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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.)
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.
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.