Posted on 03/10/2023 7:56:12 PM PST by BenLurkin
Vinyl albums outsold CDs last year for the first time since 1987, according to the Recording Industry Association of America's year-end report released Thursday.
It marked the 16th consecutive year of growth in vinyl, with 41 million albums sold — compared to 33 million CDs.
Streaming is still the biggest driver of the music industry's growth, making up 84% of recorded-music revenue, but physical music formats saw a remarkable resurgence in the past couple of years.
The pandemic led to a spike in demand for vinyl records, driven largely by younger buyers. Vinyl has become a major part of artists' marketing campaigns.
Artists including Adele and Taylor Swift made pop a fast-growing genre on vinyl, and many independent manufacturers struggled to ramp up and meet demand after years of decline. That's forced some bands to push back album releases and stopped small artists from being able to press records.
The recorded-music industry's fortunes started to improve in 2016 as streaming services grew, overcoming the decline in CD sales and online music piracy. Paid subscription services including Spotify and Apple Music brought in $10.2 billion from 92 million paid subscribers in 2022, topping $10 billion for the first time, according to RIAA.
Ad-supported streaming, like YouTube, brought in $1.8 billion and made up 11% of recorded-music revenue. Revenue from digital downloads, including both albums and single tracks, dropped 20% to $495 million.
Vinyl revenue grew 17% and topped $1.2 billion last year, making up nearly three-quarters of the revenue brought in by physical music. At the same time, CD revenue fell 18% to $483 million, the RIAA said.
(Excerpt) Read more at npr.org ...
Why not? If the person likes that kind of music, and they like vinyl there’s no reason they shouldn’t have the music on vinyl.
I think the vinyl thing will stick. But not for a “good news” reason. The fact of the matter is the music industry is dead. A lot of things played into it, bad management, advancing technology. But the days of culture defining multi-platinum albums are gone. It’s just a casual product now. Not that there isn’t lots of good music (and not so good) being made, but the consumption curve is bottomed, nobody feels the need to get music anymore. Except for some people. As with any art there are those of us who are just addicted. We have to go get it. And the fact is we’ll always get it in physical form, because when you’re a deep catalog guy you know the streams can’t be trusted. We might use them, but we know that’s like borrowing from a friend, stream music isn’t “ours” and we want to OWN.
So we’re going to buy CDs. But we’re also going to buy vinyl. Because there’s a mystique and ritual to vinyl that no other medium has. The large form, the full liner notes, the examining for dust, the dropping of the needle. It’s not a gimmick, not to the music junkie. And we junkies are now most of the market.
Except at the Salvation Army. Lots of Don Ho, Jim Nabors, Slim Whitman, and Barbra Streisand on used vinyl for a buck each. LOL.
Aren’t some of the distortions you mentioned ameliorated with a linear tracking turntable?
I seem to remember that being the case when I purchased mine in the 80s, but my hearing is too far gone now to make an honest comparison.
50s?!?!?!
Hell, most of mine are busy dropping like flies!!
😂
Now if the companies that make record players would make them capable of stacking records on them like they were back before the 1980s.
It is very irritating to stop what you are doing every 15-25 minutes to flip or put a new record on the turntable.
I miss those “pops” Skips and scratches on CD! I am VERY careful with my vinyl. Some I bought fifty five years ago are still in great shape!
Now lets have some stackable record players so we don’t have to stop every 15-20 minutes to change or flip records!
Before the CD era there was a market in vinyl record cleaning tools. I think I still have one series of that product. It would clean up one that had gotten dusty or some other contaminants.
It is actually funny/stupid how many real CDs, old vinyl, and digital purchased CDs I have. My oldest used to say that Dad’s music collection has Meat Loaf next to Mozart as I listen to almost everything but Rap. If I had gotten on the streaming music kick early on I would have saved a whole lot of money.
While I have some good headphones and some decent speakers I wish I had a pair of giant electrostatic speakers. That is the one audio splurge I never made.
NOOOOOOOOO
Stacks are record killers. Flopping a non-spinning record down on a spinning record is just destruction. Might as well sandpaper on them. Now I did see once a very cool very expensive one that would get the stack spinning then raise the turn table up and gently “grab” the next record and lower back down. But boy was that expensive. Get up, it’s good for you. And good for the records.
Right, that’s another interesting development. Cassettes have gotten popular all of the sudden. Who would have thought the lowly cassette tape would be having a moment?
I’m not sure what’s driving that but it’s interesting. Another thing I’ve seen lately at places like Target is that they’ve reissued the old Polaroid cameras that spit out the picture after you take it. I wonder if the Polaroid thing is riding the same wave that cassettes are.
Something these devices have in common is that they are resolutely *not digital*. They involve media that is not infinitely copyable which I think puts a sense of uniqueness and specialness in play. A picture taken on a Polaroid camera is the only instance of that picture that will ever exist. As such it has uniqueness that a digital image file does not.
It’s a similar sort of deal with cassettes. The classical analog problem of generation loss puts a limit on how many generations of copies can be made, which makes the original or earliest copies somewhat unique and special. If you make a mix tape for your friends, you have given them something special, and there is value in that.
So I will speculate that these things are appealing to people because they help to reclaim some of the sense of specialness that has been lost with the move to digital.
Vinyl is so popular it is a fad
No so Vinyl is the highest quality of recording CD’s were a fad streaming doesn’t work every place radios still #2 best.
My husband and I buy vinyl usually while antiquing. I play records while making dinner. Our 11 year old even enjoys it!
