9 ms·
Vinyl Records Outsell CDs for the First Time Since 1987
- throwaway742 4y agoAnecdotally my teenage cousin asked for a vinyl album of her favorite artist last Christmas. She doesn't even own a record player and doesn't own a single CD. She said it was about supporting the artist and that she appreciated the art. It also came with a poster.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- climb_stealth 4y agoI do that with CDs. I like having them in my cupboard but don't actually have a way of playing them. And yes, it is a good way of supporting smaller artists.
- devnullbrain 4y agoMaybe as an alternative you can send $20 to their paypal and buy a length of PVC piping.
- climb_stealth 4y agoHah, what's the PVC piping for?
- conductr 4y agoNow this I understand! I rarely believe the audiophile explanations I usually get when I ask why buy vinyl. I personally can't usually tell a difference with sound quality (at the CD WAV vs Vinyl record quality levels) and most people that claim to I'm suspicious they haven't invested in the hardware to really extract it if it's there so I just think there's some placebo effect going on. I've also read some stats that statistically only a small percentage of people can detect what audiophiles claim to. So again, it's in peoples mind more than anything is what it seems like to me. I liken it to a high school prank where we often told kids at parties a drink was alcoholic, they acted tipsy, and we thought it was funny because it had no alcohol. Hoarding collectible art is totally my speed though, this I get - I still buy the CDs from my favorite bands, I don't care about supporting them this way because I know they make very little off of it, I just like having "the collection". I also like the chronological album listening experience but Spotify does that, so now I get CDs and toss them in a box still wrapped in cellophane.
- mnd999 4y agoYeah, 50% of vinyl is bought by people without a turntable - it’s mad.
- lukaslalinsky 4y agoPeople collect much stranger things, like sports cards. Having a physical copy of a piece of art gives many people a nice feeling.
- ChatGTP 4y agoWell often people do this to support their favourite bands and artists. I think we’ll see a lot more of this in the future because of “generated music”
- bigbillheck 4y agoI support the artist by buying their (digital) albums on bandcamp.
- ChatGTP 4y agoSure that works too, lots of younger bands where I live have records pressed, they’re quite popular merchandise.
- mstade 4y agoI have three vinyls I think, that I've never played because I don't have a player. The first one I got as a gift, and the others I bought because I liked the artwork – they're like paintings to me. I keep meaning to get a player, but I can't find one that strikes the right balance of price and aesthetics. The Bang & Olufsen Beogram 4000c has the right aesthetics but probably way too expensive. I've been trying to find one but they're hard to come by in decent condition. Probably because B&O sourced them all to do their recreation project...
- JKCalhoun 4y agoI like my Pro-Ject Debut I picked up a decade or so ago. At the time it was at the low-end of the audiophile-grade stuff.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- twelfthnight 4y agoI've noticed that this vinyl boom has made used records more difficult to find and more expensive. That has driven me to get CDs, since I can get 3-10x the number of albums for the same price. Since it felt appropriate to buy albums originally released on CDs, the whole vinyl resurgence has counterintuitively gotten me much more into 90s/2000s music and I kind of love it.
- worrycue 4y agoIf you want the best sound quality, CDs are definitely the way to go - they are better than vinyl and compressed digital audio files; although it's perceptually hard to tell the difference from the latter 99.9% of the time. Given another 10 or 20 years and there might be a CD boom as nostalgia kicks in and a new generation of hipsters come of age.
- siva7 4y agodoubtful. there is nothing romantic about a CD
- samtho 4y agoSame could be said about most things just past their prime.
- cromka 4y agoI think it’s important to question whether the nostalgia comes from CDs and vinyls merely being a thing of the past or, rather, the analog nature of vinyl, including the process of putting on a record. I’d argue that its the latter.
- rjh29 4y ago2000-era pocket cameras as experiencing a resurgence as 'vintage'. But that relies on their quality being inherently lower than modern cameras. CDs have the same exact sound quality as downloadable MP3s or Spotify, so I don't see them being popular again.
- vr46 4y agoCD sales have collapsed - although I load up on them at £1/€1 a pop at the second hand and charity shops. A bargain. Vinyl is CRAZY expensive, the days of cheap records is long gone and I'm not sure how much longer the people who buy reissues will still continue doing so. Probably another ten years until they retire and have to live off their meagre pensions.
- Hamuko 4y agoI imagine we'll see a significant slowing down in vinyl sales if the economy continues to stutter. Vinyl records are a luxury good, and most likely not people's primary way of discovering and listening to music.
