50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player
lightcapai.medium.com
lightcapai.medium.com
Many of us in the indie music industry (hip hop sustained record plants for many years, arguably until independent music started pressing in the 2000s) have mixed feelings about records. It’s a lot of plastic. A lot of waste. And they’re cubersome to bring on tour.
But there isn’t another physical medium that sells at all as well as vinyl. Soft apparel always does well. But people want vinyl.
I don’t love the Gen Z framing of this though. Vinyl purchasing at this point is multi generational.
I don’t think it’s some mysterious Gen Z love of physical. I think we all know that Spotify doesn’t pay artists appropriately and we want to help sustain the music we love. Buying digitally is just isn’t the same for a lot of people (even though it arguably is the best and easiest income generator for artists).
- 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 assume all of the above play some part in their motivations.
For my part, there's something visceral about owning a piece of "physical music", as it were, even if I never play it.
I also think people generally underestimate "potential playability" or aspirational record player ownership as factors in buying vinyl. A LOT of people who may never own a record player in their lifetime still think they might, & even if they don't their kids or grandkids might. Vinyl collections are heirlooms.
I have young kids also, so I try to stay away from violent or scary album art.
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)_/¯
For me it's a time machine back to my childhood. We grew up poor and couldn't afford tapes and then CD's. We had thrift store vinyl albums.
For my kids, vinyl was this weird thing that sounded scratchy. Then they grew up and found that the plethora of selection was both a blessing and a curse. They now frequent local record stores and invest in physical media like vinyl specifically because it forces intentional choice.
There really is nothing as good as finding an amazing album you didn't expect, and there's nothing as crushing as realizing the album you just bought based on one song only has that one good song on it (any album by The Police, I'm looking at you).
Why call out The Police? This is the norm for all studio albums. That's why the popular albums are greatest hits collections instead.
That said, I did once consider getting a record player only to rip/archive my grandmother's collection of vintage vinyl that wound up going to my niece on her passing.
I just prefer convenience/portability. Of course, as far as purchasing goes... I bought far more music when original Napster was around... it lead me to discover a lot of music that lead my to outright buy/rip full albums myself. It's the one thing that is significantly worse today without actual DJs in control of music at radio stations in favor of automated industry garbage controls.
I have no good way to discover new music any more. At least nothing I actually find myself using.
Instead, all of my music is digital, mostly purchased on Bandcamp. I have a full archive on my NAS, also in the basement. I use iTunes Match so that i'm able to stream any of my music on demand to any of my devices. I have 0 desire to ever go back to physical media. It's far more convenient and space efficient to do it this way.
Oh. my. gosh. This has been driving me NUTS recently. Please please please here me out. The first dozen or so records I bought were of albums I already owned digitally, as FLAC so I was one of those kinds of people that didn't redeem the downloads. I wanted to buy my faves, stuff that I knew I'd love to listen to on vinyl forever. Now that I'm buying brand new stuff, that I don't have digital copies of I've noticed they rarely, rarely, if ever include a download link and so I had to renew my dang apple music subscription to listen to albums I already own when I'm away from my record player and its started to really turn me off from buying any records outside of bandcamp (where you always get the digital version too.)
I've asked some of the musicians flat-out: Which way of buying your material will get the most money directly to you? The answer is always: Buy the CD. Of course I can also make donations, and have done so.
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 an art / lyrics booklet over a physical medium of the music itself. Particularly if it included flac download of the music.
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.
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).
Many people I know buy the CD because they prefer owning a physical medium, and the CDs they actually play and have a collection of them.
As for cassette, I don't know about buying regular releases on it, but there's a small but very passionate music community around cassette releases for experimental and indie music (same as a demoscene using old computers or people making new 8bit games).
And thats basically it?
You are not even playing it?
To do what with it? Letting your kids/family sell your collection with a loss?
Is it background decoration for you? Couldn't you just buy bulk of Vinyl no one wants to use it for your decoration purposes?
That feels like consumerism at the peak.
And a rock is unique, nice to look at, did not cost you anything and kind of an appreciation of nature.
Enjoy your rock! (i'm sincere)
I mean that collecting a relatively small number of durable and visually pleasing objects isn't really the worst flavor of consumerism, even if it seems pointless to some people.
I agree we have a massive problem with over-consumption (most glaringly with things like fast fashion), but I'm not sure record collectors are a big problem.
Notably, tape decks with separate play and record heads let you listen to the recorded signal, while it's being recorded and quickly switch between the tape and source signal. Even on a good pair of headphones, when correctly dialled in, vast majority wouldn't be able to recognise which signal is the tape.
There's a lot of value to the physical artifact, but the precise nature of the physical artifact is up for playing with.
https://www.turntablelab.com/products/flying-lotus-youre-dea...
More and more though I would rather just buy merch to support the artist.
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.
Perhaps their children will cherish it for generations, or perhaps their children will have different musical tastes from their great great great grandpa and the plastic ends up in a landfill, forever un-played.
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.
It simply requires putting a stop to the constant brainwashing campaigns for inducing demand.
>> do things they naturally want to
collecting Stanley tumblers is not a "natural" tendency.
