The Vinyl Comeback Is Stalling?

[Admiral Akbar]

I love the warmth and ritual of vinyl. Also the artwork is appealing. I also appreciate what CD’s bring to the table in terms of sound quality as well.

I think the vinyl/CD surge has waned due to people getting out of their houses post-Covid. I moreover feel that the cost of vinyl is prohibitive. Much easier to use Spotify and listen nearly for free anywhere without any physical space constraint than it is to plop down $30 bucks.

I hope they can find a way to lower the prices of vinyl so more kids can get into it. Old school hip hop on vinyl — cannot be beat!

 

[hrodbert696]

Well, maybe I'm going to be the outlier on the thread. I got back into vinyl two or three years ago, and still enjoy it. I'm not particularly an audiophile, the system I bought is not top-notch but it isn't one of those crappy department store all-in-ones either, and it isn't the main way I listen to music - that would be mp3s off my phone through the car bluetooth during my commute.

Nevertheless - I do like my vinyl. I don't think it's exactly nostalgia, because I don't listen to it the same way, nor the same music, that I did as a teenager when it was the main way anyone listened to anything. But it is more of an environmental, aesthetic experience. It's a Sunday-afternoon, reading-a-book-in-the-living-room with blues or jazz music playing thing. For those times, there's something about putting on a record, twenty minutes at a time, rather than cueing up 1,193 songs on my mp3 playlist or whatever the algorithm demons of Spotify decide to throw at me.

 

[tpaul]

Frankly the volume of physical album sales surprises me, whatever the format. I still buy CDs but my 15-year-old son, who despises Spotify and listens to Tidal, thinks I'm some kind of idiot dinosaur who must be single-handedly keeping the CD industry in business with my occasional purchases. From his perspective, only someone who is woefully ignorant of technological advances would bother with something as archaic and limiting as a CD.

Meanwhile half of humanity is still buying vinyl. Who knew?

 

[Admiral Akbar]

It’s also interesting to read many of the posts in this thread up until this point have been decidedly “anti-vinyl”.

I wonder that the posts would have been like a couple of years ago?

 

[thewildest]

the subjective element of the retro factor.

If I ever put together a band, this would be its name.

 

[brianrost]

in the UK, i remember CDs routinely costing £14.99 in the mid 90s. That’s £28 in today’s money! So vinyl is not badly priced if you compare it to this.

In the USA CDs started out at just under $20 (LPs had risen to $8.98 list), but in a few years settled to $12-15 for new releases with many budget back catalog releases like the CBS/Sony "Nice Price" ones for $5.99. While $15-20 back 35 years ago might be more today with inflation, CD prices actually went down. They are cheaper than newly pressed LPs across the board today. As the article stated, record labels could ramp up vinyl production but they just don't seem interested in making the investment again.

I recently bought a new CD at Bandcamp for $12 (but tipped the artist another $8 for $20 total) in a limited edition of 150 so I ordered it as soon as it was made available (I heard pre-release single tracks on Spotify). The LP was $25, limited edition of 500. After my CD arrived, I received an email that the artists was surprised at the demand for the CD so pressed another 500! The vinyl has not sold out yet.

 

[Father Gino]

How’s the rotary phone comeback going?

 

[BrentD]

I remember a million years ago ... one of the first CD boxed sets I heard about was the Eric Clapton Collection (I think the Beetles might have been the first I heard about).

Being a huge fan of Mr. Clapton, I rushed right out and bought a CD player (component for my stereo) and ordered the boxed set.

I got the CDs and I was excited ... until I played one. Maybe the sound was too "clean" for blues or whatever. Anyway, it was awful.

That left a bad taste in my mouth so, I shied (? past-tense of "shy"?) away from CDs for a while.

It didn't take long (a couple of years, maybe) for the companies to understand some older music didn't translate well to digital format.

Anyway, a few years back, I saw one of my favorite records of all time ("Bark At The Moon") in vinyl and I figured: "What the hay".

I got the record on the turn table and I was (almost) disgusted. I didn't miss all the popping and scratching.

Maybe I got spoiled, but I'll take digital music any day.

Mastering for vinyl and mastering for CD are pretty different. CDs don't have a frequency response baked in, while vinyl as a medium has muffled high frequencies.

A lot of people in the 80s said CDs sounded thin, but it wasn't the CDs - it was that record companies either didn't remaster appropriately for the format or the engineers were still settling into a new paradigm.

That's why CDs don't sound thin anymore.

This is an interesting discussion overall. It looks like sales are down across the board and vinyl is holding up relatively well.

 

[hrodbert696]

How’s the rotary phone comeback going?

You know, it's funny - just the other day we had a health scare with a family member. My wife took them to the emergency room (everything's OK now, no worries) and called me. But I was in the living room and had left my cell in the bedroom and on vibrate (which it always is), so I didn't know anything was happening until my daughter came out of her bedroom an hour later and said, "Mom's texting me, she needs to know if you got her message." It occurred to me that in the old days when we had a landline I would have heard the phone ringing in some central location of the house and answered immediately. So YES! Rotary phone revival! Let's do it!