- mnd999 4y agoRecord companies keen to see the back of the last bastion of DRM free digital music.
- twelfthnight 4y agoI'm with you. CDs are crazy undervalued right now. I'm not sure they will have quite the hipster boom as vinyl in the future, but I wonder if used CD prices will start rising eventually after some time passes and nostalgia increases.
- lysozyme 4y agoI grew up listening to my dad’s vinyl records and remember buying my first CDs in the early 2000s. I also remember borrowing backpacks full of CDs of jazz and classical music from my local library when I was in high school and ripping them to MP3 so I could keep them with all the music I was getting from Napster. I’m one of these people who likes to listen to full albums. At one point I had a few thousand ripped as quality MP3. In college there were campus peer-to-peer ways of sharing music and my collection grew a lot. In grad school, the streaming services came out. The streaming services like Spotify have some major downsides. Sometimes things go unplayable. Stuff is missing. Stuff is changed/censored without warning. The UI is optimized for whatever Spotify wants to show you, not what you want to listen to. I assume it makes sense for Spotify to optimize their costs by suggesting stuff they pay less for. For someone who likes albums, the little annoyances add up. I recently pulled my dad’s record collection out of his attic. It’s about a thousand LPs from the sixties and seventies. Stuff I like since I grew up listening to it. I’ve spent a few months browsing Discogs and buying bargin-bin vinyl and CDs (lots of scrolling, filters are useless). I’ve bought about five hundred CDs and maybe a hundred vinyl records over several months. The majority of the CDs are $1–2, and the records are mostly under $5. It all comes via Media Mail, shipped for a few bucks. One of the packages came from Brooklyn and had been inspected by USPS to make sure it contained only CDs. One package came from Jamaica and the vinyl sleeves had a bit of fine sand. It’s a cheap, fun hobby. Now I’ve got a hard copy of just about any album I want to listen to. I like the physicality of taking the CD out of the case and nudging the sliding tray in. My CD player is a 1988 Realistic I found at a music store and it sometimes skips if the disc has deep scratches. I like the unspoken social job of turning the record over. I like that the current CEO of Spotify, and the next CEO, and whatever government wants to, can’t see what I am playing on repeat today. Since returning to mainly listening to physical media, my experience of listening to music has improved and I enjoy it more than ever. I got home the other day and the internet was out, and I didn’t even notice for an hour since the first thing I do now when I get home is put a record on
- JKCalhoun 4y agoMore and more I believe that offline is bestline. Some of us remember when the only password we needed was a 4-digit pin for the ATM. I swear if there was an offline version of Stack Overflow (like you can pull down a minimal Wikipedia) I could go days without internet.
- diego_moita 4y agoI am a CD fan but I find very hard to find a good supplier of them in North America. I am particularly interested in Jazz from the 50s to early 70s. The best place I know to buy them is Tower Records in Japan. Anyone with a good reference for a North America supplier?
- tmountain 4y agoDiscogs for long tail jazz CDs.
- lakomen 4y agoI was a DJ in the golden age of Techno, sadly my records got stolen. I've always believed that the analog sound was better. Also there was the art of beatmatching without timecoded digital tracks. The downside was, obviously, really heavy records that were a logistical challenge every time, since I had no drivers license. Also, yeah, those records can get stolen, as well as CDs, but nowadays' flac or wav files can just be copied to a new USB stick so no harm done if someone steals it. Nowadays I have 60gb of all kinds of audio files on my phone. It's not surprising that records outperform CDs in sales, but interesting that it has come to this.
- devnullbrain 4y agoIMO the vinyl resurgence is mainly hive mind consumerism. They take up more space, they sound worse, they're more expensive, and they can be used fewer times before being degraded. The secret to the last one: many of the collectors aren't really playing them at all. It's an irrational trend and the end result will be future generations taking huge amounts of plastic to landfill. And that may be sooner than we think: spinning LPs give off carcinogenic gas. Suffer for fashion.
- prmoustache 4y agoIt is all about the ritual. And the cover can serve as a poster in the room.
- kristiandupont 4y agoMaybe I am following the hive mind unknowingly, but my personal affection with vinyl is very similar to how I enjoy cooking even if I can get better meals in restaurants or creating furniture even though I can buy stuff pre-made that is higher quality: it's just a nice feeling. The rotating disk in the room adds atmosphere, and there is a bit of commitment -- I can't easily skip that one song I dislike, so I listen to the album the way the artist made it. Sometimes that is annoying, but quite often, I have ended up enjoying the harder-to-digest songs even more than the others.