If we don't induce demand by brainwashing, what will people do? They will keep inflating bubbles buying up stocks (making economy even more unstable, and eventually undermining themselves), houses (making sure new generations can't buy theirs, depressing birth rates and giving rise to political radicalism), and crypto (which is absolute insanity). People need to be given ways to spend their spare cash, and nudged to do it as opposed to "investing" that cash (which is, in the true meanin of this word, mostly impossible because there aren't enough inventions to invest into).
Unfortunately, there are C-suite level roles for this so it will never stop.
There are many things people naturally want to do that we regulate and steer away from via many different means (smoking bans, traffic laws, etc.).
You do realize we don't live in an objectivist society, right?
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 having the same or more fans, and be able to fill the same venues, have lost the living they could make by selling even 50K records (with a favorable indie label split).
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.
In 2024 1450 artists got over $1 000 000 in royalty from Spotify.[2] Additionally 2.3% (~276 000) earned at least $1000 and 100 000 earned at least "almost $6000".
It seems to me that there now is a long tail of artists making a few thousand a year on Spotify that assume they would have sold tens thousands of records each year in the 90s. E.g. the 100 000th most popular artist on Spotify assuming they would have sold as well as the 1200th most popular artist in 1998.
The more likely case is that the top ~10 000 artists would have made less back then than they do now and the rest would have made essentially zero dollars from selling records back in the 90s.
0: https://bestsellingalbums.org/decade/1990-238 1: https://dailybruin.com/1998/09/27/paying-the-price 2: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2025/03/12/spotify-loud-and...
The $1m is gross income, pre-royalty slicing. The actual payout to artists on a label will be much lower.
The $3/album is post-royalty at the other end of the telescope, and the actual number varied by territory. The gross income to labels would be much higher.
So the final premise is incorrect. The real winners - the household name bands, artists, and soundtracks - made incredible numbers from their royalty slices which are impossible on Spotify today, especially once labels take their cut.
Drake may be getting lifetime sales of $400m, but a chunk of that goes to UMG for distribution.
Meanwhile there were vital scene subcultures around indie/rave/dance/hiphop where niche artists turned DIY music production, pressing, and distribution into a workable fairly well-paid full-time career. Those numbers mostly weren't logged.
Spotify dilutes the scene effect because everyone is competing with everyone else, globally, so it's harder to get exposure, even in a specific niche.
Basically anything taken individually is a drop in the ocean. Problem is all those drops add up and that's what creates the ocean.
There are massive "water bodies" that make 10% and 20% and 30% of the ocean of plastic use. Packaging is about 30-40%, for starters. Clothes (synthetic crap clothes) and shoes are about 15%.
Just to expand on this, there is a reasonable distinction made between multi-use and single-use plastics. Things like a shampoo bottle, plasticware, drink bottles, etc. are considered single-use. (Yes, even the shampoo bottle despite being in your bathroom for weeks because its thrown out when it's empty.) As the parent comment mentions, purchasing a vinyl record does little—practically nothing—to contribute to daily plastic waste, especially with how few customers there are (compared to shampoo bottles).
I don't know all the nitty-gritty, but the last Shellac record was "pressed" using an injection molding process that utilized recyclable PET (I can't find the interview with Albini[RIP] where this was discussed but if I find it I'll edit it into the comment).
The last shellac record was indeed made from shellac. And shellac is a natural (or at least non-manmade) material; does this make it more environmentally friendly than vinyl or PET?
On the other hand, vinyl is great for intentional listening. Putting that hour aside to brew a nice cup of coffee and listen to something while exploring the feelings the album evoke, then get a break to flip/change the record and continue.
It's a kind of personal care for me. I even recently showed a little love to my old record player (an Akai AP-D210) so it can regulate its RPM better and play smoothly as it can.
I can argue that CDs are for listening to the music, and vinyl is for listening to yourself.
This is amazing
This is not a reply I was anticipating. Can you elaborate a little? =)
these types of people used to be called “hipsters.” I don’t know if there’s a more modern term for it.
That’s what I guess he meant by “amazing” and also why it spawned the goat head and papyrus mockery.
Being more serious, I think it depends on one's relationship with music itself, and I don't expect everyone to have the same relationship with it. Personally, I met with music at a very young age, and funnily I started with CDs and open-reel. Vinyl came into my normal rotation pretty late, after its availability started to increase.
I worded my comment exactly like that intentionally, because the unwritten context here is my vinyl collection is solely composed of albums I already love to listen, and dedicate some time listening to. As a person who also performed in the past, I also understand that my relationship with music is a bit different when compared to today's consumerism-centered approach.
So, if spending some time with a favorite album, enjoying it and respecting the effort went into its production is worthy of mockery and being labeled as a hipster or being backward, let it be. I don't personally care.
Same goes for pen and paper, actually, but it's a subject for another day.
Funny how there are minor variations the world around.
Both Google music (before it turned into YT Music) and Amazon Music briefly allowed uploading your own music to stream which significantly helped with my use-case, but they both removed that feature during their inevitable enshitification. I toyed with self hosting and doing my own rips of CDs and vinyl, but I find throwing on a record more relaxing than futzing with lossy encoder parameters or patching streaming servers.
Anecdotally, I see more and more stores that sell music now carry CDs.
Just yesterday I saw an entire wall of new-release CDs at a Barnes and Noble bookstore.
Despite being terminally online for literally decades now I never got out of CDs just because it always bugged me that I could buy a physical copy with better (or, nowadays, usually equivalent) sound quality for the same or less money than the MP3 (or whatever format) album.
