Earlier quoted context omitted.
Come and join the resurgent Minidisc movement!
I'll have to pivot to DAT revival for max hipster cred.
I'll have to pivot to DAT revival for max hipster cred.
Tell that to my uncle who worked on DCC.
50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player
221–230 of 348 posts
Re: 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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.
Less consumer-oriented culture demands brainwashing, totalitarianism and terror, to force people to not do things they naturally want to, when there is a capability for doing that (if there's no capability, a nation will be physically overwhelmed by other nations and cease to exist/replaced)...
Re: 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player
#223I 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…
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.
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.
Re: 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player
#224Earlier 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.
CDs suffer from different forms of degradation. I wouldn't trust a 50 year old CD if there was one as I do a vinyl record I picked. Using the same master a CD would always sound better than a vinyl record, but I and many people would always take vinyl over a CD because of the praxis . Set and setting is important, in the end. Vinyl is more demanding in every aspects, it imposes more care and respect for what you're l…
The oldest CDs are from 1982 (43 years old) and are still working perfectly fine.
I don't have any that old, but I have some from the late 1980s which my dad bought. All still fine, my parents listen to them in the car.
Re: 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Much of the vinyl noise and distortion is pressed into the vinyl itself. Even if you play it using an optical player it will still sound worse than a good CD.
My point was more that vinyl has a distinct sound, whereas CDs are just the digital files in a physical package. So if someone decides that distortion suits a particular album better, it's not going to "sound worse" to them.
If the artist thinks the distortion of a vinyl record player suits their music, they should add it to the recording on the CD.
Re: 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 a…
> 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.
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).
Re: 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player
#227I 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…
> 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 h…
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.
Re: 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player
#228Earlier 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.
I am the youngster in this case and I am going to tell you something but we really need to move off of spotify. I never really got onto spotify. I was always the youtube kind of guy, although I recently started listening to youtube music when I realized that my youtube feed was being impacted and youtube music's a better way to listen I guess We really need to get to pen-drives first before CD as well I guess. Like d…
A couple of decades ago most people I knew were spending considerable time thinking about the best folder structure to use to manage large collections of MP3s (and then making them available on Limewire). Then you'd move over selections to your or someone else's MP3 player.
One great product of this among my friends was the MP3 mix tape swap parties. You'd select a bunch of your favourite songs and put them on a thumb drive, then go hang out at a friend's house. All the MP3s would be put together, virus checked and then copied to everyone's thumb drives. It was a great way of discovering new music.
Re: 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player
#229I 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…
> 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 h…
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.
Re: 50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player
#230I 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…
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.
> Nobody loves CDs any more and I don’t get it.
I loved CDs, but I was forced to stop buying new CDs decades ago because I can't stomach supporting the RIAA. That said, it is still my preferred physical media for music (followed by minidisc) even though ultimately my CD collection was digitized and stored.