Vinyl Records Outsell CDs for the First Time Since 1987 | Hacker News Reader

Vinyl Records Outsell CDs for the First Time Since 1987

wsj.com

67 pointslxm88 comments

I grew up listening to my dad’s vinyl records and remember buying my first CDs in the early 2000s. I also remember borrowing backpacks full of CDs of jazz and classical music from my local library when I was in high school and ripping them to MP3 so I could keep them with all the music I was getting from Napster.

I’m one of these people who likes to listen to full albums. At one point I had a few thousand ripped as quality MP3. In college there were campus peer-to-peer ways of sharing music and my collection grew a lot.

In grad school, the streaming services came out. The streaming services like Spotify have some major downsides. Sometimes things go unplayable. Stuff is missing. Stuff is changed/censored without warning. The UI is optimized for whatever Spotify wants to show you, not what you want to listen to. I assume it makes sense for Spotify to optimize their costs by suggesting stuff they pay less for. For someone who likes albums, the little annoyances add up.

I recently pulled my dad’s record collection out of his attic. It’s about a thousand LPs from the sixties and seventies. Stuff I like since I grew up listening to it. I’ve spent a few months browsing Discogs and buying bargin-bin vinyl and CDs (lots of scrolling, filters are useless). I’ve bought about five hundred CDs and maybe a hundred vinyl records over several months. The majority of the CDs are $1–2, and the records are mostly under $5. It all comes via Media Mail, shipped for a few bucks. One of the packages came from Brooklyn and had been inspected by USPS to make sure it contained only CDs. One package came from Jamaica and the vinyl sleeves had a bit of fine sand. It’s a cheap, fun hobby.

Now I’ve got a hard copy of just about any album I want to listen to. I like the physicality of taking the CD out of the case and nudging the sliding tray in. My CD player is a 1988 Realistic I found at a music store and it sometimes skips if the disc has deep scratches. I like the unspoken social job of turning the record over. I like that the current CEO of Spotify, and the next CEO, and whatever government wants to, can’t see what I am playing on repeat today.

Since returning to mainly listening to physical media, my experience of listening to music has improved and I enjoy it more than ever. I got home the other day and the internet was out, and I didn’t even notice for an hour since the first thing I do now when I get home is put a record on

More and more I believe that offline is bestline.

Some of us remember when the only password we needed was a 4-digit pin for the ATM.

I swear if there was an offline version of Stack Overflow (like you can pull down a minimal Wikipedia) I could go days without internet.

It would be a dream if people just wrote documentation.

Writing documentation is easy. Writing documents is hard.

Who are you writing for, what competency, which part of the documentation quadrant, what style...

Dash makes offline copies of StackOverflow easily browsable. Maybe this could suit you!

https://kapeli.com/dash

That's throwing out the baby with the bathwater, going totally offline. You are in control of how much time you spend online, both mobile as well as at your desk. Just switch off automatic synchronisation on mobile devices and you're free from needless attention-grabbing noises from the things. Tell people to call you if they really need to get hold of you, now, at this moment. As long as you are the one who controls your devices instead of those devices controlling you the possibility of going online is a book. Use it when needed, no more, no less. Try to disable as many attention-grabbing features of connected devices, e.g rigourously block all forms of advertising on multiple levels - router, device and application. This is what I've been doing since... well, since 24h internet access became a thing really. It was clear from the outset that too much of a good thing can hurt.

Kiwix has an offline Stack Overflow:

https://www.kiwix.org/en/look-at-us-we-took-stack-overflow-o...

I haven’t used it, but I’ve used their offline Wikipedia

> I assume it makes sense for Spotify to optimize their costs by suggesting stuff they pay less for.

Pay less for? Payola is legal again; these are paid ads.

Ever wonder why random bad hip hop is injected into playlists it has no place in? It's the label paying to promote the artist.

Unrelated but every time I clean my spotify cache I get better recommendations, I figure they're saving a fair bit of money not having to stream new songs

Spotify also has comissioned songs to play you from unknown artists at 0 cost (beyond 1 time comission) or even negative cost (if they decide to also pay themselves $0.00002 per stream).