I’d then invariably rip to a compressed format for convenient on the go listening but, in 20 odd years, I’ve bought maybe half a dozen albums digitally, and half of those have been simply because no other format is available. (For context, I have maybe 700 albums on CD but I lost accurate count some years ago so it could well be more.)
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.
I get you but there’s also an element of pick your poison. Not all the online options are great either, particularly not on the streaming front (cough, Spotify, cough[0]) in terms of their treatment - and payment - of artists. I think Bandcamp might be decent, and is generally the place I go for FLAC.
I buy a lot of pre-owned CDs as well: upside, less hard/impossible to recycle waste (discs), and less plastic waste (cases), doesn’t support the RIAA; downside, it also doesn’t support the artists. Somewhat regularly I find pre-owned is the only option though, at least if I want a physical copy.
[0] One could perhaps argue that the RIAA set the standard for turgid money grabbing scumbaggery that modern services have chosen to adopt, I think.
On the other hand the larger format of vinyl and rather peculiar way it works scratches the “tactile” part of what makes physical attractive a lot more.
Each to their own of course but that’s me.
(You can of course also back up the rips, but you have the disc as origin, and as an option for re-ripping at higher or lower quality, etc.)
Plus if you damage a CD, simply rip it and burn it to a CDr. (did I mention that ripping a damaged CD usually works?)
You are right about vinyl sleeves being more attractive, though. I think that's its main selling point.
Where they’re actually much more vulnerable is on the printed side because the data layer sits just beneath that. Still more resilient than vinyl though, unless/until they get the dreaded rot.
They can also crack if dropped but that’s just as true of vinyl, if not moreso.
Maybe you are right, but I wouldn't discount the possibility that people are willing to pay for the idea that they could some day download it even if it never ends up actually happening. Kinda like getting an insurance policy you probably wont need you know?
not a big fan of all music streaming services, but they only keep about 30% of their revenue. the rest goes to the labels, and this is where most of the problem is. before the 2000s, very small artists hardly earned any income from the sale of (physical) media. I don't like the new platforms such as Spotify, Tidal, etc. either – but this kind of discussion often just distracts from the mafia-like structure of the major labels.
15$ or so just doesn’t reflect the work that goes into a month’s worth of music listening.
In the physical media era, when you bought a record/CD you owned it forever and your marginal cost of listening to a song approached zero over time. Most dollars went to new music.
Now, it's close to a 75/25 split of dollars going to back catalog vs new music on streaming services.
If you're a new musician, you're not competing against new music, you're competing against the entire history of recorded music. You're fighting for a piece of a pie that the Beatles are still taking a chunk of.
And the labels are a part of the problem there, they made the deals with the streaming services that allows back catalog to dominate.
This is why making a new game is probably a terrible idea... but hey, world is casino!
[1] https://newzoo.com/resources/trend-reports/the-pc-console-ga... and widely reported e.g. [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1je98mm/pc_gamers...
You need to let things become public domain so people can make new. You need it to be unprofitable to just keep selling the exact same bits in perpetuity.
This was a 5 year play by my dad. Shout out.
Sometimes I wonder how much INTENTIONAL engineering people's discontent for good or ill happens across the spectrum of human activity. One thing is for sure, people don't talk about it much.
I can think of many examples.
Liquid Death, CocaCola branded water, and household water filtration are unbelievable luxuries. Manufactured status for the masses. And my examines are truly luxuries: they are unnecessary for drinking water in developed countries.
Pools and green lawns have higher status when water is more expensive/scarcer.
I don't hang out with extremely high-status people, or the extremely wealthy, but I'm sure both of those groups have some surprisingly luxury water.
Luxury is a human concept that is completely disconnected from the underlying product.
Provenance, Branding, Myth, Environmental, Science all matter for status.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_(Klein_and_Thompson_...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/12/supply-b...
[3] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf
(think in systems)
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.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Ralph_Waldo_Emerson
“Art is the proper task of life” -- Nietzsche
"Art is to console those who are broken by life." -- Vincent van Gogh
Broadly speaking, creation is the meaning of life, not work, although some creation could be considered work. Survival is table stakes to achieve self actualization and a chance at finding meaning and contributing to the commons during a lifetime.
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.
There are no such things as "basic needs". If people can easily satisfy their basic needs, they simply expands this concept until it ceases to be easily satisfied
In other words, abundance is a myth promoted by mentally ill cultists, and meeting the basic needs of all people is unattainable.
How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? Insights from needs-based analysis - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245229292... | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2024.100612
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43465127 - March 2025 (26 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42529256 - December 2024 (10 comments)
(TLDR Decent living standards for 8.5B people would require 30% of current resource use)
> Decent living standards for 8.5B people would require 30% of current resource use
That claims seems to be based on your first link.
1. They define decent living standards as including things like 1 cooking appliance, a mobile phone, and internet, but not things like a dishwasher/microwave/Netflix account, etc.
2. To achieve this, they specifically say that existing resource uses that are wasteful, such as buying extra clothing, wasteful entertainment, etc, should be “reallocated” to the basic needs of society, as without reallocation they explicitly point to how the basic needs like food and shelter become too expensive.
