7 ms·

I oversee pressing for over 150k+ records a year. We eliminated download cards a while ago because the redemption rate was so low. I wouldn’t doubt if the numbe

• jen20 9mo ago
  Do they want the vinyl itself or do they want the cover art and so forth?
  • tssva 9mo ago
    Anecdotal data from my Gen-Z daughter, currently a college freshman, is that they want the cover art. Her dorm room walls are decorated with vinyl albums in frames where they cannot be listened to.
  • lucideer 9mo ago
    I'd say it's varied & most often a combination of multiple things. - They want the cover art - They want a physical token representing an artist they like - They want to financially support the artist in a direct way - They speculate they might get a player someday (much akin to book buyers leaving books on their shelves unread for years on end) 1 of the above might be the primary driver for any given buyer but I'd assume all of the above play some part in their motivations.
    • vr46 9mo ago
      They want the expense without the inconvenience?
    • DavidPiper 9mo ago
      Makes me wonder if bands produced something like a Displate wall hanging (no promotion intended) whether that would satisfy the same itches. For my part, there's something visceral about owning a piece of "physical music", as it were, even if I never play it.
      • lucideer 9mo ago
        While I'm sure there are plenty of vinyl collectors out there with some Displates up, I feel like vinyl has a lot of elements that make its audience significantly broader (even excluding player owners) - mainly that it has a cultural history associated with it. I also think people generally underestimate "potential playability" or aspirational record player ownership as factors in buying vinyl. A LOT of people who may never own a record player in their lifetime still think they might, & even if they don't their kids or grandkids might. Vinyl collections are heirlooms.
• godzillabrennus 9mo ago
  My wife and I both own vinyl, and neither of us has ever owned a record player. We put them on display for the most part. We have a song we got married to, and we bought a couple of album variations (each with different artwork) with that song; we also like the cover art on some vinyl releases as wall art.
  • onion2k 9mo ago
    I'm curious - does the music content actually matter to you? Would you buy an album from an artist you've never heard just because the cover art was great?
    • bkanuka 9mo ago
      Not who you're replying to (but I'm in the same camp). I use the album art as decoration, but the music is the first selection criteria. The music has to mean something to me first, and then the album art just needs to "pass". I have young kids also, so I try to stay away from violent or scary album art.
      • freetanga 9mo ago
        Why not just buy the cardboard cover?
        • mrWiz 9mo ago
          Where can you buy just the cardboard cover?
  • microtherion 9mo ago
    If you use the records as a display (and though I don't do that, I empathize; CD covers just don't generate the visceral reaction that LP covers do), wouldn't it make sense for publishers to offer record covers without the actual records?
• garciasn 9mo ago
  Gen X. Own a record player. Listen to vinyl as “intentional listening” and love the album cover art. My daughter (Gen Z/A) could play her albums but doesn’t. She puts them on display in her room. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
  • Loughla 9mo ago
    I own a very nice record player. Absolutely love listening to vinyl while looking at the cover art (Jethro Tull has the best album art and I'll fight anyone who disagrees). For me it's a time machine back to my childhood. We grew up poor and couldn't afford tapes and then CD's. We had thrift store vinyl albums. For my kids, vinyl was this weird thing that sounded scratchy. Then they grew up and found that the plethora of selection was both a blessing and a curse. They now frequent local record stores and invest in physical media like vinyl specifically because it forces intentional choice. There really is nothing as good as finding an amazing album you didn't expect, and there's nothing as crushing as realizing the album you just bought based on one song only has that one good song on it (any album by The Police, I'm looking at you).
    • thaumasiotes 9mo ago
      > and there's nothing as crushing as realizing the album you just bought based on one song only has that one good song on it (any album by The Police, I'm looking at you) Why call out The Police? This is the norm for all studio albums. That's why the popular albums are greatest hits collections instead.
      • taejavu 9mo ago
        By any measure, both of your statements are patently false. You’re almost making a valid point somewhere in there but the hyperbole buries it.
        • thaumasiotes 9mo ago
          What hyperbole?
