Personally i enjoy listening to vinyls becaule of the whole "ceremony" browse the albums, pull one, take it out of the sleeve, clean it, put it on the turntable, lower the tonearm and listen to the small imperfections until the music starts. Its like cooking vs ordering food.
It used to be that when you visited someone’s place, you’d see their collection of books, or music, or movies, or games sitting on a shelf and it was a low-friction way to find something in common to talk about. Now that everyone’s collections are digital, it’s all “out of sight, out of mind” and nothing has really replaced that function.
Maybe there's a market for a bookshelf populated with (OLED? E-Paper?) digital label displays that mimic real book spines and upon which are displayed the titles from your digital book library. It can also have shelves with displays mimicking CD spines with the titles taken from your music library.
It would serve no purpose beyond being a skeumorphic conversation starter and visual reminder of your media. Of course, it'd have an app that allowed the user to vary the logic used to choose the titles to be displayed by genre, chron, or some social purpose, i.e., I want to look smart or I want to impress a date, I don't want a political fight on Thanksgiving, etc.
I think even if this existed it would naturally become a vanity thing ("oh yes, I've read War and Peace") and not include Shades of Grey or whatever you're actually reading.
Physical shelves already suffered from that a bit (people would use them to display books they were prod of), but it being a purely display and not necessary storage would do the rest.
Or pulling a cork out of a wine bottle vs opening one with a screw top. The screw top is superior in every way in terms of its ability to protect the wine from spoiling, but people still prefer corks because of the romance of the de-corking ceremony.
Amen. One underinvestigated aspect of streaming is "people" (and I'm talking about my kids here) don't know what they are listening to, it's super easy for them to skip/change, and lots of what was "relation to artist/album" is lost.
On the upside, streaming is sup for discovering new music.
It might be easier to discover new music with streaming, but I'm not sure one discovers music of as high a quality.
Back in the album days, an artist needed a song or two or three on the album that would would have wide appeal and be easy to quickly like, so that they might become hits. These would get played on mainstream radio, and based on them people would buy the album. They would listen to that album for those songs, but because it was a pain to skip around on an album they would listen to the whole album.
Artists could put deeper, more complex songs on the album. Songs that people might not instantly like. Songs that people only come to appreciate after hearing many times. Songs that eventually become people's favorite songs on those albums.
With streaming, a lot of people will just jump to the newest hit from another artist instead of listening to the less immediately accessible songs from the previous artist whose hit they just checked out.
Imagine if records were still the best known music technology today. You'd buy a record ad half of it would be ads. People would make paper templates to tape to records to block ads.
I use streaming radio to find songs that are similar to a song I like, then look up the artists for some of the new songs that caught my attention. This allows me to find both new songs (immediate win), but artists whose other songs may influence my musical tastes (longer term win).
On the other hand, it encourages artists to make songs worth listening to. I've purchased way too many albums because I liked one or two songs only to discover every other song on the album was complete trash. But at that point it was too late, they already had my money.
People who jump from hit to hit will always do that. Don't worry about them. People who seek new and interesting music are immensely helped by risk-free streaming.
> lots of what was "relation to artist/album" is lost
I've literally no clue what this means or why it might matter. I love music, but it comes off an album and is produced by an artist. I could not care less about the album, or the artist (other than to pay them for their work).
What is this 'relation' thing and what is it's relevance?
Maybe you're being facetious, but here goes anyway:
Many times albums were created as works themselves, with songs as components. Rock operas like Pink Floyd's The Wall and The Who's Tommy as obvious examples. Each produced great singles, but the album was the creation. Even less cohesive albums were created with a song order in mind, so listening to them as a unit was the artist's intention. A small example: ELO's "please turn me over" lyric at the end of Mr. Blue Sky, telling you to turn the record over.
Thanks for the answer. Not remotely facetious and your suspicion that I was suggests we may be too far apart to understand each other.
The fundament of it for me is I like particular tracks, not albums, not artists, not genres (although I have preferences in each). I listen to what I like, I skip what I don't. I couldn't care less about the artist's intention, song ordering or anything - they are so peripheral I have never thought about them. That's all.
I think what put my back up about the original post was "...super easy for them to skip/change, and lots of what was "relation to artist/album" is lost". I don't expect everyone to necessarily understand the musical tastes of others, but should always respect them, which this quote seemingly didn't.
I actually discover most of my music on the radio, then at the record store (including online stores like Bandcamp). I hardly ever discover good music while streaming.
I enjoy the same things but with CDs. CDs are gonna come back big time as they offer all the conveniences of quality and the ritualistic aspects of vinyl records.
But monthly fee for the service plus an internet subscription and active connection, plus interest if you pay with a cc a dont pay it off that month. Its a never ending cost.
If I was to purchase the albums of music I listen to every month, I'd be spending literally hundreds of dollars on music per month. Compared to $10 that might increase $1 or $2 every few years.
I'm going to ignore the monthly internet/mobile bill, because music streaming is a fraction of what it's used for.
Cassettes records, and the equipment used to listen to them eventually wear out, so you'll have to rebuy them at some point (or limit how often you listen to them).
> If I was to purchase the albums of music I listen to every month, I'd be spending literally hundreds of dollars on music per month.
Are you counting only the things you listen to for the first time each month? Because once you buy it, you don't need to buy it again.