My friends an I stumbled upon "DJ Techno", an artist that is only on spotify and does not seem to exist on any other website (inlc social media), and it's the most generic techno music imaginable. When we checked it had millions of monthly listeners, probably from the same place as us, electro-adjacent radios.

The ONLY downside to collecting physical albums, besides the cost of newer or more desireable albums, is the space it requires. I'd like an album collection, but realistically I don't have the space (yet). Besides, it would go alongside the book collection, we've got like 2 Billy bookcases worth of books around the house and would like a lot more yet. I mean we don't have (take) the time to read and play video games instead, but that's besides the point; owning physical media is great.

Understanding that there's pleasure In physicality of things, I never had an issue listening to full album, in order, on spotify.

(unless you're talking about free version, in which case, com'on, it's free and cannot be compared to paid experience of buying albums plus players. At worst, it's like radio, except with fewer ads and way way more control:)

My issue with hard copies of albums is that I’m too lazy to change them. I would often find myself listening to whatever was in the player, and, then that was done, I would stop listening to music in order to avoid changing records.

I do miss the concept of an album, though.

I’ve been enjoying audio cassettes because they tend to have more audio per side than vinyl

IMO the vinyl resurgence is mainly hive mind consumerism. They take up more space, they sound worse, they're more expensive, and they can be used fewer times before being degraded. The secret to the last one: many of the collectors aren't really playing them at all.

It's an irrational trend and the end result will be future generations taking huge amounts of plastic to landfill. And that may be sooner than we think: spinning LPs give off carcinogenic gas. Suffer for fashion.

Maybe I am following the hive mind unknowingly, but my personal affection with vinyl is very similar to how I enjoy cooking even if I can get better meals in restaurants or creating furniture even though I can buy stuff pre-made that is higher quality: it's just a nice feeling.

The rotating disk in the room adds atmosphere, and there is a bit of commitment -- I can't easily skip that one song I dislike, so I listen to the album the way the artist made it. Sometimes that is annoying, but quite often, I have ended up enjoying the harder-to-digest songs even more than the others.

To me, vinyl is for intentional listening. I am making a conscious choice, I am actively listening to it, and I’m interacting with the media and displaying large form artwork while it plays.

I also have access to Amazon’s music service in every room on whatever devices we have. I am working my way through RS’ to 500 albums with it.

I am currently building a Grateful Dead Time Machine (https://www.spertilo.net/) to have that added to the music playing repertoire.

I can listen to all of those as background music or even actively. But they’re different than vinyl for me and I don’t care about what others do or how they do it, but I ENJOY this in a way I never enjoyed music before while having the disposable income to do it.

To each their own and all of that but for folks to deride those who listen to vinyl with a dismissive wave of their hand because they disagree with it and generalize their feelings for those who enjoy it is a bit much.

This is something you can get from CD too minus the large form artwork. Although you could probably put CDs in a big sleeve too.

Love that you’re building a GD Time Machine!

I recently built a PiPDP11 kit and had all the stuff to solder so I figured why not?!

For me, the soldering was done in 10-15 mins on the GDTM and the new challenge is making the faceplate for the enclosure.

Something nerdy to learn and do. :-)

To borrow a joke: how do you know someone doesn't listen to LPs? They'll fucking tell you.

The funny thing is that most folks who need to tell everyone that listening to records is dumb because they sound bad are almost certainly listening to the vast majority of their music over streaming services. So you have albums that are being mastered to survive MP3 compression being delivered over lossy streams that 100% have not being signed by the artist and don't contain glossy, album-sized photographs and hard copies of the lyrics.

Meanwhile, LPs are legitimately collectable (limited pressings absolutely accumulate value in the same way other collectables do) and are often mastered or remastered for full spectrum fidelity and pressed on extremely heavy vinyl stock. Much of the "sounds bad" critiques are only truly applicable to mass-market pop music LPs that were pressed on thin+cheap material and sacrificed quality to fit more minutes of music per side as a way to keep costs low.

When you buy, for example, an LCD Soundsystem LP and A/B it with the same tracks on Spotify, it quickly becomes clear that maybe we're not so dumb after all.

If you care about sound quality there are many streaming services offering lossless quality, Apple, Tidal, Amazon, etc. There are places you can buy lossless tracks as well. You never have to worry about them getting dirty.