• justarandomname 9mo ago
  > We eliminated download cards a while ago because the redemption rate was so low. Oh. my. gosh. This has been driving me NUTS recently. Please please please here me out. The first dozen or so records I bought were of albums I already owned digitally, as FLAC so I was one of those kinds of people that didn't redeem the downloads. I wanted to buy my faves, stuff that I knew I'd love to listen to on vinyl forever. Now that I'm buying brand new stuff, that I don't have digital copies of I've noticed they rarely, rarely, if ever include a download link and so I had to renew my dang apple music subscription to listen to albums I already own when I'm away from my record player and its started to really turn me off from buying any records outside of bandcamp (where you always get the digital version too.)
• analog31 9mo ago
  While I haven't seen vinyl at performances, I've seen plenty of CD's. My family enjoys attending shows given by smaller indie acts in areas such as folk, jazz, and classical. There's often a merch table with CD's to buy. We often buy them, then I take them home and rip them onto an NAS. I've asked some of the musicians flat-out: Which way of buying your material will get the most money directly to you? The answer is always: Buy the CD. Of course I can also make donations, and have done so.
• RileyJames 9mo ago
  I’ve been buying vinyl for the sake of collecting it, with limited intention to ever play it. And I’ve been wondering why would anyone buy the cassette or CD? (And I own more cassette players than the zero vinyl players) I recently found out that some of my favourite vinyls, that I’ve been collecting, ONLY include the art/lyrics booklet in the CD version. These are from the early 2000’s (peak cd?). I reckon I’d buy an art / lyrics booklet over a physical medium of the music itself. Particularly if it included flac download of the music.
  • bentley 9mo ago
    > And I’ve been wondering why would anyone buy the cassette or CD? I have no interest in cassette or vinyl. I love CDs because they provide the highest music quality, uncompressed audio that’s trivial to rip to lossless FLAC files, complete with metadata.
    • masklinn 9mo ago
      Sure, but on the whole I’d take getting FLAC directly over CDs. Not that I don’t have CDs, even deluxe editions with picture books and stuff, but I pretty much never get them out. I can understand people preferring vinyls as physical artefacts, the full frame jackets of my father’s albums are gorgeous in a way that’s distinct from and superior to CD album art, even if the music bit is markedly inferior technically (although that technical inferiority has led to better musical end results in some cases, you can’t compress the shit out of a vinyl, then again hopefully that time is long on the past).
      • Uvix 9mo ago
        I'd take getting FLAC files directly, but they're not available most of the time.
        • masklinn 9mo ago
          Yeah. But my point is mostly that the CD remains nothing but a transmission vessel for the audio, I don't know anyone and have seldom heard of people who value CDs for their physicality as a CD. Unlike vinyls which they very much do.
• GauntletWizard 9mo ago
  I buy vinyl for the album cover. If somebody were to sell me a digital download which also ships me an empty slipcase, I would buy it, for almost the same price that I pay for vinyl. I do have the record player, but I don't think I've used it more than a dozen days in my life. There's a lot of value to the physical artifact, but the precise nature of the physical artifact is up for playing with.
  • Symbiote 9mo ago
    A friend was selling a parent's vinyl collection on eBay, and a couple of times buyers asked to be sent only the slipcase to save weight and therefore postage costs.
  • throwaway777x 9mo ago
    The best example to me why I buy vinyl without a record player is the Flying Lotus - Your Dead album art. It is an incredible work of art: https://www.turntablelab.com/products/flying-lotus-youre-dead-vinyl-2lp https://www.turntablelab.com/products/flying-lotus-youre-dea... More and more though I would rather just buy merch to support the artist.
• onion2k 9mo ago
  It’s a lot of plastic. A lot of waste. It's only waste if it's being discarded. If someone wants to keep it and cherish it, even if they're not playing it, then it's not waste.
  • tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
    It's all waste eventually.
  • itake 9mo ago
    At some point in the future, the owner will pass and their children will have a mass of plastic to manage. Perhaps their children will cherish it for generations, or perhaps their children will have different musical tastes from their great great great grandpa and the plastic ends up in a landfill, forever un-played.
    • leogao 9mo ago
      in the grand scheme of things, this is a very small amount of plastic waste, and as far as resources go, one of the less scarce ones. at some point, the cost of the hand wringing to avoid waste is more of a drag on society than the actual wasted material itself.
    • onion2k 9mo ago
      At that point it becomes waste. That doesn't mean it's waste now.
  • thih9 9mo ago
    Technically they could get some paper stating “you own one vinyl” and we would use less plastic and storage (and we’d get an alternative monetary system perhaps).
