckyunits.com/the-intellectual-freedom-amendment.html https://breckyunits.com/the-intellectual-freedom-amendment.h...) In the meantime, do you hear the people sing?

RcouF1uZ4gsC 4y ago

> I have some experience in these matters—in my alternative career I worked with CEOs chasing after fast growth product categories. I know how they handle these situations. > (1) You add manufacturing capacity aggressively—to make sure you have enough product to fuel growth. The fact that the author is suggesting the music industry add vinyl manufacturing capacity aggressively is enough to make me question his competence as a business adviser. If my CEO was listening to this person, I would show them a copy of this article and recommend they stop.

jurassic 4y ago

I'm one of those folks with a small vinyl collection (~75 albums? Like 25/yr since I got into it) and no turntable. I got into this during the pandemic when the quality mid-range tables were sold out everywhere for months on end so the available hardware option was either a trash-tier Crosley/Victrola player from Target/Walmart or some kind of hi-fi $1000+++ option which seemed like a lot for a newcomer to the hobby. I chose neither, for now, and I'm sure a lot of other folks without turntables are in that state for the same reason; there was no reasonable hardware to buy when the hype was at the peak. The big album art was/is the biggest draw for me anyway. I'm not an audiophile and streaming sounds good enough for my ears but a 1x1 inch album cover on my iPhone can't hold a candle to the full-sized album art in all its glory. Of course I wish they were more affordable, but in some ways the fact they're so expensive is almost a blessing because I don't have space to hoard albums like I would if they cost a lot less. If forces me to weigh the options more carefully and think about what I would really enjoy most having in my collection. I agree the music industry fumbled the trend, that much is obvious. But calling people like me "t-shirt collectors" isn't helpful for the hobby either; music or not, it's a badass art collection and I don't see a problem with approaching it that way.

empyrrhicist 4y ago
Quality vintage players are still widely available and affordable.

xrd 4y ago

I own a lot of vinyl, most of which I purchased in Europe in 2002 or so, right before music went fully digital. I'm not saying the quality is better, or that I honestly listen to them that often. There is still a thrill in pulling out a dance record that was underground in London at the time I bought it. I've got quite a few Dr Rockit, which is Herbert before he became Herbert. And, I'm hopeful that somehow, someday the experience of playing records will be better than letting my kids drive YouTube music and play the same song over and over. If vinyl saved me from that, it would be worth any price.

fedeb95 4y ago

Vinyl is a collectible or a niche product that appeals to some people, like me. It's priced as such. I don't see how it could go mainstream. I think the author mistakes his own bubble for the "main"

college_physics 4y ago

There are some technologies that are just completely dominated by others. Encoding audio on vinyl seems to be one them. From a pure sound perspective its hard to think why one would want to use a sub-par option (ready to stand corrected if true audiophiles have an argument besides nostalgia / retro feeling = valuing the scratches and jumps of the needle). BUT. Vinyl is not just the audio experience. Its the tangible artifact: the artwork, supporting information, a physical place in a music library etc. For a period CD's/DVD's provided a limited emulation of those attributes but even those are now deprecated. An mp3 or even worse, a stream is not quite the same, is it. Maybe what we "need" is a reincarnation of a some sort of LaserDisc [0], with the exactly the same form factor as vinyl but dramatically larger storage (including e.g. videos from band performances or other audiovisual material) [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserDisc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserDisc

hugg 4y ago
One major thing for me as well is that Vinyl doesn't really degrade the same way as a CD or LaserDisc eventually will
- college_physics 4y ago
  it does degrade when played a lot, though I would imagine new materials could prolong expected life. but indeed as storage its rather more robust / purely "mechanical"
empyrrhicist 4y ago
I listen to a lot of digital music, and also vinyl records. Using laserdiscs sounds like less fun than both IMHO.

zanderz 4y ago

"In other words, the record business became the only entertainment industry in the world with no plan for technological innovation." Hasn't this been true since people started listening to the radio instead of buying sheet music? Who can be surprised at the cluelessness and intransigence of the music industry after 100+ years of the same? They were so busy fighting digital music, seemingly with the ridiculous pretense they could stop it altogether, they let spotify come in and take a big piece of the pie they could have kept for themselves.

JackFr 4y ago

I am an old guy. I am nostalgic. I want vinyl. The old guy music I used to listen to isn’t available. Therefore the record labels are lazy and greedy. Here are some cherry-picked market statistics from other self-interested parties presented with no context. See? I am right.

omar_alt 4y ago

The thing I noticed was that the price of an average record skyrocketed in price but the demand for an adequate turntable has not been as noticeable.

Balgair 4y ago

My SO collect vinyl. One of the main reasons they do it is because they don't want to lose the music and sounds. Their collection spans 40+ years with records going back further. With other media like cassettes or CDs, the degradation in players or the music itself is large enough that vinyl is the only workable solution for storage. I've seen it on some of my most favorite music from YouTube. One day, poof, the tracks are gone. YT or the creator decided to pull the music to never be heard again. Nothing exists of the music on the internet anymore. I've ripped them and burned them to CDs, but if I could get them in vinyl, I'd be much happier for the long term safety of the music I love.

hotpotamus 4y ago
I wouldn't think a CD would degrade within a few human lifetimes when properly stored. (Though there were issues with early optical media). Vinyl has the advantage of being nearly human-readable though - if all of society and technology vanished, you could still run a needle over it and hear the sounds within. I believe repeated plays do cause some degradation though which should not be a factor for CDs. I believe major movies are still archived onto color separated black and white negatives and stored away in vaults for reasons like the above. Personally, I keep flac audio files on an archive NAS server using ECC RAM and ZFS filesystems plus backups. The open source and lossless nature of flac is appealing as it should not be locked into one proprietary vendor and should never have to undergo any lossy transcoding from one format to another. I'm sure my system is imperfect as all things are, but I'm satisfied. I do also have a very small selection of vinyl records as I can appreciate them for the reasons I mentioned above.

lowken 4y ago

I just don’t understand people who still want to play music from huge plastic disks.

teknico 4y ago

I wish. Here’s hoping.