- garciasn 4y agoTo me, vinyl is for intentional listening. I am making a conscious choice, I am actively listening to it, and I’m interacting with the media and displaying large form artwork while it plays. I also have access to Amazon’s music service in every room on whatever devices we have. I am working my way through RS’ to 500 albums with it. I am currently building a Grateful Dead Time Machine (https://www.spertilo.net/ https://www.spertilo.net/) to have that added to the music playing repertoire. I can listen to all of those as background music or even actively. But they’re different than vinyl for me and I don’t care about what others do or how they do it, but I ENJOY this in a way I never enjoyed music before while having the disposable income to do it. To each their own and all of that but for folks to deride those who listen to vinyl with a dismissive wave of their hand because they disagree with it and generalize their feelings for those who enjoy it is a bit much.
- grey-area 4y agoThis is just a function of the inevitable decline of custom hardware information storage vs software information storage (where hardware is fungible, could on the cloud, locally or a mix of both). CDs have finally declined to the levels of hobbyist collectors of vinyl and will soon go to 0 as the reader hardware dies out (as did many hardware formats before it). Vinyl will stay around probably for a long time as a curiosity as the hardware is relatively simple - our kids of a small record player which works on the same principle and it is actually fascinating as a concept - you can see the data stored as bumps in the plastic records. There really is no reason for CDs to stay around, they are neither attractive nor convenient and haven't been for a decade at least.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoBut the same ("there really is no reason for CDs to stay around") was said for vinyl and casette tapes before; given that these are now having a resurgence, I don't think you can be as absolute about CDs. That said, I don't see minidisks making a comeback any time soon, but then their timing was very unfortunate - only just before the much more convenient MP3 players.
- grey-area 4y agoCan you even buy new cassette players? You still haven’t given any reasons I’d want a cd. Vinyl I can see the attraction as the players are pleasingly simple, these other formats, why bother? I can’t see use outside very niche cases.
- iggldiggl 4y ago> You still haven’t given any reasons I’d want a cd. Not universal reasons to exclusively buy only CDs (because I haven't done so either), so I guess it might fall under your "niche cases", but 1. Some gapless live albums have been released online (both downloads and streaming) in a broken fashion, so getting the CD is the only legal way of getting a non-broken digital release. 2. Occasionally even a new CD costs less (!) than the digital download. 3. Vinyl albums are of course unmatched in terms of cover art, but even CDs are usually still a step above purely digital distribution – sadly the practice of including the cover booklet as a PDF or something like that is far from universal. While of course ultimately the music is the main thing, with a number of albums missing out on the full cover art and/or liner notes is still somewhat of a shame, because they're interesting/funny/informative/part of the complete art package.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jayceedenton 4y agoI haven't bought vinyl in at least 15 years, but I'm pleased to see any physical media still maintaining a place in our lives. For me, it's not the nostalgia factor, or the atmosphere created by physical media, it's purely about the availability of music. I have a huge collection of hip-hop vinyl and CDs. A significant proportion of my favourites are not available on Spotify. We're not talking about niche artists either - releases by plenty of well-known artists from the 90s and 2000s have some kind of rights issue that has kept them off streaming platforms. Just recently one of the best, and seminal 00s hip-hop albums has been lost from Spotify. Either all this fantastic music is gone and lost forever (because not on Spotify = does not exist), or we keep the CDs, vinyl, and ripped MP3 collections. People think that Spotify is basically all of music. They see the music streaming services as having solved the 'unified catalogue' problem where the video streaming services are still balkanised. This is far from the truth though, so much is missing from Spotify. What I really miss is not the vinyl, it's the completeness of Napster in 2000.
- prmoustache 4y ago> they sound worse Does it really matter in a world where many music producer use VST plugins or tapes to give a vintage flair to part if their music? Does it really matter in world where most people listen to music through terrible bluetooth speakers and headphones and in noisy environments?
- jsz0 4y agoI don't want to rain on anyone's parade but there is a dark side to collecting that isn't immediately apparent to people. It involves a lot of virtue signaling and snobbery. I've seen so many music forums online ruined by people bickering over releases or resenting each other because they can't afford the same collations as other people. In my experience almost all collecting communities or discussions end up turning toxic. My advice would be if you enjoy collecting something DO NOT get involved in the communities surrounding it. Do it for yourself not the strangers online who will go out of their way to make you feel like whatever you have is lesser than them.