I collect a significant amount of new vinyl and listen to it relatively frequently, but digital music is so much more convenient. That can be a detriment though, I find a lot of the value I get out of listening to vinyl is the "intentional listening" experience. I think Henry Rollins called it carbohydrate listening or something to that effect, listening to things you like that you've heard a million times and isn't exactly stimulating in the same way a new album or artist would be. Music feels a whole lot more consumable and disposable when its just on constant instant playback. Forcing yourself to flip the record and drop the needle keeps you more engaged I feel.
All that to say I mostly just like collecting colored vinyl, and supporting small bands and artists you like by buying a product significantly more profitable than millions of Spotify streams is pretty cool.
Thanks for making the Henry Rollins' carbohydrate reference. It's a great way to label these two modes of listening that we all experience.
----
"I have two basic food groups of music: protein and carbohydrate.
The protein listening is new music, where it’s unfamiliar to me so I’m listening, sometimes taking notes, researching the band while the music is playing. I do quite a bit of this, usually during the week.
On the weekends, I will allow for some carbohydrate listening, which would be records I’m familiar with, that I’ve been playing for years. This music is not exactly background, but more of an environmental asset for elevation of mood."
It's exactly the same for me. Yes, vinyl is more inconvenient, expensive and may even sound "worse" unless you have an expensive audio setup.
That said, the deliberate experience of sitting in your couch, doing/thinking nothing else but the music you're listening, is for me an invaluable ritual. It's like meditation.
> That said, the deliberate experience of sitting in your couch, doing/thinking nothing else but the music you're listening, is for me an invaluable ritual. It's like meditation.
This is what we did with cassettes and then CDs. I had dates where we sat on the floor and just thumbed through our CD catalogs and played music for hours. Even today, I still prefer to listen to whole albums.
> That said, the deliberate experience of sitting in your couch, doing/thinking nothing else but the music you're listening, is for me an invaluable ritual. It's like meditation.
Just imagine if you could do that with a CD or even an album of MP3s! But that's just not possible, it can only be done with vinyl records.
This is exactly why I have a turntable, too. Just buying the records of my most loved albums, setting aside some time to listen them intently and enjoy the process.
It’s not like meditation. It is meditation. As a meditation teacher, I can definitely say that.
Sometimes I prefer the original vinyl sound compared to the digitally remixed version of the old songs.
But most of my vinyl is of old albums that nobody bothered to re-release on CD. It's fun to buy them cheap at the thrift store, wash them, and see what's on them.
Good points. Just to expand, I find with instant on digital music I never really listen to it with as much attention as vinyl.
In fact I love everything about vinyl except the sort durarion of each side, but even that makes me focus more closely on the experience. I know I'll have to turn it over shortly...
Vinyl is a completly different experience: the smell, the look(!), the age(!), the masting and care for the production, the cover(!)- these things matter.
Dedicating time to listen to a specific album. My kids may never understand it. An album is an interesting art form, it captures a few pieces of time: when it was made and then then it was consumed. The cover art and liner art. The order of the songs. All assembled with intention. There are albums I’ve heard hundreds of time and I will still hear little new bits I never quite noticed before.
I do love digital music and having it everywhere, but it is special to just listen and take it I’m.
Why would your kids not understand it? My son certainly has no problem exploring album art and reading liner notes while he enjoys one of his favorites.
It seems like a fairly universal human quality to want to intentionally listen to music.
Digital music resparked my interest in vinyl. With streaming you have a great tool to figure out what you really love and need to have on vinyl. Less is more.
I got rid of most of my LP's over the past few years as I realized I'd gradually just started to play them from Spotify instead (convenience slowly converted me), over the same speakers. Then I sold my turntable.
But I kept around 20 of my favorites and just rotate them for display on my bookshelf. If I'm playing one of them on Spotify, I'll even rotate to show that LP while I play it. The really bizarre thing is, there's a particular old album I'm thinking of purchasing just to be able to display its cover, because of what it means to me.
It's the same with books -- my favorite ones are in my bookshelf, but even if I read a book I own physically, I pull it up on my iPad because I prefer to be able to highlight, look up words, adjust text size, read in a dark room, etc.
So I'm shocked to discover that I like having the physical artifacts even when I still consume them digitally. It's almost like bringing back souvenir knick-knacks from a vacation. This is not an outcome I ever would have expected.