So in the context of the grandparent commenter’s argument, we would have to take away a lot of the luxuries (which is probably a fair description) that most Americans have like entertainment, buying more clothes than they need, etc and would not include things like any trips/travel, eating out, etc - and you believe people would react the opposite of what the grandparent claimed, that they would not consider those things to be “basic needs”? I guess if we were truly able to eliminate most inequality and all millionaires, etc, then maybe people would accept life without those existing things they have as basic needs? But I am not sure if your argument is meant to be a thing that could happen in real life, or merely a “If I was dictator I'd ensure peace on earth” type idea?
This video and timestamp comes to mind: https://youtu.be/2sxKJeYSBmI?si=ikuOuZl-Ho5_VK4k&t=1613
My interpretation is that back in his day, TV was grayscale, grainy, and interlaced, and therefore demanded that the viewer exert their imagination to "complete the picture".
I imagine that if he were to see today's 4k full-color 120Hz panels, he would call TV a "hot" medium.
Its only really recently that CRTs have been surpassed by modern screens in terms of colour.
However I'm not going back to CRTs anytime soon. Just a dumb OLED public signage display, and some high bitrate codec
However, a huge difference is that on CDs you're up against a fixed maximum (0 dBFS) so all peaks are equal, which is fatiguing; on vinyl you're up against the adjacent groove, so your maximum amplitude any given moment depends on the amplitude of things in the recent past and near future! Ways to optimize for this are prevalent, amazingly, and the result is less fatiguing.
Dire Straits - Brothers In Arms (1985 release, first CD to sell over a million copies) also sounds great, and IMO better than most modern releases.
Some early CDs were recorded using pre-emphasis, similar to the RIAA equalization used with vinyl records. CDs using this have a flag set in the metadata to tell the player to apply a matching de-emphasis filter. I sometimes see people blaming digital production for early CDs sounding "thin". I think it's more likely they heard rips of CDs using pre-emphasis that didn't have the proper de-emphasis applied.
An average CD from the 80s sounds better than an average CD from any other era, because it pre-dates the loudness war, and because it's intended to be played on a good home stereo (which if you were buying CDs back then you could probably afford).
There's also a noise floor that limits your dynamics.
Since CDs are digital sound, there's not really the same reason reason to use CDs over a digital release.
edit: fwiw, I don't agree with the parent talking about more data, either. Since pretty much all the music these days is digital pretty much right through the entire recording process, I don't think this is all that relevant. I guess maybe sometimes they might use a different master for vinyl though? But regardless; if you're looking for "more data", you're not going to use either a CD or a vinyl.
https://now.tufts.edu/2016/07/11/does-music-sound-better-vin... https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/q-why-vinyl-not-be...
IMO, use a lossless digital file if you want to a more accurate sound, and use a vinyl if you prefer the sound/mastering of that release.
It's also just CDs, not digital formats in general. Grab an audiophile and ask their opinions about digital PDM/PCM formats, high bitrate AACs even, against true vinyls. They wouldn't have as much opinions as they do against CDs.
Also: 44.1kHz sampling rate != arbitrary waveform up to 22050Hz, unless music you're listening to consists of pure sine waves(and not even classic Yamaha FM sound chip signals).
Every signal can be represented as a combination of pure sine waves. That insight is the basis of Fournier analysis / transform.
But in the case of analog recording, nobody can distinguish a pure analog recording from the same thing but with a good ADC/DAC pair in the signal path in a blind test. It's theoretically possible to hear undithered 16 bit quantization noise if you turn the volume up extremely loud, but correctly mastered CDs should be dithered from higher bit depth.
And 44.1kHz sampling rate can theoretically represent arbitrary waveforms up to 22050Hz. The only complication is that this requires a brickwall filter, which is impossible to implement. That's why the sampling rate is set higher than needed to exceed the 20kHz limit of human hearing (in practice the limit for adult hearing is almost always lower). The higher sample rate allows for a practical filter with a shallower transition band to be used.
- 44.1ksamples/sec can only represent arbitrary waveforms at some point lower than 44.1kHz/2.
- Example: The only 22.05kHz waveform you can encode at 44.1ksamples/sec is a square wave (for 16 bit samples: -32767, 32768, -32767, 32768, etc.)
Going down to 44,099 samples/sec you could only do an extremely crude "steppy" approximation of a sine wave, sort of like the NES's triangle channel.
EDIT: Also, consider that true square/triangle/sawtooth waves are mathematical abstractions that can't exist in reality. If you try to move a real loudspeaker cone in a square wave, you have to reverse direction in exactly zero time. This requires infinite acceleration and therefore infinite force. If you take the Fourier transform of these waveforms you get an infinite series of harmonics.
A real-world "square" wave only contains the lower harmonics within some frequency band. When you limit it to audio frequencies, all square waves above 6.67kHz are identical to sine waves because the only harmonic within that frequency band is the fundamental.
There's some audiophile content on Blu-Ray disks encoded at 24-bit/192 kHz, intended for people who subscribe to The Absolute Sound.[1]
(Typical TAS review: "Their Crystal Cable Infinity power cords markedly lower background noise; increase resolution, density of tone color, and dynamic contrast; and add a more substantial third dimension to images." US$34,000 for a 2 meter AC power cable.)
[1] https://www.theabsolutesound.com
[1]
Mastering is mostly done purely digital, so only when they are pressed are they converted to analog grooves. This can never add new data / information.
Gain staging against an analogue noise floor, not having nonlinear/nondestructive editing, etc. would be, to use a technical term, "fucking stupid."
