How much physical music (CDs, vinyl, minidiscs, cases ingles, whatever) have you bought so far this year?

I hope your friend wasn't Grant

*awkward*

hahahahahaha

how is appreciation of sound "simple" or "clinical" kmt

Zero CDs since 2004. About 20-30 new vinyl albums a year. About 20 digital purchases-- mostly hard to find classical stuff. About 50 used vinyl purchases a year.

It's like going grocery shopping and everything's in identical vacuum-sealed packets with "ROCKET SALAD", "RUMP STEAK", "JELLY BABIES" printed on the front. We know that it's food, but we can't tell whether it will appeal at all once it's out of that packet. There's no intrigue or impetus to eat beyond "I like steak. I will buy it for sustenance".

food has nutritional values printed on the packet (scientific facts) plus people have tasted the exact food before. there are clear expectations of how food tastes, it's nothing like music in this regard.

the labels of food are actually more informative than the labels on records, which weakens this already dire analogy.

i'm only really commenting because comparing modern music formats to supermarket food (or generally any music/food analogies which seek to criticise an inevitably vague and unspecified modern decline) are so often the dumbest and cheapest faux-opinions around.

but a+ for not bringing mcdonalds into it, you are dropping science.

it was a bit sad when, realising more and more people wouldn't buy CDs, labels just started getting the work experience kids to do the cover art/design to save a few more bob

two records arrived through the post today and when I opened there was a random copy of daft punk's da funk thrown in there too

Awesome!

Is Grindr named after the Priest song? "Grinderrrrr / Lookiiing for meaaaaat"... Always wondered that.

"Food has nutritional values printed on the packet (scientific facts) plus people have tasted the exact food before. there are clear expectations of how food tastes, it's nothing like music in this regard."

This is not at all true. "This steak right here" doesn't equal "all steak"... That's like saying "ah, ya heard one Detroit techno record you heard em all"...

10-20, but I'm poor and would buy more if I could.

Would say all vinyl, no CDs, but I've quite possibly bought one or two CDs or cassettes from bands at shows.

Can't remember exactly how many CDs I've bought this year, but it's probably about a dozen or so - three Duke Ellington titles, the new Dwight Yoakam, the new Baroness, a few used things...I still get a lot of physical promos, though.

Following up on my most recent post, it's that sort of reductionism that I think Dog Latin is trying to explain doesn't work for him. It's a markedly different experience to buy a piece of vinyl and listen to it than to DL an mp3--sonically, procedurally, economically, sacrifice-ly, what have you. My local grass-fed steak cooked medium-rare on my grill is markedly different from even the very same cut from the very same cow made somewhere else. If bad analogies are harmful to music discourse, reductionism is far worse; at least analogies are trying to work through and perpetuate discourse, whereas reductionism just seeks to shut down the opposition.

If ronan and lex were locked in a room together for 24hrs, would it create such an enormous feedback loop of pedantry that the world would implode in on itself? It's a good thing you guys don't get on because I actually fear this could happen.

Without wanting to perpetuate the food packaging analogy too much more, for fear of people will wilfully miss the point yet again- being able to see the food, or at least a picture of a serving suggestion of the food, can and will influence what you choose to buy and cook. If everything came in identical, plain packages with no pictures it would make stacking the shelves easier, but the act of choosing what to have for dinner would be boiled down to a purely functional act. We'd be faced with rows and rows of packets identifiable only by a label to tell us what's in there. Some may find this a good thing. They would find the functionality of this system appealing because all they want to do is go out and get a steak. But others might prefer to browse around, to see what their tastebuds want for tea that night. If this is the case it would become very difficult to get creative or excited about it. There's more to the appreciation of food, music, art in general than the end product itself - there's a whole miasma of factors and influences that inform my personal appreciation of these.

