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Comment by mushufasa | Hacker News Reader

Eh, I see this more as a shift in consumer design patterns overall.

At the launch of the iphone, everything was skeumorphic. The cover flow clearly emulated flipping through a stack of records or CD books.

Now that people don't have physical media, the metaphor changes. The new design treats the cover art like an avatar on a forum or social media site -- a small thumbnail to identify the music.

Additionally, the original iPod/iPhone typically used internal storage in your Library. Under the Apple Music era of streaming, this may be a decision to shave a few % off of bandwidth costs by only pushing lower-resolution images. And then the choice being made to not upscale low-res to screen-width and incur blurriness.

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Meanwhile lots of folks are going back to vinyl.

Not "lots". In terms the entire music consuming industry, "more than previously (which was nearly 0)" at best

Every music store I've been in lately has a larger vinyl section than CDs, so as far as physical media goes, it's a pretty big shift.

That mostly reflects how much CD sales have plummeted.

Vinyl record sales in 2020 surpassed CDs for the first time since the 1980s:

"Vinyl records accounted for $232.1 million of music sales in the first half of the year, compared to CDs, which brought in only $129.9 million. ... Since 2005, sales for vinyl have grown consecutively. In the first half of 2020, vinyl revenue was up 4%, while CD revenue was down 48%, according to the RIAA."

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/13/tech/vinyl-records-cd-sales-r...

It seems like an opportunity for Apple to create a "vinyl filter" for Music, like a photo filter, to simulate the slight EQ profile and the physical scraping of playing a song on a turntable. I mean, if you really want it to sound worse, go ahead. It's no different than applying a "Polaroid" filter to a modern digital camera snapshot.

I think that would be the worst of both worlds, the good part of digital media are no rewinding, in your pocket, on demand. And the benefit of physical are big artwork, tangible, one copy. It is not about the sound of vinyl, but having it in your hands.

For reference, that same article mentions that streaming is a $4.8 billion market, so about 20x the size of the vinyl industry.

Sounds about right. Streaming is about being able to listen to anything you want. Vynil is about keeping what you like.

My Spotify history is full of songs and playlists which I don't even like, and I use it to explore other genres and artists. It's reasonable that only 5% of everyday people listen to is good enough to be acquired permanently.

Sometimes it’s reversed. Spotify has less than 50% of the artists and albums I have on CDs and I have been tempted to buy missing songs on vinyl. Spotify’s playlists also rot, roughly 1% of songs disappear per year.

I'm actually a bit surprised streaming is only 20x. But I guess even if vinyl is something of a niche, it's probably sort of a luxury enthusiast one.

Have in mind the vinyl market share isn't too far from the MacOS market share a couple of years ago. I see it as the premium niche, something we can't just ignore, especially if we consider the growth.

From a purely financial point of view, if that's all that matter, yes, you may compare streaming/vinyl/CDs.

... those are _different_ markets:

- Streaming is about subscription to a right to listen to music passing by, attached to a specific set of account (with all the metrics that come with it).

- Vinyl is about physical analog copies that you can transmit to someone across space and time and that are barely trackable.

Edit: but indeed, huge markets crush small ones...

I haven't bought a CD for many years, and I don't think I'm the only one.

I see the appeal of having a physical token that I can transmit to people, but it's not enough to make me buy CDs any longer.

For the most part I agree, although if I'm going to buy an entire album digitally, I do sometimes just buy the CD and rip it if the price is about the same.

That said, I finally got my music library cleaned up and decided to fill in some holes. But, at that point, I also decided I might as well just use subscription downloads from Apple Music. It's all very mainstream older stuff and if I do decide at some point, I want copies I own I can buy them if I want. But no need to spend the money right now just so I know I own everything.

Same dilemna here.

But, like books, that's the only way my kids and their kids may keep the actual artefact of something that I did read or listen to (be it a book, or a vinyl).

So, if I appreaciate/care about what it is/says, I get a physical copy of it so I can give it to someone. Otherwise I know it's lost to them.

The two don't have to be mutually exclusive. You don't have to hate streaming to enjoy vinyl, and vice versa.

I happen to enjoy both and treat them as different experiences. I'm fine if the expectations around digital change as long as it's still accessible.

I do the same thing! I find that with vinyl I’m more likely to listen to the whole album. With streaming, I’ll hear a song I like, remember another song, hop around all over the place.

This was (is?) the idea behind Paper & Plastick Records [0] in the MP3 heyday. The "paper" is a download code, and the "plastick" is a vinyl record along with it. Pretty fun concept IMO.

[0] http://www.paperandplastick.com/

Besides, what in the digital realm is not skeuomorphism to begin with?

Every single item in the digital world down to a pixel (off of the `pt` points system) we see online is skeuomorphic inspiration off of something! Typesetting and the alphabet is skeuo off the typewriter systems/foundry, buttons––of course skeuomorphism, web-page and scrolling follow from pulp and physical scrolls, header, footer, body inspire off of letterheads.

Anyone who claims 'skeuomorphism this, but !skeuomorphism that' is a digital noob and doesn't quite understand where the world has been and how it got here.

There is a difference between (1) being able to trace design inspiration back to something non-digital, and (2) skeumorphic design. The latter is more about making a nostalgic leap back to a specific pre-digital aesthetic, painstakingly hiding the interim steps.

The difference may be subject to nuance and debate, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

A small number of very noisy folks.

https://www.riaa.com/u-s-sales-database/

Absolute dynamo of a medium.

Wow, that page is spectacularly broken on Chrome mobile: it disables zoom so that I can't see the whole graph, and if I view it using 'Desktop version' the page becomes unresponsive due to either too much Javascript, or due to CSS hacking.

Only if by "lots" you mean "almost no one".

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