At least for the K-pop artists my daughter listens to.
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 downloading songs from youtube to run them in pen-drive or just listen to locally would show us youngsters something
I have been recently thinking of downloading all of my songs and uploading it to some vps so that I can listen to from anywhere. I feel like steps like these with media ownership would gradually help rediscovery of CD perhaps as well as we people would really love supporting the artists then as well and buying their CD might be the way if we end up downloading their musics.
Pen-drives are ubiquotus as well so perhaps we might need the pen-drive era in between
Also computers are absolutely removing the CD port. Even my desktop doesn't have it. I think it has the slot but I had my PC built in the store so they didnt really add it but literally no devices have CD except perhaps our car but I think even some new Cars might not have any CD's
If someone is forced to buy a CD player just to play CD's, it just adds more friction and I would argue that Vinyl is much more so for the aesthetics itself as well which I feel like CD's aren't really that much for.
So my point is, People aren't really using Vinyl for quality, they are using it for aesthetics. If CD's have a chance, they really need to get more on the ease of starting and pen-drives can help start the local-music movement.
https://www.minidisc.wiki/guides/getting-started/what-to-get
cassette can get to fuck. They were and always are, a shit medium.
Sure the sound quality isn't great, but cassettes have a great user experience.
My kids listen to stories on CD and Cassette. With Cassettes you can just stop and continue later exactly where you were. On CD they have to remember the chapter and the number of minutes. Which they never do so they are less motivated to continue listening.
The same is true for VHS. One of the great benefits of Netflix is that you don't have to keep track of where you were in a series and can quickly continue. DVD or separate downloads never had this, with Netflix you can just continue. The same is true for VHS, you can just pop it back in and continue where you were.
Also, with both cassettes and VHS you could very easily record things. This was never easy with DVDs, so much so that it basically wasn't a feature. HDD recorders were also quite bad.
Quality of sound and image is just one part of the equation. I would never listen to a music album on cassette, but the medium, from a usability point of view, is great for specific use cases such as stories and creating your own mixes.
Yes, there is cover art, I miss decent cover art and the thought that some people put into it.
VHS can also fuck right off. Sure I loved the stuff that was on them as a kid, but I fucking hated them as a medium. A nice Humax from the early 2000s obliterated VHSs.
Don't get me wrong, everything else about digital media suck arse, the shitty player and bollocks practices. But the experience of the media it's self is far far better.
Tell that to my uncle who worked on DCC.
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.
I recently had a relative complain that they have to find and buy a CD player to listen to their music when they aren't in the car. I pointed out that they already have several in their home. Multiple game consoles and their bluray player supported playing CDs. The loss of CD drives in computers is unfortunate, but the format is still supported in a lot of devices that take disks.
We should stop fantasizing about CDs and Vinyl and shit and just enjoying listen to music.
And if we think we need tokens in the real world, make them yourself or buy that one vinyl.
Otherwise I totally agree about aesthetics of vinyl. I have a rather large collection and still buy from time to time, but usually only 2nd hand. I threw away all my CDs because they stopped working after 20-30 years from being stored improperly, being scratched from being played too often, and overall I just prefer the convenience of MP3s.
Internet radio is also lovely (outside of Spotify of course), check out https://directory.shoutcast.com/ which works great with WinAmp (even the old versions from the 90s still run fine in Windows 11). There are of course other smartphone apps that use other directories, but Shoutcast was/is the first and still my favorite place to discover new music.
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
I have ripped all my cds to flac on my NAS and put them on usb in whatever format as needed.
A vinyl record degrades every time you play it in a normal turntable.
Out of 100 disks, only five or six have failed and all have been because of scratches on the foil side (or whatever the media that the music is encoded into is called).
She'll trawl thrift shops for CDs too.
New CDs in shops now are much much cheaper than they used to be as well.
Giving up Spotify isn't on the cards yet though. I'll teach her how to rip songs next I reckon.
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 listening to.
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.
I think they are. There was an article in the newspaper in the last month or so saying that CD sales are on the rise, and mainstream pop stars are releasing their music on CDs again.
As noted in another comment, I see CDs in music (and other) stores more and more where I live.
This has strong energy of "Teach your kids how to play Magic, they won't have money for drugs."
The point I am trying to make is that nostalgia can seem really good as that comment also pointed that, we often only remember the good parts of the system.
It's only when we recounter them that the bad parts resurface again.
Now instead of taking the fair criticism and perhaps doing something about it if possible, your dad tried to use the old technique of "back in my day ..."
And I will tell you kids ABSOLUTELY hate this. It's more so, Gramps you were forced to deal with this thing, we got digital and you aren't willing to understand my problem so why should I be stuck with the problem or the countless other examples.
I don't know much about vinyl but if it's the record players, perhaps your father can buy them a good one which could help them solve the issue they are facing.
I have many happy memories of getting a new record as kid, laying in the floor and listening from start to finish while poring over liner notes and album art. There was a level of connection with the music that I just don’t get from listening to Spotify while I’m washing the dishes or something.
I know it’s sentimental, but I get so much joy out of watching my daughter do the same thing now. She has a blast going to our local record store, finding records from her favorite bands old and new and then coming home and just listening. No devices, no distractions, just her and the music she loves. In a sometimes horrible and depressing world, it’s a sweet escape.