The point I was trying to make is that the folks who feel compelled to explain why vinyl is dumb (each one is the first to offer this opinion) usually start by telling us that vinyl sounds terrible.

They are unaware that a) it doesn't and b) Spotify does.

Which is fine, but you'll notice that you rarely see LP collectors expend energy trying to tell streaming music enthusiasts that the entire premise of their enjoyment is flawed.

Vinyl people claim all the time that vinyl sounds better. Usually about the "warmth" or "better mastering". You do it in your post above. The post you replied to doesn't even mention streaming or Spotify. Maybe they are talking about CDs or lossless FLACs or lossless streaming or reel to reels or any format that offers higher quality sound than vinyl?

Consider the order of operations: the article that brought us here simply declares that LPs are now, officially and finally, out-selling CDs. I responded to a top-level comment of the "LPs are bad" variety - perhaps my only real mistake. In other words, I was reacting to someone whose reply to "LPs are popular" was an unprompted "actually, they suck".

I'm not actively seeking out digital music listeners to proselytize records. We tend to not do that because they already have a hard time keeping up with existing demand.

You might not like hearing that most music is mastered for lossy compression, but it doesn't change that it's true. I suggest that you don't confuse "better" mastering (subjective) with mastering for a target medium, which is a technical process.

Anyhow, we all know that LPs only get warmer when you play them on a tube amp. Yes, that was also a joke.

Maybe it's changed in the last 5 years, but until fairly recently many vinyl collectors would go out of their way to tell anyone else that CDs didn't have the correct ambiance, sound quality etc.

I'm aware that it's an inescapable fact that vinyl degrades with each listen. On the bright side, if I pay $30 for the cheapest copy of This Is Happening on Discogs, I can be certain that nobody bothered to spin it during the 13 years since its pressing - it's mint condition.

I'm also aware that Spotify sounds bad. That might be part of the reason I don't use it?

I think you'd benefit from a world view with more nuance than tribes of enlightened LP buyers versus ignorant Spotify subscribers.

I think you’re missing the point. Music is an experience, and how people want to deliver that experience varies. Who are you to say the correct way for people to enjoy their experience?

Someone on HN compared Emacs to vinyl the other day, and I really enjoyed the comment. There are multiple reasons why Emacs/vinyl is objectively worse. That being said, it’s fun, and there’s no reason to hate on it.

The manufacture of cancerous plastics has negative externalities and it's especially silly to pay these when a significant amount of them never spin.

Whether it’s measured in carbon footprint, health risk, or otherwise: the impact of vinyl records is small. It’s a significant source of enjoyment for many. The ratio of impact to enjoyment here is negligible. I’ll focus on caring for the world around me through other much more significant means.

That's like saying oil paintings are stupid because photos are better.

Your "plastic to landfill" is also irrational because vinyl can be reused easily, and albums are often repurposed into decorative items before discarded entirely.

And they're more valuable and collectable than e.g. CDs, people take care of them, pass them down to generations, or sell them.

Vinly (PVC) is one of the more difficult plastics to recycle.

A lot of things we do for fun are either irrational (why pay for food at a restaurant many times what the same food would cost at home? and with drinks it’s even worse because literally the same wine/beer/soda is easily 10 times cheaper at the supermarket) or bad for the environment (traveling, for example).

IDK, seems perfectly inline with certain demographics aging, accumulating wealth, and business exploiting that.

I don't think it's a coincidence that things from the same era, like super heroes, are also currently popular.

Nostalgia is a strong drug.

> spinning LPs give off carcinogenic gas

Only in California

> they sound worse

My VPI turntable could extract details from vinyl I've never heard elsewhere. Marvelous machine, that.

Counter point: it’s just more fun

It is all about the ritual. And the cover can serve as a poster in the room.

I've noticed that this vinyl boom has made used records more difficult to find and more expensive. That has driven me to get CDs, since I can get 3-10x the number of albums for the same price. Since it felt appropriate to buy albums originally released on CDs, the whole vinyl resurgence has counterintuitively gotten me much more into 90s/2000s music and I kind of love it.

If you want the best sound quality, CDs are definitely the way to go - they are better than vinyl and compressed digital audio files; although it's perceptually hard to tell the difference from the latter 99.9% of the time.