The problems with records start with the fact that you're using a diamond point to ride along a much softer vinyl groove. As the tone arm moves towards the record's center the angle of the stylus in relation to the arc gets increasingly more severe so it increasingly wears one side of the groove more than the other. Think motocross riders blasting around a curve - one side of the curve gets dug out more than the other.
Also, since as you get closer to the center relative rotation speed decreases so there's less area to record information on. That's analogous to recording tape speed - the faster the tape speed, the more fidelity one gets.
The angle of the linear arm never changes as it does with a swinging tone arm. Looking down at the turntable, the stylus is always at the 3 o'clock position. Also, absolutely NO skate. IIRC, the talk at the time is that the original masters were recorded useing some sort of linear device and that having a linear tone arm would therefore best replicate what was recorded.
You do realize that now I'm gonna have to remove my plastic bag dust barrier from my LT turntable and pull out a couple of Deutsche Grammophon albums. LOL
Friends’ kids have been buying vinyl and the vintage stereo equipment, that’s probably a factor. A local indie record store owner I know has been selling more vinyl (including the picture disks and that kind of collectible junk) than CDs, at least in $ of sales, for at least a few years now, hmm, nearly a decade. And otherwise sane adults have taken like anchors to water the practice of buying (sic, it’s really a rental) streaming music on their phones, that’s probably most of it.
I agree with this, and have stated so if you look back through my posts.
A record is an EXPERIENCE... its physical. You have the artwork, the actual record itself, the mechanical nature of a record. You place it on the turntable, you watch it spin, you see the needle drop and move, you hear the sound. Compared to a CD or Cassette, where you just pop in, close the cover and push play. The CD is the least interactive experience you can have with the popular forms of physical recorded media. And streaming/MP3 literally has ZERO physical experience at all with the media itself.
This makes a record an experience, yes, but as I said, these “kids” aren’t out there snapping up records because of the sound. Let’s face it, these kids aren’t buying the records INSTEAD of their streams... they are choosing to buy the record on TOP of the streaming/digital recording they already have in their pocket. Sort of like if you find a paperback book or series you really enjoyed (or digital book these days) you may go out and buy the hard copy original print of the thing for your bookshelf.
The overwhelming majority of the time these “kids” are listening to these songs is still through streaming, (with rare exception)... They may go out and buy the albumn and listen to it, but by and large they aren’t abandoning their digital model, just picking up records as a kitch thing to augment their primary audio experiences from time to time.
Reality is simple, physical media as a whole sells at a abysmal fraction of what it once was. 43 Million Vinyl records were sold world wide last year. To put this into comparison, at the PEAK of physical media, in the year 2000 CD’s there were nearly a BILLION CD’s sold world wide. In Fact, Vinyl’s growth, stalled compared to the 2 years previous... with under 5% in 2020, after 40%+ in 2020 and 2021.. which honestly, those years, were probably driven by lock down BOREDOM... people had a crap ton of time on their hands, and desperate for anything to distract them.... (Guitar Sales as well went through the roof, something like 40% in 2021 as well. And just to be complete, Vinyl Records lowest sales year was 2006 at less than a Million, Vinyl sales have been slowly increasing since then.
So I agree with you, records provide a physical experience, (and that is IMHO what is behind this) however, there is no indication that the “kids” buying these things are doing so, in any significant way because of the sound quality differences.
I think it’s a few parts nostalgia and some cheap profits giving some kitsch to bored kids with looking for a distraction.
I still don’t care for streaming personally. It is convenient, but something is just lost... I do BUY digital songs now and again, but if I decide I want an albumn, I still go find a CD and buy it... and now Rip it. I don’t think I will ever largely go to a pure streaming model.. Something about recurring fees and not owning the music just doesn’t sit right with me. Yes, $10 or so a month won’t break my bank to pay for a streaming service.. but frankly I don’t buy $10 worth of music a month. I do listen to music, but its much I like, much of which I already own, so why am I going to keep paying?
I know someday I may break down and join a streaming service, but I can use the free stuff like pandora with ads to hear things I don’t own, and if I do get the sudden urge to own a particular song I don’t, for $1.29 or less I can buy that song. I honestly don’t hear many songs that I have a desire to own, that I don’t already own. So $10 a month while not a whole lot of money, just doesn’t seem worth it to me.
I’m sure if I bit the bullet I’d enjoy a subscription streaming service, but at present I just can’t justify it mentally.
It was only a few months back that I finally ripped all my old CD’s. And found some of my old CD’s had disappeared through the years, so went out and spent $7 each or so to replace the missing ones... If I ever need to rip them again I have the physical media. I am also debating buying a 100 CD carousel for my old college stereo that I have in the basement which also houses a few full size video games. (I also have a bluetooth sound bar, that I use with my phone... but with the CD Carousel I could just put all my CDS in there, and just hit random play and see what pops up... I enjoy that... random songs that were never hits but were on Albumns that I did enjoy and long forgot about come up whenever hit random play.
Kids today will never know a lot of this sort of thing, because honestly, how many buy an albumn anymore?
Many years ago I had a big collection of them. Top shelf performances recorded beautifully. I'd love to start my collection anew and I just might do that. But first, I must buy a turntable.
Recently, I've been looking at vintage integrated amps and speakers on Ebay. Whatever I end up buying will be installed in my recording studio as a system to do final checks on album masters I produce. And, of course, it'll also be used just to enjoy music on - like those old DG recordings. . .
I'm a huge Classical Music fan.
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