In my family group there were a good numbers of vinyls gifted this past christmas and none of them are going to be regularly listened to as the majority of music consumption they do is "on the go" in the car or mobile.
Similarly, I'm seeing them make more purchases of "trophy books" where they read the book on their phone or listened to the audiobook but liked the book so much that they want to have it on their shelf (there are also special editions with elaborate edge decorations, etc. that seem to feed into this).
I support artists I like by going to their shows and buying lossless digital copies where possible (even if I listen to their music elsewhere).
But I don't want or need more physical "stuff".
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, although every now and then I miss something specific and regret it, but I get over it pretty fast.
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.
I don't share the anecdote to suggest in any way that you or anyone else would feel the same.
The only "cheat" was a half-dozen boxes of childhood keepsakes in my parents' basement - that are now in my basement. ;-)
Yeah, in some way that's true. In the house music scene almost every producer also sells vinyls of their best songs, sometimes "collectors editions", and also DJs obviously sometimes pride themselves on only playing vinyl. For the artists I really do enjoy, I tend to buy their songs + with the vinyl, as a way to support them, but I indeed have no way of actually playing them, and haven't had for more than a decade.
So here I sit with 20+ vinyl records, most of them unopened, and no record player. But I don't mind, I just want to give money to the artists that provide me joy.
And those who don’t almost always only set a minimum price, so you can still pay more if you want. And if you buy on BC Friday [0] (next is February 6th), Bandcamp doesn’t even take a cut of the revenue.
Bandcamp Friday is such a fun day, I always have +5 purchases lined up from the previous month, and usually keep track of the social media of the artists I buy from that day, and many of them post something really wholesome about how much they made on that day :) Such a fun time all around.
https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/fan-support/
https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/getting-a-fan...
As a bar/restaurant owner who sometimes host electronic parties, that sucks and does mess up a lot. But as a dance party attender, that sounds like a good thing, the parties tend to have way too high attendance, and if there is no space for people to actually move around and dance, I don't really know what the point of it even is anymore.
They have now started touring in Europe instead. Many cities with short distances, and people actually show up for the show. Much more rewarding to play with actuall audience.
I don’t know why they do this, but I do know I have an ever growing stack of tapes I can’t listen to…
What? Do you have an example?
I'd rather them spend this time on doing their art, or going on with their lives. If you want to give an artist a token of appreciation, send them money. I always increase the suggested price of an album or track on Bandcamp to some interesting-looking number.
To produce, ship, and store an otherwise unused complex artifact just as a token of appreciation which is not otherwise enjoyed by the parties looks wasteful for me.
But come on do you listen to music of a band becase they are great in taking pictures? Or because they are really really good in standing next to a vinyl press?
No
You appreiciate their music and you don't need a commercial token to do so.
Listening to an album you love, while taking the time to flip the record or tape, or taking the time listen to an entire album in your streaming service of choice, helps you to notice things and be present.
Recommended film: Perfect Days by Wim Wenders - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Days
Recommended book: Bridge of Waves by W.A. Mathieu - https://www.shambhala.com/bridge-of-waves-288.html
In 02026: Slow down, and fix things.
Slow is smooth.
Smooth is fast.
I’m a recovering audiophile. I got into the hobby because I enjoy technology in its myriad aspects, and had discovered that good speakers can make things sound better. As I began accruing CDs and re-ripping into lossless audio, I also began collecting vinyls via Record Store Day events of bands or artists I found interesting at the time, or the odd Collector’s Edition bundles of albums or games. The thinking was that when I finally settled into my own place, I could invest into some Hi-Fi kit to play them back.
Well, I fell out of the audiophile sphere when I got into data analysis, physics, human biology, and psychology: I had become inoculated against the bullshit that permeates the space, but still recognized the value of my album collection. I’d also pivoted into preservation, and so I began accepting relatives’ collections of older formats, like 78s. I still lacked playback mechanisms, though I now had the space and budget - just more pressing projects than a record playback setup.
And so here I am in 2025, in an apartment that transmits energy between units, with an upstairs neighbor that does somersaults and tumbles all day (thus shaking the space slightly). The cost of everything has skyrocketed, but it’s no longer a matter of a turntable and a phono stage to get going (need isolation as well, and that ain’t cheap). I’ve also - shockingly - got other, more pressing projects in front of me, one of which is a bedroom Hi-Fi setup that has physical controls for music streaming instead of smartphone apps - again, not remotely cheap.
Right now, my meager collection sits in a crate under the sofa, languishing. One day I’ll get to enjoy them, but today is sadly not that day.
I've got news for you: you won't. Your post reads like you're letting perfect be the enemy of good enough. Also it's 2026, and being the first day of the new year the PERFECT time to just go ahead and do it. You could probably buy a used record player today for < $50 and be listening to a record.
As someone with OCD: guilty!
In all seriousness though, I do have bigger, more important projects that consume the limited Capital I have first: finding new employment for one, replacing the sagging IKEA furniture and wobbly Amazon TV stands with something more resilient and long-lasting (eyeballing Salamander Designs for that), likely a new mattress for the bedroom, the list goes on.
That said, you're right in that I should be keeping a list of components updated with pricing and watching for deals. I know what I need, I just haven't chosen it yet, and that's the first step in any project build.
At the very least, I need to sit down and choose the turntable and phono stage I want, at a price point and feature set that matches my current kit. I can then setup deal monitoring to help me reprioritize that project upward if something good emerges.