Given another 10 or 20 years and there might be a CD boom as nostalgia kicks in and a new generation of hipsters come of age.

If you want the best sound quality, CDs are definitely the way to go - they are better than vinyl and compressed digital audio files

Only if they’re mastered with the intention of producing the best quality. There are tons of CDs out there that were mastered for other purposes [1]. These are a big factor in the vinyl boom because the latter versions (of the same album) tend not to have the same flaw. Of course, there were also vinyl records and cassettes mastered in this crappy way, but I suspect those won’t be so popular today.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

Vinyls have one other weakness though, wear and tear. The more you play it the worse the sound quality gets.

There are players that use lasers instead of a physical needle I believe, but then you probably end up with CD quality since they basically sample the physical structure of the album.

But personally, I'll stick to digital for listening to music; vinyl is for collecting. I've got a handful of vinyl albums but not even a player, lol.

> then you probably end up with CD quality since they basically sample the physical structure of the album.

Not quite. Vinyl if I'm right physically represents the audio wave forms - and there might be limits to how accurately it can do so due to the limitations of the material.

CDs sample the audio waveform at 44.1Khz (44,100 samples per second) and quantized the input to 16 bits (2^16 different levels) then using the magic of math it reproduces almost the exact same waveform it sampled during playback - with any errors (from quantization if I'm right) pushed to frequencies we can't heard.

>you probably end up with CD quality

There is absolutely zero chance of getting CD quality off a physical record, even using a laser.

People don't seem to understand how good CD quality actually is. 96dB dynamic range is not to be sniffed at.

The only CDs you can trust are those of classical music. The CD format is really allowed to shine with classical music and vinyl cannot come close. Having said that, a good vinyl record will still sound remarkably good.

But for popular music all bets are off. There were some great CDs released prior to the 90s and a few here and there since but most have had numerous "remasters" issued since. Unless you know what you're looking for you'll probably end up with something crap.

It's unfortunately the strengths of CD (and digital in general) that become its downfall. CD will happily and faithfully reproduce clipping and other unnatural waveforms. Vinyl simply can't be abused to such an extent which is one reason it often sounds more pleasing to the ear.

This online database is useful for estimating how compressed something will sound:

https://dr.loudness-war.info/

The DR score isn't a perfect measure of perceived dynamic range (e.g. the surface noise and phase distortion of vinyl can increase DR score without adding any musically significant dynamic range), but it's a good starting point.

>CD will happily and faithfully reproduce clipping and other unnatural waveforms. Vinyl simply can't be abused to such an extent

Ability to reproduce clipping depends on the high frequency response of the medium. High frequency response of good vinyl typically exceeds that of human hearing, so if you ignore the inherent flaws of the medium (e.g. low signal-to-noise ratio), it can reproduce clipping that sounds the same as CDs. However, this requires mastering at a lower volume, which defeats the point of the loudness war, so the only reason to do this is saving money by reusing the digital master. Many vinyl releases do this anyway.

See: https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)

Anyone serious downloads lossless or 320kbps mp3s which are indistinguishable in all cases by humans from lossless/uncompressed. The distinction is irrelevant.

CDs are inconvenient low density storage.

Totally true. And I'm not a serious audiophile. For me, having CDs is more about collecting and physically browsing when picking out what I want to listen to. Not for everybody!

doubtful. there is nothing romantic about a CD

Same could be said about most things just past their prime.

I think it’s important to question whether the nostalgia comes from CDs and vinyls merely being a thing of the past or, rather, the analog nature of vinyl, including the process of putting on a record. I’d argue that its the latter.

My 13 year old wanted a cd player for christmas, and now she wants a cd burner. She wants to own music, but thinks vinyl is too expensive and snobby

2000-era pocket cameras as experiencing a resurgence as 'vintage'. But that relies on their quality being inherently lower than modern cameras. CDs have the same exact sound quality as downloadable MP3s or Spotify, so I don't see them being popular again.

:shrug: it is to me. What's romantic isn't the sound, since it's equivalent to a download. Instead it's the process of going to used record stores, looking at your collection everyday, the joy of find a cool, obscure album. And honestly, I wonder if it's just too recent right now. Maybe eventually it will be retro enough to have a boom like vinyl.

