Why Vinyl Can't Survive

soulja boy, kreayshawn, carly rae jepson, etc

these people have all released albums afaict

the guy who wrote "spirit in the sky" got some fat checks when it started getting used in vietnam films

NORMAN FUCKING GREENBAUM deserves more respect than this ffs.
also, you ever play that 45 at 33rpM? wooooaaahahh it's heavy! can't do that with a CD! (not easily, anyway.)

I was going to say something earlier about how I think EPs are the future (present actually I guess) and I'm looking at Carly Rae Jepsen now and didn't realize that her hit is originally from an EP. She's a good example though. 10 million singles sold and only 226,000 albums in the US. So yeah, a few people can still make serious money primarily from singles. But not the kind of money that she would have made if she sold 10 million albums! Not Adele money. And then when you extrapolate that down to the lower tiers of artists who only sell in the tens of thousands you can figure out the huge chunk of great music that is no longer financially sustainable in a singles dominated world.

so how many actual singles would she have sold in stores? not enough to break even, i guess, if i'm to believe you guys.

although come to think of it she's probably one of those people whose single you CAN actually buy in gas stations and drug stores and stuff. they had a huge taylor swift display in the walgreens down the street. probably still there.

The only cds I see in gas stations are bizzie bone and Alabama.

The only cds I see in gas stations are bizzie bone and Alabama.

the gas station of my dreams

But see that's the thing, Red has sold over 5 million copies worldwide. So yeah, 5 million $10 albums vs. 10 million $1 downloads is kind of a no-brainer.
xp

If the 5 million people who bought Red only bought WENEGBT and Trouble, that would be $10 million vs. $50 million

And a band who makes a living selling 10k albums a year is not going to do so well selling 10 or 20k single tracks.

has aerosmith ever put out his uh their own records? i thought that was the future for "cult" artists. the cult of aerosmith...would join probably. unless they met in boston...

is their a good current indie money breakdown thing on the web? please don't make me read albini. something that lists costs and describes the current situation. what people make. what people do. i guess everyone has different situations now.

Is there a similar discussion on ilx about film distribution/dvds?

the other factor that hasn't been mentioned re: CD singles is shelf space. If the retailer made 50 cents or a dollar on a CD single but $3 on an album, then why would they want to take up valuable shelf space with singles? but I guess the death of CD singles came before places like best buy sold cds as a loss leader to get people in the store to buy washing machines.

i think the chain music store across the street from me makes all its money on dvds and games. they sell a ton of new video games. i buy dvds there. out of the giant buckets of dvds. i graze in them for a while.

i'm really glad that chain store is there. cuz people who want to steal stuff just get confused in my store. they don't know what's flippable. so, the dumb chains do serve a purpose. they keep shoplifters employed and out of my hair.

Without wading through this whole discussion let me say that I LUVVV my vinyl and that I LUVVV my CDs and that I'm against arbitrarily pitting them against each other because they have their own pros and cons and 'cause it's kind of pointless to argue about one being better than the other 'cause they're their own singular entities and, y'know, peaceful coexistence and all.

Same here. (Someone said the same thing earlier.) I don't have the emotional/goopy-nostalgic attachment to CDs that I have to my records, but the simple fact is, I'm a car guy, and I can't play my records in the car. Once I accepted them, CDs were a big leap forward from cassettes as far as motorvatin' went. I play my albums in fits and starts, but they'll always be there. Having to treat them carefully is a somewhat inconvenient reality, but if you aren't going to do that, or if you're someone who finds that difficult, you should never buy records.

ok y'all I'm gonna give you my SUPER SECRET NINJA SECRETS OF CARING FOR YOUR FRAGILE RECORDS THIS SHIT IS CRAZY:

1) put your records on a shelf side by side

2) when you want to play a record, pull it out on the shelf

3) Take the record off the shelf, pull out the inner sleeve

4) Remove the record from the sleeve, hold the record by edges and don't like put fucking mud on it or let your dog bite it or take sandpaper to it or let a toddler take a shit on it

5) Put record on table, press button, gently put needle on record

unless your this guy you should be fine

http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/webdr02/2012/11/8/18/anigif_enhanced-buzz-31123-1352415867-5.gif

http://s3-ec.buzzfed.com/static/enhanced/webdr02/2012/11/8/18/anigif_enhanced-buzz-31123-1352415867-5.gif

But see that's the thing, Red has sold over 5 million copies worldwide. So yeah, 5 million $10 albums vs. 10 million $1 downloads is kind of a no-brainer.
xp

― wk, Thursday, February 7, 2013 9:00 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

If the 5 million people who bought Red only bought WENEGBT and Trouble, that would be $10 million vs. $50 million

― wk, Thursday, February 7, 2013 9:03 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

And a band who makes a living selling 10k albums a year is not going to do so well selling 10 or 20k single tracks.

