Live data from Hacker News

50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player

lightcapai.medium.com

141–150 of 348 posts

Re: 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player

#141
post #99
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have my old BluRay collection which I build up from the mid 2000. This already was the replacement of the DVDs I had before. They still sit in the shelve because I don’t know what else to do with the space. Same goes for books etc. I mean I really like the covers etc and the fact one has a physical token. But I simply have too much of it in my house already. And replacing the stuff yet again feels useless. I…

About 15 years ago I got rid of almost all of my physical media. I was moving a lot at the time (I've moved 13 times over the last 20 years, several times to different cities) and I had hundreds of CDs, DVDs and books.. It was literally a quarter of my boxes every time I moved.. So I sold and donated all of it, kept what had special value, and re-acquired a lot of it digitally. I still think I made the right decision…

I also moved many times in the past. Once CD-quality settled, I gifted my vinyls to a thrift store. (The 'art' was immaterial.)

20 years ago, I ripped all of my CDs into 192K MP3s (perfect enough for my ears) using an online metadata service. Getting rid of the 'jewel cases' (and eventually all of their non-CD content) but retaining the CDs (4 Logic cases worth, 3 sq. feet) saved a ton of room.

For backup I archived the thousands of MP3s onto an 80GB Seagate which I organized by genre, then stored in a shoebox. 12 years later I copied the Seagate to two more HDs. It worked fine (but gave-up-the-ghost later that year).

I've relied on those files since. Unlike several dead self-burned CD-Rs, the manu'd CDs (I never use) seem to have remained healthy in the cases at room temp.

Re: 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player

#142

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 number of buyers who don’t own a record player is even higher tha 50%, and that the percentage of people who actually play the records is actually 10-20%. I don’t have data on that, it’s just a hunch. Many of us in the indie music industry (hip hop sustained record…

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.

Re: 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player

#143
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they want the vinyl itself or do they want the cover art and so forth?

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 a…

They want the expense without the inconvenience?

Re: 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to ask, when are the youngsters going to discover CDs? Much less prone to degradation to vinyl, lossless ripping, superior quality.

If it is to happen, CDs and CD packaging would need a rebranding. Part of vinyl popularity is the large sleeve surface that provides a large canvas for a piece of art. Another part is that you get a physically large analogue object that, while previously would be cumbersome, has become interesting in a heavily digital age.

Afaict this has already happened. Vinyl is about the big art, CDs are all about the pack ins. You get small books, pictures, stickers all packed into a cardboard box the size of a novel. Not jewel cases.

At least for the K-pop artists my daughter listens to.

Re: 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player

#146

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 number of buyers who don’t own a record player is even higher tha 50%, and that the percentage of people who actually play the records is actually 10-20%. I don’t have data on that, it’s just a hunch. Many of us in the indie music industry (hip hop sustained record…

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)_/¯

Re: 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player

#147
So I had a year or two in the same situation, old sony turntable had door mechanism fail and the stylus I had wore out and didn't have an easy replacement. Got a sound burger for Christmas and it’s pretty great for casual use (it stows away nicely).

Most of my collection I did get for the art or to support the artist more directly (there’s one I always buy the test pressings from on every album he puts out, I get to hear it like a month before release).

My dad has a pretty big record collection, he didn’t play them a ton, what we would do was dub them to metal cassette and listen to those so it wouldnt degrade the records. So there’s a boomer equivalent to using streaming over playing the original physical copy.

Re: 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are overwhelming examples of people who continue to work when all of their basic needs are met. Some work because they love to, some work because they have to; we, collectively, should be trying as hard as possible to make work optional (automation, etc), because the point of life is to live, not to work. Some combination of Abundance [1], Solarpunk [2], etc. The entire planet will eventually be in population d…

> the point of life is to live, not to work I'd love to learn how you came to this definitive conclusion. At no point in human history have humans not worked (I'm sure there are some limited exceptions, none of which have been sustainable). Perhaps you meant to say the point of life is to survive, but you have to work to make that happen.

> At no point in human history have humans not worked

This is a non sequitur. The discussion is about the point of life. At no point in history have humans not pooped, but I would imagine that few consider pooping the point of life.

Re: 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player

#150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to ask, when are the youngsters going to discover CDs? Much less prone to degradation to vinyl, lossless ripping, superior quality.

> Much less prone to degradation to vinyl huh... and I thought the vinyl craze happened because it's more durable out of ye old formats CDs are well known to oxydize in the span of decades of storage

Vinyl was infamous for degrading during use to the point where you could identify whether an album had been played more than a dozen times by the reduction in sound quality.
Post reply on HN