 

[hrodbert696]

Mastering for vinyl and mastering for CD are pretty different. CDs don't have a frequency response baked in, while vinyl as a medium has muffled high frequencies.

I'm no sound engineer, but I was always suspicious of the "analog is warmer" argument. I suspected what you've said - it isn't "warmer," it just muffles the highs. Or rather, muffling the highs is all "warmer" actually means.

 

[Liam Wald]

When records are still going for $30 after all this time of the “renaissance,” no wonder it’s stalled out. Record companies are run by morons.

Could you perhaps name a few industries that aren't?

 

[Koshchei]

Here's a new piece from writer Ted Gioia who had written on the vinyl comeback about a year ago.

The bad news in short is the market growth for vinyl in 2021 was 95% and in 2022 only 4%. Although vinyl outpaced CDs in revenue in total units sold, when it comes to number of units sold CD and vinyl are still running neck and neck. The hyped cassette revival looks like, well, hype.

View attachment 4936220

Even worse he wrote this:

I buy digital versions of the album because I can store them on my NAS, they won't wear out, and I can push them to various devices around my house. On average, I get two or three new albums a week.

I'm 100% against streaming though - classic case of the business model being such that the parasite is killing the host.

 

[superheavyfunk]

I buy vinyl from bands for the same reason that I used to buy CDs - to help support local and touring acts. I don’t play any of the vinyl that I own because I don’t care to make the investment in an analog home stereo system. And I haven’t had a device that can play a cd for at least 10 years now, so I’d rather get the big format for the artwork than the small format which is basically just a waste of plastic to me.

I almost never buy music from anyone who is not independent. Major artists all get streamed in my household.

I’d much rather buy a record than a band tshirt. PSA: Your tshirt designs are terrible, everyone. Seriously.

 

[Michael Milner]

I'm not a fan of Gioia (I think he is full of it frankly). The reason that there was a "comeback" for vinyl is that there was a market for it. There was a segment of the music consuming public that never got rid of their turntables and were willing to buy used vinyl records. It was a niche market, and to think that there would be exponential growth every year is silly. With respect to costs, well news flash, something that cost $5.99 in 1975 is not going to be $5.99 in 2022. Prior to the digital age, you either listened to records or the radio (with the exception of 8 track tapes, then cassettes). Now there are a myriad of ways to listen, so vinyl will be in competition with all of those other formats. I don't have a preference for either a vinyl record of a compact disc, but I do like the album jacket and all that goes along with it. I would also note that there is still a market for all of those stereo systems from the 1970's as well. My 2 cents.

 

[smokescreens]

Inflation and limited manufacturing stalled growth last year. Everyone I know is on a 8 month to a year wait list to get pressed as the music world resumes itself. There are kids - actual teenagers - buying records in stacks in shops I go to. Its niche market, but its a consistent niche. It was never going to be the way everyone consumed music again. Digital is too convenient.
Records are an active listening experience, a ritual, and has its own little cultural pockets. That appeals to a lot of people.

 

[Hummergeist]

I was pleased to sell off my vinyl, and then pleased to sell off my CDs. Don’t miss them.

 

[EriktheRed]

I used to have over 100 LPs, at least half of which were already kind of beat up. I foolishly kept them in a cardboard box in my garage and one winter some furry critter decided to make its home there and feast on the covers. I recovered a small amount of them (haven't really counted) and they're safely in my house, where I display them on my walls. I periodically swap them out.

 

[Turtle71]

I just recently got back into the vinyl thing in the last year, I bought a budget(ish) record player from Audio Technica, and started looking around for some vinyl, I was surprised just how much stuff was out for "current bands"...the vinyl comeback may be stalling, but I don't think it's going away again any time soon.

Now the vinyl pricing (as mentioned earlier) is getting outta line in some cases, but there are still some reasonably priced treasures out there to be had.

One thing I have found, is that some of the vinyl purchases I've made on Amazon also come with the "digital copy" as well, so I can download that to my phone or whatever, which is kinda nice since it's tough to play records in my car.

 

[brianrost]

I'm no sound engineer, but I was always suspicious of the "analog is warmer" argument. I suspected what you've said - it isn't "warmer," it just muffles the highs. Or rather, muffling the highs is all "warmer" actually means.

When you actually consider the technical specs, it's difficult for vinyl to get all the way to 20kHz because of the limitations of the phono cartridge itself. Digital, even in the cheapest crap mp3 players, get there easily and all the way down to 20Hz with ruler flat response, wider channel separation (near infinite), signal to noise ratios of 90+dB, etc. Then tdigital loses the tape hiss, wow and flutter, turntable rumble and hum...simply no contest. The issue about the sound is always about how well it's recorded, mixed and mastered. I have plenty of music on both LP and CD where I like the vinyl much better but it's all about the mixing and mastering. The engineers in the 1960s had different ideas of what sounded good than the enginners of the 21st century.

 

[Roxbororob]

I love my Vinyl and the product these days is much better quality. It is expensive but, you get what you pay for.
I still buy CDs and have a Spotify subscription to boot.
I listen to all three mediums but really enjoy the whole record album experience and have no trouble with skips, static or pops. Heck I even listen to FM radio and read books!

Your are all entitled to your opinions and YMMV. Cheers.