Vinyl and Cassette Sales Continued to Grow Last Year | Hacker News Reader

Vinyl and Cassette Sales Continued to Grow Last Year

fortune.com

33 pointsjmsflknr22 comments

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a friend of a friend's place for a Christmas party, where he had the most amazing audio setup in his house - thousands of vinyls and a high end turntable and amplifiers, with state of the art speakers all around the room.

He tasked me with being the 'DJ' for the night and pick any album and spin it on the turntable, which I eagerly did. Grabbing those album covers, reading the jackets and the inside sleeves etc. just brought back to me how much fun it was doing the same back in the 80's.

Not to mention the sheer happiness and memories just seeing some of the cover art could bring back. People across the room would see me pull down an album from the shelf and run up to me screaming "Oooh, I remember that one!! Play track 4 on the 'B' side - that was the song playing when I experienced my first kiss..." etc.

Something about that tri fold combination of audio, visual and touch with vinyl that made the experience a whole lot more deeply immersing. Plus the added bonus of discovering hidden gems on the 'B' side of most albums.

Cassettes on the other hand? Other than making my own mixtapes for my friends, I always found the cassette experience a PITA.

I don't get why this would be unique to vinyl. Take my generation that grew up with CDs in the 90s and it's the same thing. So yes, that differentiates "us" from the younger generations that grew up on streaming, but I'm not still buying CDs because I like the medium. It's only because I want the physical thing at home (in good quality, as opposed to vinyl) - I'm only using the MP3s...

I buy vinyl but don't own a record player (yet). I do it for albums I love because of the large format artwork, extra notes/images inside and supporting the artists. Digital music has become essentially free and vinyl represents a physical manifestation of music and pride of ownership, which is becoming increasingly rare these days.

"Pride of ownership" is nothing more than a symptom of consumerism. It's an attachment to physical manifestations of an ephemeral thing (music itself), which confers no benefits over a digitally stored or streamed copy of the same music, other than the fetishized ritual of tactile interaction with an object.

That's not to say I wholly condemn the concept, I do collect classic rock and metal on vinyl, however only for albums where it was the original release format. Buying new music on vinyl is ridiculous, there are so many other better ways to support artists.

Nostalgia, gifts, hobbyists.

I’m actually impressed with the vinyl niche/trend - Compact discs only sold 70 million (plummeting big time) last year compared to vinyl at almost 10 million.

The vinyl market I understand. The large format artwork, the physicality of the disk and needle, the collecting, and the nostalgia factor are all pretty compelling. The cassette revival I don't get at all. I would guess it's not going anywhere.

I grew up in the late 80s/early 90s, and my primary playback format was cassette tape, until I was around 12-13 and got my own CD player. I first listened to classic albums like Deep Purple - Machine Head and various Beatles albums on tape, so there will always be a certain nostalgia factor there. I assume a lot of other people around my age feel the same way.

Cassettes might always be around but I think the only reason they saw double digit growth is because the market is so small. However, I can't see somebody choosing cassettes (or for that matter, 8-track cartridges) as the primary format for their music collection in the same way some do with vinyl or CDs.

Oh no no, absolutely not. I only keep a handful of cassette tapes around for nostalgic reasons, and I don't have a tape deck anymore, because it seems rather pointless, as you say.

I just like to hang on to obsolete media that once meant the world to me, so I have a couple of tapes, some 3.5" floppy disks and a couple of MiniDiscs (still shrinkwrapped), purely for nostalgia and maybe one day as something to show the eventual grandkids.

Maybe they miss the sound MCs make after a couple of hot summers in the glove compartment :)

Personally I have many vinyls but the only MCs I have (2 boxes full) contain ZX spectrum games. I wonder how many of them still work, I haven't had it out for a spin in a couple years.

Cassettes have a versatile DIY aesthetic about them: you could record all your sources off radio, TV or CD, sample it into a synth, build up and trade mixtapes, and so on. It isn't just a format for pre-recorded, and digital doesn't really do the same thing since the result of recording into digital is neatly encoded and organized files.

I read once that prisons only use cassettes because optical media can be turned into weapons.

Sadly, nothing in there to say what percentage of the music business vinyl actually makes up. Is it 1%, 5%,or what?

Done some digging. Looks like vinyl is about $200million from $4billion.

https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/RIAA-Mid-Yea...

Wow, hadn't realized how fast the transition to streaming went. It now responds for 75% of all revenue for the music industry (makes the Spotify semi-monopoly all the more worrying).

To put vinyl sales in context, it is almost half of all physical units in revenue. I think the AUR for an LP is much higher, but still impressive.

I've been thinking about how the vinyl/cd experience could be brought back into the digital era; something with space for decent artwork, like an SD card in a vinyl sleeve or something in between, and a chromecast-like player to match. Something you would be proud to own and display, with a low entry barrier in terms of equipment. If anybody is interested in working on something like this, my email is in my profile.

I buy CDs, since I want to own a copy of high-quality audio. I then copy them to my computer, and they sit in a box.

I no more want to flip through LP-style artwork than I do photographs of friends and family, which are also only digital. What I'd like is high resolution (at least 4K for my monitor/TV) artwork that could be shown while an album is playing.

Too bad the CD format makes it difficult to get a perfect rip. I prefer a FLAC (or WAV as I occasionally see) download over CDs, but CDs are my second choice, especially for older albums with used copies available.

Tools like Exact Audio Copy and cdparanoia have made it possible to do bit perfect DAE since the last millenuium.

I think Apple Music has like 50 million subscribers to Spotify’s 80 million. Not exactly a semi monopoly.

What's the difference between what you are suggesting and just buying CDs?

Much the same reasons we started buying vinyl again. CDs have ridiculously short shelf life in practice, are too fragile, require a complex and brittle laser reader. The tech sits in an intersection between analog and digital that serves absolutely no benefit at this point.

Plus, the physical experience of owning and playing them was never anywhere near as pleasant as vinyl.

I don't know about short shelf life. I just pulled boxes of CDs out of my attic last weekend. 95% were purchased before 1995 with probably 25% being from the 1980's.

They've been in my attic for the past 10 years experiencing extreme temperatures that would have destroyed vinyl (probably 130 degrees in the summer and freezing during the winter). So far every CD I've played has played perfectly.

> a complex and brittle laser reader

It's a very low tech thing at this point. The player I used the day I brought the disks down was $9 at Target and it worked just fine.

> the physical experience of owning and playing them was never anywhere near as pleasant as vinyl

I don't think it's that far off, especially when you factor in some of the audio advantages that the CD format has.

Vinyl is more fun though, no question about it. The format you are proposing would be even less fun. CDs have problems, but they are still (for now) the dominant format, by a factor of around 6x.

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