> Cassettes records, and the equipment used to listen to them eventually wear out, so you'll have to rebuy them at some point (or limit how often you listen to them).
Sure, though purchased music that you can (both legally and practically) make lossless digital copies of to insure against that is very much a thing. Heck, some of the platforms offering all-you-can-eat streaming arrangements with their catalog also let you sync and stream your owned-music collection, and will even sell you DRM-free, copyable music, so that you don't need to rebuy or limit listening.
Im not saying streaming is a bad deal, just that the requirements to use it make it far less portable, more temporary and removes any sense of ownership.
> I don’t care about the concept of ownership, I care about being able to listen to my music.
Well, they're kind of related. You won't be able to if Spotify terminates your account for whatever reason (which happened to me once, due to claims on their end the payment ran into some issue, which I could never verify) or if it goes out of business.
So then you switch to Google Music or Apple Music and keep listening. Meanwhile if your CD collection is stolen or destroyed, you have to go buy all of them again.
Assuming any of these services actually have all of the music you listen to at any given time. Entire albums, songs, artists could be lost to you not because they were so forgettable but because they became lost in the sea of abundant music streaming. Your favorited artists went from something like a count of 237 to 230. What was lost? And when were you supposed to notice? This is what you lose by not owning your music. Not to mention music that simply does not exist on streaming services, which a very large amount of worthwhile music. At the end of the day, why are you giving so much control to others about what music you would have shared and preserved?
You can also rip your CDs so that the music is no longer tied to the physical media.
Hundreds of dollars? Maybe if you’re an audiophile. Normal people buy most of their music second hand. If you are really poor, prerecorded cassettes are a quarter to 50 cents at your nearest thrift store. CDs can go up to a dollar and you can get a decent vinyl record from half a dollar to 2.
If you are willing to spend it you can buy second hand CDs or vinyls for less the 10 dollars at the record store, and they usually have a good enough selection such that you can most likely pick up that record you never found in the thrift store.
I only buy new music from newer artists (mostly from Bandcamp) and yet a CD is usually around $10-15 with vinyl maybe $5 more (+ shipping). But I take comfort that this money goes to supporting the artists, so it is worth it.
Usually I spend about $20-30 dollars on music a month (with some months spending more on expensive records). But with every new album I buy, it is added to my collection so I can listen to it again without needing to buy it again.
> Hundreds of dollars? Maybe if you’re an audiophile.
No, the math works out even if you're a less-than-average consumer or casual listener.
An album is at minimum $10. If you listen to more than one new album a month, you're coming out ahead if you use a streaming service. If Spotify shuts down, there's at least two other competitors in this space for me to go to. But none of them look like they're going anywhere.
> But with every new album I buy, it is added to my collection so I can listen to it again without needing to buy it again
Until the record wears out, or gets stolen, or breaks for a variety of reasons.
Parent specifically said hundreds of dollars per month. Hundreds of dollars per year is not a lot of money to pay for music.
Also when buying new albums it is not unreasonable to expect the artist to get some money for their work. And its quite hard to reason that they do if they have to share your $10 subscription fee every month.
It varies from person to person. For someone who listens to a lot of different music on a regular basis, a subscription clearly makes sense. For someone who listens to music infrequently or a small number of albums, it is going to add a reoccuring expense that will quickly exceed the cost of purchasing the music.
Ya, it's a ritual. The other thing I like about Vinyl is that you have to actually listen to the music. Well, you don't have to, but if you're going to all that trouble it's likely because you want to actually listen to the music -- I mean, listening to the music is the activity that you're doing. With spotify, I usually flip it on to fill the background while I do something else. That's not true for vinyl (for me). Spotify is for hearing music, vinyl is for listening to music.
Agreed so many times over. Music on the radio, or from the computer/ipod and most of my CD listening is background music. Putting on a record is a ritual, a conscious choice to sit in front of the stereo and listen intentionally.
CDs do sort of straddle the boundary between background and intentional listening. I own music that I treasure on CDs that I don't own on vinyl. While it's more convenient than records, I sometimes put it on with the intention of focusing on the music.
What's interesting is that a few recordings work better on CD than LP for me. I came to love the Allman Brothers Band in University[0], and Mountain Jam spans two sides of a Eat a Peach on LP[1], requiring an interruption to change the record and hear the whole thing. On CD, it flows seamlessly.
[0] I got into them backwards from most people. Blues Part II by Blood Sweat and Tears got me into longer-form rock, and I found Mountain Jam by searching for mp3 files over 10 or 15MB on the school's network. I have since bought perhaps half a dozen albums I'd have never discovered otherwise.
[1] The Eat a Peach version is the definitive version. The July 5th version from Live at the Altlanta International Pop Festival remains my favorite, but I digress.
I found vinyl a bit annoying in college--but that was probably because as the only person at my end of the hallway who didn't smoke marijuana I kept getting asked by people to handle operate their turntables when they wanted to listen to music while high.
Cassettes can be operated by even the most baked person with little risk of damage to the cassette or the tape deck.
As a former rave dj, you are talking out of your ass. A record player, even a manual one, is plenty easy to use even while quite intoxicated. Marijuana specifically should not impair your record playing ability at all.
Yes, couldn't agree more, the whole experience of manually browsing and playing records physically is something else. I also find that visiting record stores is great for discovery, at least in my case. One reason probably is that when browsing online I get lost in a sea of options and waste more time. Not saying its better but its a fresh change.