  • compiler-devel 9mo ago
    > It’s a lot of plastic. A lot of waste. And yet again customer demand and financial gain supercede environmental concerns. There’s no hope for a better, less consumer-oriented culture if even the indie creatives among us acknowledge the problem yet succumb to it.
• coldtea 9mo ago
  >It’s a lot of plastic. A lot of waste. Compared to the plastic waste produced daily it's a drop in the ocean. And at least this is kept and collected. >even though it arguably is the best and easiest income generator for artists Digital is nowhere "the best and easiest income generator" for musicians. A common complain from musicians is how, with the advent of online music, sales craterred, and musicians despite having the same or more fans, and be able to fill the same venues, have lost the living they could make by selling even 50K records (with a favorable indie label split).
  • altacc 9mo ago
    Perhaps they meant digital download sales such as Bandcamp & Beatport and less so for iTunes, Amazon, etc... as there are still real revenues to be made from selling digital music. It all depends upon how many middlemen between purchaser and the artist but vinyl adds in unavoidable production costs, risks of unsold stock, etc... versus Bandcamp where there is little upfront cost, low risk and low transaction costs.
  • dale_glass 9mo ago
    I think that makes sense and was in a way unavoidable. Compare a physical shop with Spotify. A physical shop has limited space, so old stuff has to be pruned out to leave room for the new releases. So sales for old stuff gradually stop, and there's a small selection of current releases you can buy. Spotify and the like aren't like that. It's an infinitely growing amount of music you can play. New releases may be completely unnoticed by users who follow recommendation algorithms. You can trivially follow impulses like "So what else did the the band that made Video Killed the Radio Star make?". Since digital is infinitely reproducible and not perishable this will keep getting worse and worse. Any new artist competes against all of the music that was released before them.
  • eptcyka 9mo ago
    I will spend more in a month on a digital download at times than what I would've paid Spotify in years.
  • sehansen 9mo ago
    During the entirety of the 90's 11883 records sold at least 50 000 units[0]. If we assume $3 royalty each[1] that's ~1200 artists making $150 000 or more in an average year. That's ~$300 000 adjusted for inflation. In 2024 1450 artists got over $1 000 000 in royalty from Spotify.[2] Additionally 2.3% (~276 000) earned at least $1000 and 100 000 earned at least "almost $6000". It seems to me that there now is a long tail of artists making a few thousand a year on Spotify that assume they would have sold tens thousands of records each year in the 90s. E.g. the 100 000th most popular artist on Spotify assuming they would have sold as well as the 1200th most popular artist in 1998. The more likely case is that the top ~10 000 artists would have made less back then than they do now and the rest would have made essentially zero dollars from selling records back in the 90s. 0: https://bestsellingalbums.org/decade/1990-238 https://bestsellingalbums.org/decade/1990-238 1: https://dailybruin.com/1998/09/27/paying-the-price https://dailybruin.com/1998/09/27/paying-the-price 2: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2025/03/12/spotify-loud-and-clear-2024/ https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2025/03/12/spotify-loud-and...
• b00ty4breakfast 9mo ago
  >It’s a lot of plastic. A lot of waste. I don't know all the nitty-gritty, but the last Shellac record was "pressed" using an injection molding process that utilized recyclable PET (I can't find the interview with Albini[RIP] where this was discussed but if I find it I'll edit it into the comment).
  • alnwlsn 9mo ago
    Confused by this until I realized you meant "Shellac (band)" and not "Shellac - resin secreted by the female lac bug" which was used to press records in the 1920s. The last shellac record was indeed made from shellac. And shellac is a natural (or at least non-manmade) material; does this make it more environmentally friendly than vinyl or PET?
• bartread 9mo ago
  I’m increasingly conscious of being an outlier here. I prefer physical, for a variety of reasons (ownership being one of them), but also prefer CD to vinyl. Nobody loves CDs any more and I don’t get it. I own vinyl, I like vinyl, but CDs are objectively better and somewhat easier to store.
  • bayindirh 9mo ago
    I love both for different reasons. CDs sound better, they can be ripped and archived and can be carried around without any loss in their digital form. On the other hand, vinyl is great for intentional listening. Putting that hour aside to brew a nice cup of coffee and listen to something while exploring the feelings the album evoke, then get a break to flip/change the record and continue. It's a kind of personal care for me. I even recently showed a little love to my old record player (an Akai AP-D210) so it can regulate its RPM better and play smoothly as it can. I can argue that CDs are for listening to the music, and vinyl is for listening to yourself.
