This is a really interesting article. To me, iot's mind-blowing, that after a huge growth year in 2023, vinyl dropped to a 4% growth rate in 2023. Factoring in that, without Taylor Swift vinyl sales, there would have been a significant drop in vinyl sales, for the year. It's hilarious, that many "swifties" don't even own turntable. They merely buy Taylor Swift vinyl as souvenirs.

Granted, surf record labels, other specialty labels, and small independent labels are on a different business model than the major labels.

Me... I'm a dinosaur. I don't want vinyl. I prefer CD's, and, if a CD is not available, I'll purchase the download. I'll refrain from talking about streaming, for now.

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/did-the-music-business-just-kill?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&fbclid=IwAR2LSCi6hdOgFys1cszc1GAElt_8BKfHFdp5VKmYgLtcobcvAzPJVINC1Q8

Bob

Last edited: Dec 30, 2023 18:49:03

I probably have a couple of hundred vinyl albums, which are rarely, very rarely so much as looked at. I did buy two N.O.S. vinyl albums, a few years back, but that was only because they were never released on CD, at least to the best of my ability to find, so I bought a USB turntable, and ripped these to digital form.

Mastering an album for vinyl has different requirements than mastering for digital media. Every media form has its own characteristics, and vinyl has less dynamic range capability than a CD. I’ve heard that a bass line that would be a breeze for a CD could make the needle jump right off of a vinyl album. This wasn’t read on one nut case blog, but I’ve come across this information in several places. As I understand it, mastering for vinyl requires more compression than mastering for digital media, such as CDs.

All analog media has its own dynamic range, and even CDs have limits, but the limits of CDs are fairly high, and quite well known. 45s, LPs, and the various forms of tape each have their own limitations. “Pushing” magnetic tape is a well known technique, using the limitations of the tape as a method of compression. I’ve even done it myself, back in the Cassette days, when I would push the level slightly into the red zone on the VU meters, when creating a cassette version of a CD, for in car listening. The result was pleasantly compressed.

Ears like compression. The response curve of our hearing flattens with increased volume, which is why louder music appeals to many people. Vinyl albums are compressed, and likely EQ’d differently from CDs, and that is pleasing to the ear. I fully understand why people prefer vinyl, but I wonder if most music consumers understand why they prefer vinyl. IMHO, it’s all about the EQ and the mastering, which is imposed by the limitations of vinyl, but not directly caused by the vinyl, itself.

The article talks about outrageous prices for vinyl, and how that has affected sales. Wow! You’d think that all of the businessmen in that industry would understand that raising prices will almost always reduce sales. And Taylor Swift, as the growth area in vinyl makes little sense to me. As the article said, most Taylor Swift fans probably don’t have turntables. I guess that the emotion of a concert will make you spend money on things you’ll never use.

as far as cassettes are concerned, I used them for years. The limited sonic capabilities of 1/4” tape are multitude, but I heard some great sounds come out of tape players in my cars. All that having been said, the drawbacks to cassettes are numerous. Dolby helped to rein in tape hiss, but cassettes are still nowhere near to being as clean as digital media. Cassettes are serial access, instead of random access. Cassettes required to be manually turned over, or could be auto reversing. There was usually some blank space at the end of at least one side of a cassette, and when I created cassettes from CDs. I had to calculate how to program songs in order to fill the cassette, without chopping the end off of any songs. There were a lot of hassles. In contrast, I still have a very small iPod somewhere, about 1.25” square, and it holds more music than many impressive cassette collections.

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“What record labels are doing right now will eventually be taught in business schools as a case study in mistaken priorities”. How many times has that been said in criticism of whatever the music industry was doing in the past fifty years? It’s amazing what you can do with an MBA.

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The myth is that vinyl ever went away. But it's been a niche market for a long time now. I really don't think there is a large mainstream audience for vinyl LPs to listen to, so I think the author of that article is way off base in his business analysis. Vinyl's day in the sun was 40+ years ago, and I don't think that is coming back in the mainstream. The mass markets want convenience over all else, to the point where even CDs (which are significantly more convenient than vinyl) are now marginalized. I still play CDs in my 2005 Honda Element's stock sound system, but I think it's been 10 or more years since they put CD players in cars. Mp3s or some type of streaming rule now.

In fact, I think the way to kill vinyl is to try too hard to crank the volume and, in the process, overwhelm the relatively limited production capacity and also tamper with the mojo that I think draws a lot of listeners in to the vinyl world. I strongly suspect that if "the majors" tooled up for a large volume of vinyl, they'd saturate the market and it would crash, leaving them holding the bag. Of course, having more production capacity would be good for the niche markets where vinyl is still important.

I think it's great that many serious listeners of music have rediscovered vinyl. I haven't done an inventory lately, but I still have something like a couple thousand vinyl LPs, and even some 45s - and this is after purging a bunch, donating to a buddy who is a serious collector/wheeler-dealer. And I need to purge further - I stopped buying vintage LPs quite a while ago - it really is inconvenient in the context of the modern music world we now live in. And I think I have enough, LOL. I might grab a new production LP occasionally if it's cool. But my days of combing old record stores and antique/flea markets for LPs are done.

But I still enjoy spinning some vinyl when I have time to justs sit and focus and listen for a while. I still feel that, for a lot of the music I listen to, I just prefer a good vinyl record through a good system. No, it doesn't have the exaggerated bass of most modern music, but the high end is superior, especially in comparison to the dominant mp3 sound, which can range from decent to terrible, depending on how much digital compression is used. But even a CD's full 16-bit PCM encoding at a 44.1 kHz sampling rate with typically sample-and-hold signal reconstruction just misses important information in the high end, and that hasn't changed. It is possible to do a better interpolation in reconstruction of the signal, but that would cost a lot more to implenment and I don't think consumer-grade equipment has ever done this - not that I know of, anyway.

Audio compression has been used in music production for a long, long time. Most modern mass-consumption music is compressed to hell, to the point of serious ear fatigue to me. I understand using it to deal with the technical limitations of the recording medium, but at this point, dynamics in most modern music has practically vanished. And I think that is more a commercial (do I dare say 'artistic'?) decision than a technical one.

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Off topic, but I just picked up some 'new' shellac for my vintage players. I'd be really impressed if a modern artist pressed a single on a 10" 78.

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