Nor is there anything romantic about cassette tapes but somehow (Techmoan?) the cassette came back.

1. They play even while fairly damaged

2. Super cheap to get decent equipment from a thrift store. Took me two visits to get a really nice dual cassette deck

3. Recording your own cassettes is easy and fun. My wife and I have been dubbing podcasts onto them for her and my BIL, for the fun of it

4. Super cheap to get cassettes. Last yard sale we wanted to a get a few blank tapes out of a box someone was selling and they wouldn't let us leave without taking the whole box

They are romantic? The tape player adds flavour to the sound output, they need to be rewinded manually, you can't just jump to any song easily, they have awesome graphics on the sides, they have two sides... there are lots of quirks to them.

Also see: every movie/TV show where someone makes a mixtape for someone they fancy.

Anecdotally my teenage cousin asked for a vinyl album of her favorite artist last Christmas. She doesn't even own a record player and doesn't own a single CD. She said it was about supporting the artist and that she appreciated the art. It also came with a poster.

Now this I understand! I rarely believe the audiophile explanations I usually get when I ask why buy vinyl. I personally can't usually tell a difference with sound quality (at the CD WAV vs Vinyl record quality levels) and most people that claim to I'm suspicious they haven't invested in the hardware to really extract it if it's there so I just think there's some placebo effect going on. I've also read some stats that statistically only a small percentage of people can detect what audiophiles claim to. So again, it's in peoples mind more than anything is what it seems like to me. I liken it to a high school prank where we often told kids at parties a drink was alcoholic, they acted tipsy, and we thought it was funny because it had no alcohol.

Hoarding collectible art is totally my speed though, this I get - I still buy the CDs from my favorite bands, I don't care about supporting them this way because I know they make very little off of it, I just like having "the collection". I also like the chronological album listening experience but Spotify does that, so now I get CDs and toss them in a box still wrapped in cellophane.

Some songs are mastered differently for vinyl, especially with regards to compression. See the loudness wars. This I think accounts for a lot of it.

Vinyl sounds worse anyway. It’s just fashion.

I have three vinyls I think, that I've never played because I don't have a player. The first one I got as a gift, and the others I bought because I liked the artwork – they're like paintings to me.

I keep meaning to get a player, but I can't find one that strikes the right balance of price and aesthetics. The Bang & Olufsen Beogram 4000c has the right aesthetics but probably way too expensive. I've been trying to find one but they're hard to come by in decent condition. Probably because B&O sourced them all to do their recreation project...

I like my Pro-Ject Debut I picked up a decade or so ago. At the time it was at the low-end of the audiophile-grade stuff.

Yeah, 50% of vinyl is bought by people without a turntable - it’s mad.

People collect much stranger things, like sports cards. Having a physical copy of a piece of art gives many people a nice feeling.

Well often people do this to support their favourite bands and artists. I think we’ll see a lot more of this in the future because of “generated music”

I support the artist by buying their (digital) albums on bandcamp.

Sure that works too, lots of younger bands where I live have records pressed, they’re quite popular merchandise.

I do that with CDs. I like having them in my cupboard but don't actually have a way of playing them. And yes, it is a good way of supporting smaller artists.

Maybe as an alternative you can send $20 to their paypal and buy a length of PVC piping.

Hah, what's the PVC piping for?

I don't want to rain on anyone's parade but there is a dark side to collecting that isn't immediately apparent to people. It involves a lot of virtue signaling and snobbery. I've seen so many music forums online ruined by people bickering over releases or resenting each other because they can't afford the same collations as other people. In my experience almost all collecting communities or discussions end up turning toxic. My advice would be if you enjoy collecting something DO NOT get involved in the communities surrounding it. Do it for yourself not the strangers online who will go out of their way to make you feel like whatever you have is lesser than them.

I am a CD fan but I find very hard to find a good supplier of them in North America.

I am particularly interested in Jazz from the 50s to early 70s. The best place I know to buy them is Tower Records in Japan.

Anyone with a good reference for a North America supplier?

Discogs for long tail jazz CDs.

CD sales have collapsed - although I load up on them at £1/€1 a pop at the second hand and charity shops. A bargain.

