Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/15/vinyl-records-now-outselling-c.html
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This year just gets weirder and weirder.
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I wonder if or when 60 mm film (type 120) or sheet film will outsell 35 mm film (type 135). Similar dynamic.
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Maybe in this age of downloads and streaming there are still people who buy CDs but, I don’t know them. So to me the surprise isn’t that vinyl is outselling CDs but that everything isn’t outselling CDs.
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What a time to be alive. If i was to buy physical media for the intent of actually listening to it i would buy a CD but the few times i’ve bought a vinyl record it was because it was already signed by the band or i got it as a collectible. As a physical object vinyls are really nice experience to handle, CDs are just more utilitarian but i’m not surprised in the age of streaming that their sales have been taken over by an older analog format.
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Forty years ago there were plenty of records to buy for $2.99. When CDs were introduced, they were considerably more expensive. Then CD prices slowly went down.
I don’t see units sold, just money paid. Do given that vinyl is a niche, and now carries a premium price, isn’t really that one sells better than the other, or that $50 times X beats $5 times X?
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I still buy CD, especially at venues, because you can’t get a digital download signed and because smaller artist get a bigger slice on CD sold directly.
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Vinyl? Bah! True audiophiles know that to get the full, rich spectrum sound you need to go with shellac. That is, if a wax cylinder isn’t available.
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Let me know when Kodachrome comes back.
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CD buyer here. I like having a physically reproduced artwork and liner notes, as well as a semi-archival backup in the unlikely-but-possible event of multiple hard-drive failures. Though I generally only actually “play” the CD once, for the purposes of ripping to FLAC and playing off my RPi-based Volumio setup.
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I mean, has anyone seen the prices? They’re pretty absurd.
My advice would be: if you’re into collecting CDs, now is the time.
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Sigh. Yeah. Of all the past media formats I miss, Kodachrome is at the top. I’ve got stereo slides from the 50’s that look like they were shot yesterday. And in medium format, a Kodachrome slide is like looking through a window. After decades of technological evolution, there’s still nothing that can match it.
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I tend to purchase CDs because unlike streaming I have “purchased a copy,” under copyright laws so I have the legal rights that implies, instead of whatever has been granted my under a EULA.
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As someone who grew up with Vinyl records, CD’s are better, having to put up with crackles even on brand new records like the Dark Side of the Moon Album I will not miss.
CDs are at over Twice the frequency of human hearing at 16 bit any “better sound” from vinyl is mostly imaginary.
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Vinyl is the true archival format. When we are all living in the post-apocalyptic ruins cooking rat meat over fire, vinyl records will still be playable without electricity, with a pine needle and a amplifying cone.
There are lots of below-the-radar areas of music where vinyl never went away as well. Hiphop, all kinds of dance music, Jamaican music, and other subrosa genres all have uninterrupted histories dating back as far as 70 years in some cases of music on vinyl.
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Yea I’m another CD buyer. Easy to rip mp3 and no clicks and pops
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Ektar is honking bullshit. I think it might be going away already.
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There are bands I want to support. They make a lot more money from selling CDs than they do if you listen to a stream. Some of them, like Belzebubs, only release their music on physical media. And I can play the CD in the car or rip it to an external SSD drive and plug that in and listen without paying for bandwidth or a monthly fee.
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“And, um, how much of that 85% goes to the artists creating the music?”
It may be worse now, but I remember reading this sobering essay about the music business by Steve Albini when I a musician in the nineties and early 2000’s:
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My wife got a set of CDs from a coworker that provides some sort of educational credit for her licensing.
Then we discovered we really don’t have a functioning CD player. None of our laptops have one, the console stereo one seems to have broken from lack of use. An old diskman has a messed up headphone jack… etc.
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