You also didn't pivoted into preservation, it just happened because of whatever 'audiophile' thinking you think you have.
At the end you just stream music as everyone else.
Which is fine.
This will also so let you listen to it on computers (including cell phones). You can also transcode the music to e.g. MP3 to allow easier storage.
I gave all my CDs (probably more than a 1000) away about a decade ago. I find physical media annoying, they take up space and require more effort to use them. All those CDs became more of a burden. I guess it's because I grew up with cassette tapes, portable tape players, then CDs, then Discman, then Discman with buffering. Having gone through all of that, being able to play music on your phone is... excessively nice. I also care more about the music than the packaging -- if I want something nice on the wall, I would get a painting, litho, etc. instead.
The only thing I really miss is old-school music discovery. Reading reviews, then going to a record shop, listening a stack of records to decide, talking to record shop owners and friends for scoops, etc. was so much more fun than letting algorithms do recommendations. And after spending your monthly pocket money on two albums, you were invested in the music.
BUT I would enjoy recreating the rituals that go with playing vinyl: obsessive cleaning of the disks, the gentle manipulation of a delicate tone arm, and the soft thud when the turntable cover drops. Playing a record was a minor event to be savored. I doubt the younger generations are getting all of that right.
Vinyl absolutely CAN sound great. If you have a nice amp and good speakers, modern listeners will be amazed at the fidelity possible from vinyl played back on a good turntable with a decent signal chain.
BUT.
CD is still better. CD is simpler. You don't have to faff about with cleaning them, or treat them like hothouse flowers. The platform is incredibly portable.
And yet: Vinyl is more fun.
We moved last year. Our audio room can play streaming, CD, or vinyl. It's the first and third options that get by FAR the most usage. CD comes up once in a blue moon.
Something like Bandcamp-style downloads, which you put on a micro SD card. You put the card in a 3d-printable piece of plastic, resembling a cassette case. When you buy the download, the band sends you a printed piece of paper (the inlay for the cassette case thing) saying “limited edition run #1, Sequence Number 465/2000; thanks for your support”. If you want to get fancy, maybe record the transaction in some kind of ledger; perhaps put the buyer's name on the band webpage as a patron.
For the software, perhaps there could be something open source based on hardware like the anbernic rg355xxsp and similar devices (multipurpose, portable, hackable by design, …)
It would take very little to get it established: A critical mass of bands in some genre getting together, their fans getting on board, and things spreading from there.
CDs were rapidly heading in the same direction as tape (and continue to), and both were less romantic and felt in many ways a less "authentic" format than vinyl did. The physical aspect of vinyl has a beauty that simply isn't replicated by the CDs optical storage system or the tapes magnetic storage.
Another thing I'd add is that I have a craving for analog more and more in my life these days, especially in music and other media formats. Everything is so polished and so clean that the novelty of the quality has worn off, and everything around you instead feel increasingly unnatural.
As an analogy, I've always thought it was interesting how awful the hologram quality is in Star Wars given they have extremely advanced technology otherwise. But if they were in perfect HD although they would be better from a functional perspective, there would also be something less romantic about them. It's hard to put my finger on why I feel that way, but I think the same is true of lots of technologies. When street lights are replaced with LED lights, they are more functional, but they're also less romantic. Or if you look at food packaging from the 50s, there's something romantic about the materials, colours and print used vs today's plastic packaging and digitally designed labels.
Anyway, I guess this doesn't surprise me at all and I think it totally makes sense, although I suspect most people don't even really rationalise why they're doing it. Vinyl just feels right because there's something more authentic and real about the format.
880 full length albums in my 12" collection, with pressing dates between sometime in 1955 and this October 2025. 70 years... They all get fairly regular rotation, I alternate between choosing something I feel like listening to, and using the Randomize button in Discogs.com where I track my collection.
A someday project is to figure out how set up an automated workflow to use ambient song detection/recognition to magically recognize when I am playing an album and scrobble it to last.fm to track my plays. It's nothing I want to do manually but it would be neat to see my own analog spotify wrapped summary.
Funnily I'm in the complete opposite cohort. I own a record player, because stereo sets used to come with one even when vinyl was on the decline already. I have less than a handful of records which I ever only played out of curiosity.
I have 2 (and a spare for parts) tts and a DJ mixer to allow crossfading (it's a 4 channel because it was the cheapest usable thing available). I threw in moderate Audio-Technica MicroLine cartridges in both and had to get a digital scale and some other calibration crap because these tts are some relatively cheap with a bunch of adjustments lacking interchangeable cartridges. I'm at around 10 milk-crate sized storage boxes and have stopped buying almost entirely. It's not a "purist" rig at all (I'm allergic to audiophiles) considering it feeds into a Marantz NR1711 that has Tidal and a PlexAmp Pi that drives a couple of Elac Debut mains and an SVS PB16.
After buying one vinyl album from a niche artist (djpoolboi), he actually then sent me a link to download the same tracks on flac, which I appreciated.
Lately I've found myself buying the same album both on vinyl for listening to at home, and on CD to rip for my digital music collection.
I work from home a lot so having to get up to flip the record gives me an excuse not to stare at my screen all day too.
Half of all buyers of scented candles actually burn them.
Half the buyers of those fancy soap bars in the shapes of fruit or whatever actually use them as soap .