A digital library is great, it's functional and handy to have, but it also sucks a lot of the fun out of discovering and sharing that music. Other than the physical sound coming out of the speakers, there's no 'in' to a piece of music. We're served a blank slate with no other information about what we're hearing, nothing about the artist and why they chose to make that music. as such it becomes homogenised - it may as well be musical wallpaper to the casual listener.

I've seen this in action time and again. If i have people over and plug my mp3 player into the stereo, they tend to jus chat over it. It's often as though the music isn't playing at all. Get a record out, and people suddenly start taking interest. They wanna see the cover, they anticipate the music before the needle drops, and they talk about, rather than over, the record as it plays.

I have no idea why this happens but it always always does time and again. The only explanation I have (other than the whole 'vinyl sounds better than mp3' thing, is that they are somehow more aware that the music playing is a complete artefact as opposed to some abstract and ghostly digital file automatically queued in by a computer-based shuffle. I really don't know but it probably relates on a deeper psychological level than I'm prepared to ponder.

I like dog latin's post.

I'm in the 100+ range by this point, surely.

i bought a john fahey record for $30 the other day, it's beautiful

i bought the bob mould album on cd b/c he is old and i figure digital sales are confusing and frightening for him
Brilliant.

― comedy is unnatural and abhorrent (Scik Mouthy), Tuesday, October 2, 2012 10:05 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

bob's hip now he DJs and everything

also if it makes money he knows about it

i bought a kenny clarke box set a couple weeks ago. not quite sure how much physical media i've purchased...maybe 7-10 items?

guessed 2-6, mostly used records, i'm not buying cds at all anymore. but also i was pretty broke most of the year so i wasn't buying much in the way of fun stuff at all until the past few months.

A digital library is great, it's functional and handy to have, but it also sucks a lot of the fun out of discovering and sharing that music. Other than the physical sound coming out of the speakers, there's no 'in' to a piece of music. We're served a blank slate with no other information about what we're hearing, nothing about the artist and why they chose to make that music. as such it becomes homogenised - it may as well be musical wallpaper to the casual listener.

Well, to an extent, other than the fact I've bought digital releases from artists who have well-cultivated blogs, tumblr accounts, individual pieces of art for each audio file, or any number of other "ins." If anything, the ability for me to learn about an artist, whether it be before or after hearing their actual music, is much more diversified than it's ever been. Interviews, zines, liner notes really not the same.

"Food has nutritional values printed on the packet (scientific facts) plus people have tasted the exact food before. there are clear expectations of how food tastes, it's nothing like music in this regard."

This is not at all true. "This steak right here" doesn't equal "all steak"... That's like saying "ah, ya heard one Detroit techno record you heard em all"...

i never said this=all, i said there are clear expectations. and remember we're talking about steak that comes in a packet.

Good post, dog latin.

I don't care about "I only do digital", go crazy, I love digital. Just as long as you've got speakers connected to that computer. And you don't play Youtube rips when you DJ. Other than that it doesn't bother me.

That said, I really enjoyed the online presence and presentation of a couple artists enough to order their albums, and the albums were pretty much devoid of additional content -- stark cover image, tracklisting on the back of a paper sleeve, single-color CD. Kind of a blank palette for me to connect what I do know with the music.

Just as long as you've got speakers connected to that computer

I hardly ever listen to my digital files on a computer! It's always streamed to my home stereo or off my iPhone.

Without wanting to perpetuate the food packaging analogy too much more, for fear of people will wilfully miss the point yet again- being able to see the food, or at least a picture of a serving suggestion of the food, can and will influence what you choose to buy and cook. If everything came in identical, plain packages with no pictures it would make stacking the shelves easier, but the act of choosing what to have for dinner would be boiled down to a purely functional act. We'd be faced with rows and rows of packets identifiable only by a label to tell us what's in there. Some may find this a good thing. They would find the functionality of this system appealing because all they want to do is go out and get a steak. But others might prefer to browse around, to see what their tastebuds want for tea that night. If this is the case it would become very difficult to get creative or excited about it. There's more to the appreciation of food, music, art in general than the end product itself - there's a whole miasma of factors and influences that inform my personal appreciation of these.

so you wouldn't know what food you'd tasted already tasted like if it you couldn't see it?

this analogy doesn't hold up at all, the music that comes without a packet could potentially sound like nothing you'd ever heard, any expectation you had could be wrong.