    • bifftastic 9mo ago
      > CDs are for listening to the music, and vinyl is for listening to yourself This is amazing
      • bayindirh 9mo ago
        > This is amazing This is not a reply I was anticipating. Can you elaborate a little? =)
        • threethirtytwo 9mo ago
          He’s reacting to an implication in your phrasing. “CDs are for listening to the music”. frames CDs as rational and objective. “Vinyl is for listening to yourself” reframes vinyl as something more inward and identity-driven. For many people, vinyl already sits in an intentionally irrational space compared to modern formats, worse fidelity, more friction, more ritual. So that line can be read as quietly calling vinyl navel-gazing or performative rather than about the music itself. Some readers find that observation insightful or funny, which is likely what prompted the “this is amazing” reaction, even if it wasn’t how you intended it. these types of people used to be called “hipsters.” I don’t know if there’s a more modern term for it. That’s what I guess he meant by “amazing” and also why it spawned the goat head and papyrus mockery.
• ta988 9mo ago
  A lot of plastic? less than a couple takeout orders no?(sure that's less of a toxic plastic in food containers but still)
• im3w1l 9mo ago
  > I oversee pressing for over 150k+ records a year. We eliminated download cards a while ago because the redemption rate was so low. Maybe you are right, but I wouldn't discount the possibility that people are willing to pay for the idea that they could some day download it even if it never ends up actually happening. Kinda like getting an insurance policy you probably wont need you know?
• conartist6 9mo ago
  35. My record player is in storage, but I still buy records sometimes because they're beautiful art and I want people to keep making them. For now I lend/give them to my friend who has a proper player set up. Spotify's max-blandness shuffle algorithm is like having a wank compared to letting an artist give you a full performance
• j4nek 9mo ago
  >I think we all know that Spotify doesn’t pay artists appropriately and we want to help sustain the music we love. not a big fan of all music streaming services, but they only keep about 30% of their revenue. the rest goes to the labels, and this is where most of the problem is. before the 2000s, very small artists hardly earned any income from the sale of (physical) media. I don't like the new platforms such as Spotify, Tidal, etc. either – but this kind of discussion often just distracts from the mafia-like structure of the major labels.
  • finghin 9mo ago
    It’s labels plus the limited revenue available due to competition. 15$ or so just doesn’t reflect the work that goes into a month’s worth of music listening.
  • danmelnick 9mo ago
    This is part of the problem for sure, but it's also how the revenue is split between back catalog vs new music. In the physical media era, when you bought a record/CD you owned it forever and your marginal cost of listening to a song approached zero over time. Most dollars went to new music. Now, it's close to a 75/25 split of dollars going to back catalog vs new music on streaming services. If you're a new musician, you're not competing against new music, you're competing against the entire history of recorded music. You're fighting for a piece of a pie that the Beatles are still taking a chunk of. And the labels are a part of the problem there, they made the deals with the streaming services that allows back catalog to dominate.
    • capncleaver 9mo ago
      This redistribution of revenues from new to old has also taken place in games: ~90% of time in games on PC is spent in games older than a year, ~50% in games 5+ years old like Fortnite, CoD, Roblox etc. Around half of revenues are 'free to play' [1] This is why making a new game is probably a terrible idea... but hey, world is casino! [1] https://newzoo.com/resources/trend-reports/the-pc-console-gaming-report-2025 https://newzoo.com/resources/trend-reports/the-pc-console-ga... and widely reported e.g. [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1je98mm/pc_gamers_spend_92_of_their_time_on_older_games/#:~:text=We%20know%20that%20there%20are,%E2%80%A2%2010mo%20ago https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1je98mm/pc_gamers...
• e-neko 9mo ago
  Playing vinyl is a bit like making espresso on a manual machine: a small ritual. Bit without the machine, it's a cargo cult.
• knowitnone3 9mo ago
  if they don't play it, what do they do with it - toss it under the bed? If people wanted to pay artists, a t-shirt is way more practical or just send them money.
• obrhoff 9mo ago
  At this point its mostly a merchandise/ collectable which I also think is okay.