Half of all shutters on houses can actually be closed to "shutter" the windows
So I think lets not shame people for what they do on their own time that affects none of us really.
If you want to listen to music then Spotify runs circles around vinyl as a medium. Records really suck for music quality which is why everyone dumped them when tapes came along and then even more so when cd's became a thing.
If Vinyl was a good medium to listen to music then no one would have bought cd's or had a Spotify subscriptions.
I can't imagine people going back to old school crt televisions to watch sports or movies either, but I do see people
No one uses it because of quality or because it is the best medium for music.
Glad you agree with me:)
CDs killed both.
Napster + portable mp3 player and smartphoned did kilómetros ll the cassette.
[1] especially the late 90's early 00's ones that were barely bigger than a standard cassette case.
[2] there was buffering for discmans but it wasn't 100% effective if skipping happened for longer than the buffer
Last Christmas, I bought 3 vinyl records as gifts. I don’t own a record player.
I don't think of them as "investments," though. I don't think they're actually worth that much.
I have the music on them as digital files that I got from Apple Music, though (I have an Apple One sub). Much better quality sound.
I guess I'm in the market for a new record player. Is that market picking up again?
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/culture/article/booktok-tiktok...
Artist make no money off streaming. This is a real artifact I get to own, keep sealed and maybe get signed.
I did have the unfortunate experience of buying a D12 Devil's Night vinyl to find the cover image quality to look like some intern copied it off Google images.
And these were all artists and albums I know and love through CDs or streaming, so it's not like I'm buying them blind.
also, we're probably getting some really good stats with this stuff with the folks buying at their local record store, right?
by the way, what was the phrasing of the question they used to get this information?
I buy them because I like to see the cover & lyrics while listing to it (mp3).
The first is that even if people don't own a record player at the moment doesn't mean that they don't plan on getting one. I have multiple nieces/nephews who got record players (at their request!) this year for Christmas. Briefcase record players are becoming ridiculously more popular. The thing is there's no point in buying a record player if you don't already have some records, and artists are doing a lot more limited prints so sometimes you need to buy immediately to be sure you're going to get one.
My wife and I bought a new sound system in 2024, and we decided to include a record player. We have used it way more we had expected to. We still have streaming services (Tidal) but listening to a record has a ton of benefits. There's the fact that the entire album itself is an organized experience, not just random tracks, and the tactile nature of it is really appealing. The albums themselves are like pieces of artwork in a way that a CD or screensaver would never be.
It's also nice knowing that the artist I'm buying from is getting real money from the purchase, unlike the pennies they get from streaming.
(Ultimately I went all-in on smart speakers, so I couldn't just hook up the turntable anymore, and getting a turntable/adapter that digitizes the audio to send over Bluetooth, just no...)
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.
Preordering product – whether books, vinyl, or digital – really, really helps self-funded artists and indy arts business.
Keep it up, kids! :-)
Streaming is convenient for travel and great for previewing music, getting recommendations etc. But if I want to sit back and truly enjoy albums that I love, that’s where vinyl comes in.
I have a decent sound system. Buying albums on vinyl that I’ve listened to 100’s of times and playing through the system blows me away. I’ve been unable to get the same effect or quality from digital, despite trying everything aside from a $2000+ DAC. Wired streaming. Lossless. Various services and formats. CDs. Technically better quality. My ears disagree.
At the end of the day, vinyl is more enjoyable for me and many others. It’s a better experience.
To quote Trent Reznor:
VINYL MISSION STATEMENT
IN THESE TIMES OF NEARLY UNLIMITED ACCESS TO ALL THE MUSIC IN THE WORLD, WE'VE COME TO APPRECIATE THE VALUE AND BEAUTY OF THE PHYSICAL OBJECT. OUR STORE'S FOCUS IS ON PRESENTING THESE ITEMS TO YOU. VINYL HAS RETURNED TO BEING A PRIORITY FOR US - NOT JUST FOR THE WARMTH OF THE SOUND, BUT THE INTERACTION IT DEMANDS FROM THE LISTENER. THE CANVAS OF ARTWORK, THE WEIGHT OF THE RECORD, THE SMELL OF THE VINYL, THE DROPPING OF THE NEEDLE, THE DIFFICULTY OF SKIPPING TRACKS, THE CHANGING OF SIDES, THE SECRETS HIDDEN WITHIN, AND HAVING A PHYSICAL OBJECT THAT EXISTS IN THE REAL WORLD WITH YOU. ALL PART OF THE EXPERIENCE AND MAGIC. DIGITAL FORMATS AND STREAMING ARE GREAT AND CERTAINLY CONVENIENT, BUT THE IDEAL WAY I'D HOPE A LISTENER EXPERIENCE MY MUSIC IS TO GRAB A GREAT SET OF HEADPHONES, SIT WITH THE VINYL, DROP THE NEEDLE, HOLD THE JACKET IN YOUR HANDS LOOKING AT THE ARTWORK (WITH YOUR FUCKING PHONE TURNED OFF) AND GO ON A JOURNEY WITH ME. -TRENT REZNOR
The secondhand market becomes saturated with inferior pressings that are inevitably bound for landfills since they don't meet the quality/expectations of the people who actually play vinyl.
Hypothetically.
Little do they know, the true sonic experience comes from wetting the disc with a special felt pad and watching the stroboscopic markings on the edge of a turntable platter...