There's more to the appreciation of food, music, art in general than the end product itself

the format music is presented in has no bearing on the truth or untruth of this statement. not least because the packet IS an end product.

The idea of being tethered to a computer was one of the main complaints against digital files to begin with, and now people can't think of listening to hardly any music without a computer present.

xp That's cool. I just have nightmares in the wake of that EMP exit poll. It's the Youtube DJs I can't stand... the sound of somebody turning up a Youtube rip of Destiny's Child in an effort to start a party is the most unpleasant sound under the sun

o see the food, or at least a picture of a serving suggestion of the food

how is this analogous to the art on an album? it's not a picture of the music

presumably people never understood music until the days when you could physically buy it, all hail the last 100 years, the best of all possible worlds.

I haven't bought a CD in ~2-3 years, but I buy songs/albums on iTunes. One an hour ago (Lindi Ortega)! I chose 2-6 because we have bought a few pieces of vinyl to go with new player.

fwiw I think the browsing/tactile/visual sense of listening to music in a group, like dog latin is referencing, is only partly about the music and mostly about the shared experience needing props. About half the time I listen to digital music in my living room, I'm browsing through albums on the television screen and the cover displays while it's playing, giving that "in"

i listen to spotify, god, i don't know....30-40 hours a week at least...at work mostly

i does bum me out that lots of people haven't heard really nice pressings on a nice record player...i know skot tries to tell people, but it is amazing! it really is. i genuinely hear new stuff i've never heard on the track on a regular basis...i noticed some subtle, light percussion tracks on court & spark by joni mitchell the other day, like never heard that before...

i think, by now, lots of people grow up never having heard a really good stereo and just assume it's not that different

20-40 CDs (close to 40, maybe a couple more.) That's about 40% of my total music purchases last year. The rest (including three vinyl records and three box sets) all purchased used at garage sales or through ebay/Amazon.

Never purchased any digital downloads, dagnabbit.

I agree that it's a horrible tragedy. Sadly, a lot of music venues have shitty sound, or people only go to see huge bands, so they hardly ever go to a nice smaller venue with great sound to realize how bad their home experience is.

I was in a music venue a couple weeks ago during a festival and, while the band wasn't what I'm into at all, I realized it sounded _great_. I also noticed the soundboard was way oversized for the room and there was nice sound baffling on the ceiling, and figured out the venue was used for recording sometimes.

CD buyers, do you think you'll still be buying them ten years from now? Vinyl longevity issues are different but I would not be surprised if CD production is just, say, a tenth of what it is now in 2022, if that.

I fear that the digital music collection is becoming too personalised, too internal. Part of what got me into music was the way it can be shared and bonded over. And I don't mean sharing over a p2p network or on Facebook. Our music collections are now hidden away on our computers and iPods rather than displayed in living rooms and bedrooms. Flicking through folders on someone else's pc feels a bit like going through their drawers. No longer can we have that 'oh my god, you like Jonathan and the Modern Lovers too?!' moment because how do you know? And if one is granted access to scroll and pick music from the enormous mass of folders of someone else's digital collection, the answer to this is most likely to be 'yeah I downloaded all his albums a while back but I never listened to em'.

This is my problem with Spotify, and yeah yeah it's inevitAble that this is the future of music listening, but imagine a guy from the seventies travelling to the future and being shown this incredible glowing plasma ball. 'Behold! This orb will play any album in the world, whatever music your greatest wish desires, you can hear it right now, simply by thinking about it'. You just know that seventies guy is going to pick London Calling or whatever...