― wk, Thursday, February 7, 2013 9:04 PM (2 hours ago)

don't have time to get into details but your assumptions about how artists make money over the course of their lifetime are a little skewed

I mean more specifically -- is there a discussion about people who make movies and try to distribute them to people who want to buy them, not the sales of DVDs that are already produced and floating around in vats?

I don't think I said anything about how artists make money over the course of their lifetimes
xp

I've just been trying to point out the basic math of an industry geared around selling $10 units vs. $1 units and how that relates to sick mouthy's perceptions of albums being some kind of greedy scam or outdated boomer nostalgia rather than being the driving force that allowed the creation of 90% of the great music that people like to talk about here.

Stop strawmanning me for that remark, which was a tiny bit of the piece, based on an excellent presentation by someone else (ie evidence) and only meant to illustrate that the album (which I am a vocal and much criticised fan of on this forum) started life not as an artistic statement but as a money-making scam.

As for what I listened to before I got a CD player, it was almost exclusively cassettes. I had a Walkman and a cassette ghetto blaster thing, and I played cassettes, over and over again. My first ever music purchase was. 7" though - Bad by Michael Jackson. The shape and size of it irritated me and I threw it across the local park like a frisbee.

"well, evah since I was a young boah, I hated vinyl.."

Yeah, I was the same with me in the pre-CD era: cassettes. Cassettes were cheaper and easier to store, I don't think my family even had a vinyl player when I was kid. The same with my friends too. I dunno how it was elsewhere in the world, but in here cassettes were the format of choice for people who didn't have much money and/or weren't big music consumers in the 80s (and all the way to the early 90s).

I inherited a load of cassettes off my brothers, and they copied some albums they had onto tape for me too.

It's a generation thing really, not many people who were born at the very end of the 70s onward really got into the habit of buying vinyl records, they were already seen as a bit old hat by the time I got into pop music. For most of my generation it was tapes then CDs (and for a very long time afterwards CDs copied onto tape). I think I still regularly used a Walkman until about 2003.

I bought a minidisc walkman when I went to uni in 1998, and that replaced the cassette walkman I'd had since I was 10 (which I won on a TV quiz show!).

It's a generation thing really, not many people who were born at the very end of the 70s onward really got into the habit of buying vinyl records, they were already seen as a bit old hat by the time I got into pop music. For most of my generation it was tapes then CDs (and for a very long time afterwards CDs copied onto tape). I think I still regularly used a Walkman until about 2003.

― Matt DC, Friday, 8 February 2013 11:25 (8 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I'm a little younger than both you and Mouthy, but I was into records from the age of about 9 and kept buying them til I was about 16 or 17. Tape ran concurrently with that. I saw tapes as a cheap convenience, or I'd use them to make comps. But vinyl was a big part of my early career as a music fan.

This is old-guy arrogance, but I'm glad I never had to go the cassette route. I continued buying new releases on vinyl right through to '88 or '89, then gradually made the transition to CDs. I've got maybe 40 cassettes stored away downstairs, every one of them bought for two or three dollars. (I did, during the second half of the '80s, make numerous mix-tapes for people.)

Cassettes were great for the car when it was that or the radio. Bought Screamadelica on cassette from Woolies for £1.99. #rosetinted #oldfart

Fuck me I just hashtagged in an ILX post. #wanker

I did love playing my own mix-tapes in the car for 10-15 years, yes, but only rarely would I throw on a commercially-released cassette. At home, I continued buying and playing vinyl. Today, homemade or commercially-released CDs in the car, vinyl or any kind of CD at home. I'm more a creature of habit than logic.