Vinyl is CRAZY expensive, the days of cheap records is long gone and I'm not sure how much longer the people who buy reissues will still continue doing so. Probably another ten years until they retire and have to live off their meagre pensions.

I'm with you. CDs are crazy undervalued right now. I'm not sure they will have quite the hipster boom as vinyl in the future, but I wonder if used CD prices will start rising eventually after some time passes and nostalgia increases.

I imagine we'll see a significant slowing down in vinyl sales if the economy continues to stutter. Vinyl records are a luxury good, and most likely not people's primary way of discovering and listening to music.

Record companies keen to see the back of the last bastion of DRM free digital music.

This is just a function of the inevitable decline of custom hardware information storage vs software information storage (where hardware is fungible, could on the cloud, locally or a mix of both).

CDs have finally declined to the levels of hobbyist collectors of vinyl and will soon go to 0 as the reader hardware dies out (as did many hardware formats before it). Vinyl will stay around probably for a long time as a curiosity as the hardware is relatively simple - our kids of a small record player which works on the same principle and it is actually fascinating as a concept - you can see the data stored as bumps in the plastic records.

There really is no reason for CDs to stay around, they are neither attractive nor convenient and haven't been for a decade at least.

But the same ("there really is no reason for CDs to stay around") was said for vinyl and casette tapes before; given that these are now having a resurgence, I don't think you can be as absolute about CDs.

That said, I don't see minidisks making a comeback any time soon, but then their timing was very unfortunate - only just before the much more convenient MP3 players.

Can you even buy new cassette players? You still haven’t given any reasons I’d want a cd.

Vinyl I can see the attraction as the players are pleasingly simple, these other formats, why bother? I can’t see use outside very niche cases.

> You still haven’t given any reasons I’d want a cd.

Not universal reasons to exclusively buy only CDs (because I haven't done so either), so I guess it might fall under your "niche cases", but

1. Some gapless live albums have been released online (both downloads and streaming) in a broken fashion, so getting the CD is the only legal way of getting a non-broken digital release.

2. Occasionally even a new CD costs less (!) than the digital download.

3. Vinyl albums are of course unmatched in terms of cover art, but even CDs are usually still a step above purely digital distribution – sadly the practice of including the cover booklet as a PDF or something like that is far from universal. While of course ultimately the music is the main thing, with a number of albums missing out on the full cover art and/or liner notes is still somewhat of a shame, because they're interesting/funny/informative/part of the complete art package.

Yes, the mechanisms are poor quality though.

> they sound worse

Does it really matter in a world where many music producer use VST plugins or tapes to give a vintage flair to part if their music?

Does it really matter in world where most people listen to music through terrible bluetooth speakers and headphones and in noisy environments?

I was a DJ in the golden age of Techno, sadly my records got stolen. I've always believed that the analog sound was better. Also there was the art of beatmatching without timecoded digital tracks. The downside was, obviously, really heavy records that were a logistical challenge every time, since I had no drivers license. Also, yeah, those records can get stolen, as well as CDs, but nowadays' flac or wav files can just be copied to a new USB stick so no harm done if someone steals it. Nowadays I have 60gb of all kinds of audio files on my phone.

It's not surprising that records outperform CDs in sales, but interesting that it has come to this.

I haven't bought vinyl in at least 15 years, but I'm pleased to see any physical media still maintaining a place in our lives. For me, it's not the nostalgia factor, or the atmosphere created by physical media, it's purely about the availability of music.

I have a huge collection of hip-hop vinyl and CDs. A significant proportion of my favourites are not available on Spotify. We're not talking about niche artists either - releases by plenty of well-known artists from the 90s and 2000s have some kind of rights issue that has kept them off streaming platforms. Just recently one of the best, and seminal 00s hip-hop albums has been lost from Spotify. Either all this fantastic music is gone and lost forever (because not on Spotify = does not exist), or we keep the CDs, vinyl, and ripped MP3 collections.

People think that Spotify is basically all of music. They see the music streaming services as having solved the 'unified catalogue' problem where the video streaming services are still balkanised. This is far from the truth though, so much is missing from Spotify. What I really miss is not the vinyl, it's the completeness of Napster in 2000.

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