Spotify turns the act of sharing music something that you do over the net, not face to face. I'm no gamer but I was recently disappointed when I realised that the majority of multiplayer games HAVE to be played over the net, and that very few rely on two controllers which you can use in the same living room. That's bizarre to me, as someone who used to sit for hours with his friends and brothers and sisters playing each other at mario kart and streetfighter ii.

I understand I sound like a Luddite here, but these developments, while being useful, are putting up walls in the way people share their tastes. Nowadays the word 'social' is all too often succeeded by 'media' - a boiling down of like lists and Spotify recommendations.

The crush tape is practically a dead format. Those handwritten, lovingly selected compilations can't be reproduced with digital. A 7GB USB stick filled with 3 days' worth of music isn't exactly the most romantic token of affection. But hey, so it goes, this is progress.

We're served a blank slate with no other information about what we're hearing, nothing about the artist and why they chose to make that music. as such it becomes homogenised - it may as well be musical wallpaper to the casual listener.

this too, is rubbish. it's the internet, do you really think people aren't reading about things as they listen, or before? there's more "context" than there ever has been, we could do with less.

also what is "musical wallpaper", please define.

presumably this is why white label releases are known for their safety first approach, because the casual listener just devours music that comes with no info?

No longer can we have that 'oh my god, you like Jonathan and the Modern Lovers too?!' moment because how do you know?

frictionless sharing. google it.

it's the exact reverse, the info and trimmings are more often for the layman. if you doubt that then just have a look at how the industry bolstered itself once things started to go tits up, every "big" album coming with an extra dvd and some other gimmick.

look at the biggest selling cds of the last 20 years and the biggest selling digital music and tell me which is more bland, to you personally.

Sorry this is many xposts now. mh - I agree that there's loads of information on the web, more information than ever before, about the music one is likely to be hearing, but I don't see this as a replacement for, say, an album cover because really you have to have a vested interest in the musi in the first place to go and read an artist interview, and most people don't at first.

Ronan before you could physically buy music, you had to go out and listen to it being played by musicians, hence you were placed in a perfect context.

so recorded music itself is a problem too?

frictionless sharing. google it.

dude some of us are on work computers

thing is, I'm old enough to remember when vinyl LPs came with just the facts, ma'am, on their sleeves; if it was a greatest hits/best of you got a picture of the artist, a track listing and that was it. Anything else you had to conjure up in your mind or go find out about elsewhere. Consequently there was a bit of mystique; you didn't know about the artists, you just heard the music and came to your own conclusions. Now with deluxe reissues there's no space for the listener to breathe; every little pore is spelt out and there's no means by which a new or casual listener could find their own way to the music.

All records are "musical wallpaper" really, regardless of format. They get half-listened to and then put on the shelf to stare at. The solution is for a record you could only listen to once (meaning you'd HAVE to concentrate and listen to it) but the technology for that hasn't been developed yet.

So my heart sympathises with Dog Latin but my head agrees with Ronan.

I can see thirty three CDs that I've bought this year, around my room.

It's a bit of an odd one in that this year is the first I've really been able to afford to buy CDs since quitting music journalism (for the most part) and my new "proper job" (as my gran would have called it) kicking in.

so recorded music itself is a problem too?

I'm not gonna get into it but actually yes!

not even nostalgia is as good as it used to be

well if you're at work i doubt a friend is in your living room going through your modern lovers vinyl.

which leads me to the obvious point that the idea people are somehow discussing music (or anything else) less is just utter fucking mentalism.

if anything people's musical taste is waved around far too much. how often would somebody realistically be going through your records in your living room?

the main way friends get into records that we end up discussing is by... LISTENING TO THEM, not looking through my collection.

xpost fwiw i have started buying vinyl again recently, but it's because of sound quality and the inability to get certain things digitally. i find a lot of dog latin's points on this thread are part of some odd but common need to be either/or when it comes to formats, but there's some incredible assumptions about other people and how they consume music.

i don't do digital when it comes to books and i can't honestly say i've ever had a friend pick up a book in my living room. but i have talked about books with friends on numerous occasions.

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