I mostly was split evenly between cassettes and vinyl growing up. If I bought a cassette, it was either because the store didn't have the vinyl, or because I really wanted to listen to it (in the car, in my Walkman) at that moment. Taped tons of records, made tons of mix tapes, but generally hated cassettes. The fidelity sucked, finding songs on a tape was annoying, and they would always have this EQ warble thing happening that I found maddening.

All my early music purchases were cassette, I have a huge box of them

When I was six or seven, I was given my very own blue plastic Sears record player, and it was a fine day when I could hear “Little Willie” any time I damn well pleased. Never again would I have to wait for some guy on the radio to play it. “More than a Feeling” by Boston was the first 45 I bought with my own money, the Beach Boys’ Endless Summer the first LP. I still have the latter, and listened to it a couple of months ago. It sounded pretty good, whereas I have CDs that inexplicably stopped working within a few years of buying them.

30-plus years and many, many records later, this record collecting habit and the fetishization of vinyl sometimes troubles and puzzles. Why do these objects exert such control over otherwise sane minds? Is it not absurd or even humiliating for a grown-ass man to obsess over Ebay auctions of records made decades ago for teenagers, when the same recordings can be downloaded anytime on the cheap or for free? It is madness, no? (And I’m nothing compared to some friends. I just witnessed a pal pack close to 10,000 records for a cross-country move. It was indeed a dreary thing to see.)

It is the fidelity, you say? Some of my most loved 45s sound like someone is frying bacon in the background. When people say those crackles and pops make for a more “authentic” listening experience, what does that even mean? In my darker moments, I suspect much of this talk is merely sentimental malarkey, nostalgia, or a desperate justification for a vapid materialism. Others say it’s the packaging and the art work, the band photos, and so forth. I say when you have seen one long-haired burnt-out case, you have seen them all. I say all this and yet why did I have to buy “She’s Gotta Wobble When She Walks” by Sugar Boy Crawford (Imperial 5424,1956) this week on 45? I have it on a compilation already, and that should be enough. Why did I recently have a dream about Starday country 45s when I used to dream about girls?

Some friends recently got interviewed about their band/also about records, worthy insights --
http://www.thevinyldistrict.com/newyork/2013/02/prince-ruperts-drops-the-tvd-first-date/

Also, in the "I've seen it all, now.." folder:

http://www.spincds.com/blonde-on-blonde-nbrd-ltd-ed-180-gram-45-rpm-three-lp-box

Bob Dylan, Blonde on Blonde, mastered onto three slabs of vinyl to play at 45rpm.

This means you get to hear the surface noise speeded up!

Also, that "Sad eyed lady of the lowlands" no longer takes up all of side four.

Yes! It now takes up all of side six!

<i>This means you get to hear the surface noise speeded up!

Also, that "Sad eyed lady of the lowlands" no longer takes up all of side four.

― Mark G, Friday, February 8, 2013 10:45 AM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink</i>

45 shouldn't necessarily have more surface noise? idgi....45 12 inches can sound pretty great, def can have better bass, cfe metal box

so many rap LPs are 12" 45s that sound amazing wtf

hopefully a bunch of teenagers will buy that at urban outfitters, listen at the wrong speed, and think dylan is supposed to sound like that

"Skellington" Julian Cope is mastered at 45rpm, I was halfway through side 2 when the penny dropped...

i went and saw this garage band from the UK called The Hipshakes, they were good, really high energy and then i bought the record and thought goddam these guys are amazing, really cool production but i realized it was a 12 inch 45 being played at 33, but they were fast and hyper enough that it still sounded "kinda" normal :(

12 inch at 45 is the way to go. the japanese made some of the best reissue pressings in the 70's and 80's of jazz and classical at 45 rpm. i never knew that the first skrewdriver album on chiswick is 45 rpm until i played it a few weeks ago. sounds amazing! certainly one of the best-sounding punk records ever made.

PJ Harvey's White Chalk is another 45rpm album. I played it at the wrong speed the first dozen or so times and only found out my mistake when I downloaded it to put on my iPod. If you think that record sounds strange and haunted as it is, give it a spin at 33rpm.

Still can't believe that pressing it at 45rpm wasn't a mistake in fact. There is no indication on the label about it.

Uuuuhhhh... 45rpm 12"s sound BETTER than 33rpm 12s.. And it sounds better whenthengrroves are spread put. Jesus.