Posted on 01/06/2009 12:43:43 PM PST by weegee
Sales of the vinyl single are now back up above the million mark in the UK
Downloads and iPods are all very well, but for many musicians, your latest song just hasn't been released until it's been forced on to a small, grooved plastic disc at a pressure of more than 2,000 lb per square inch.
...The 45 rpm single is about to reach its 60th anniversary and despite repeated predictions of its demise, sales are rising once again...
Most people think of records as being made of black plastic, but it turns out that coloured vinyl is as old as the seven-inch single itself.
The first 45 rpm disc, Texarkana Baby by country-and-western singer Eddy Arnold, was issued by RCA in the US on 31 March 1949.
It was made of green vinyl, as part of an early attempt to colour-code singles according to the genre of music they featured. Others included red for classical music and yellow for children's songs.
...Seven-inch sales peaked in the UK in 1979, when a staggering 89 million of them were sold, but once the CD hit the market, vinyl of all kinds went into sharp decline. In 2001, annual singles sales dipped below 180,000.
...But who is actually buying all these singles? According to the British Phonographic Industry, which represents the British music business, a new generation of bands is attracting younger buyers.
...The BPI admits that seven-inch singles may be even more popular than its figures suggest, since they are based on shops that report to the Official UK Charts Company, which compiles the weekly Top 40.
As it acknowledges, many singles are sold through specialist retailers, which do not necessarily have their sales figures canvassed for the charts...
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
PING
I suppose in certain circles 7” singles are popular...
Dead cat bounce?
Back to mono!
I thought this was a 1911A gun porn thread.
This may be like the sale of ‘57 Chevy and ‘65 Mustang parts. The new buyers may have vintage jukeboxes, or just collect 45’s the same way some people collect first issue stamps.
What the hell are they PLAYING them on? I have a turntable only to put old vinyl in to my computer, but are there really that many old systems left out there?
You can still buy turntables. I have seen them in Best Buy and Circuit City.
Give me a laser stylus that doesn’t wear out the record surface - oh and make it under $100 - and I’ll buy records again.
Make mine vinyl.
I have no idea where it came from, but he had a 45 player installed under the dash.
The records could stack 8 or 10 on a spindle that would drop one at a time .. the arm swung in and rode the groove, lifted, moved away, and the next would drop.
I was a kid then of maybe 16 years, and though he rarely let us 'twerps' ride in his car ... when we did ... MAN! .. that was MY BROTHER!
That was just the start of him becoming uncle Fancy .. he's had the coolest stuff first, since way back when.
Me too, but 60 is a little young. Mine is almost that old.
Very cool!
Heck, I listened to music this weekend on MWT, Sr.’s reel-to-reel player.
Wondeful audio.
An optical mouse is basically a camera-light system that rapidly takes tiny pictures of the size of the area of the optical window underneath the mouse, hundreds to thousands of times each second, to detect motion. I guess the same system could be tweaked to optically read records.
Did I just give out a patent-worthy idea? :^)
Whaling songs, bagpipe music, ancient folk songs...the stuff I like is NEVER going to be mass market enought to come out on CD. ;) I’ve turned a lot of scratchy old vinyl into less scratchy MP3’s!
You'd be surprised. It's pretty common to see deejays at nightclubs for example using turntables.
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