Patience! Try putting on a record and listening with friends or dancing to the beat with your significant other. Don't try to cherrypick just one song or conversely listen to endless AI generated mix while your mind is elsewhere. Afterwards, have a conversation about what the artist was trying to express and moments in your own life the songs reminded you of. THEN tell me you didn't have a unique experience compared to what Spotify provides you with.
Why can't you do that EACT same experience on spotify? You realize you can pick a specific album and play it in order correct? The only difference between the two is that with spotify you have options if you lack the self control to go for the experience you are suggesting.
To avoid this outcome I started a family tradition where we play a record every time we sit down at the dinner table to eat. We take turns picking an album and let guests pick when we have guests.
Might I guess that the albums are either Pink Floyd or Led Zeppelin? Even when I listen to those two digitally, I like to see the album cover. That has been ingrained as part of the experience for me.
I don't want to start a flame war. This said, I think vinyl sucks; it's my opinion and not some absolute statement about the universe so please respect it! It was the state-of-the art technology when I was kid, but I was so glad it was gone. Digital music is SO much better and I remember the joy of replacing vinyl by CDs and then by high quality digital files.
And because of all of the above, I understand why a lot of the buyers don't have actual record players. Vinyl is a bit like 8-bit cartridge gaming, it's a mix of nostalgia with physicality, holding something fun and cool in your hands. It's more like buying a book... The albums had pretty covers, and I do remember liking to hold them in my hands, read lyrics (often included in an insert) while listening to the music. That was a nice aspect of it, but it was overall so cumbersome and lossy that I'll keep my FLACs, thank you.
Most vinyl records are sold as vinyl + digital anyway.
The appeal to the vinyl is the ritual that we kind of lost buy going digital. I've also gone back to start reusing CDs, at least the little I kept. I donated most of my CD collection when I moved country and kind of regret it.
People keep talking about quality to praise digital media. But most people saying this listen to music through crappy bluetooth speakers nowadays. There is a very small amount of users still using decent hi-fi equipment.
So if people grew up with digital media, they would never have "lost" that ritual. No wonder they don't care about it. Its only purpose is nostalgia.
When mass produced media first became possible, people probably said you could only listen to live music and the experience of not being in a venue was lost. Then everybody who grew up with a gramophone, modern turntables, Sony Walkman, etc, think the version they grew up with is the best because of nostalgia.
> People keep talking about quality to praise digital media. But most people saying this listen to music through crappy bluetooth speakers nowadays. There is a very small amount of users still using decent hi-fi equipment.
Lossless digital recordings are the _closest_ way to listening to the originally produced audio authentically. (It still will have artifacts from the equipment itself - the media is the message after all) You can use crappy equipment to listen to any audio, but digital is closest to ideal.
> “50% of consumers who have bought vinyl in the past 12 months own a record player, compared to 15% among music listeners overall.”
No way in hell do 15% music listeners own record players.
Assuming Luminate's numbers are not entirely made up, their sampling method must be deeply flawed, which brings into question their ability to determine how many record buyers own a record player. Maybe they asked the question in some idiotic way that confused the respondents.
> No way in hell do 15% music listeners own record players.
That's also a weird statement in general, sure there might be a group of people who actively avoid music, but aren't most of us music listeners. Perhaps there's some special meaning to "music listeners" as a term.
Definitely seems nebulous, but I would consider myself not a music listener. Outside of it being paired with a movie/game/video/etc, I practically never listen to music just to listen to music.
15% of music listeners probably don't have a record player set up ready to be used.
Record players, however, are a really common sight in garages and the back of closets. Even younger folks have picked them up from estate sales and flea markets on a whim and never used them.
>Most people older than 40 got a record players decades ago
That seems unlikely. I'm in my mid 40s and I bought my first music on compact cassette, but that was almost immediately supplanted by CDs. I never owned a record player.
I think that's closer to being true of people over 60. I'm almost 40 and never even came close to owning vinyl, it was all already CDs when I was young and cassettes before that.
Limited edition type stuff or just eclectic music I enjoy.
I bought an Audio-Technica AT-LP120BK-USB (and a cartridge, because, the one which came with my 300 record player was "trash") after I had accumulated a handful of them. Picked out the TRON: Legacy soundtrack and got it all hooked up.
For some context, I have a nice sound system which is optimized for movies/tv though I listen to a fair bit of music too.
If you're not aware, the TRON: Legacy soundtrack was produced by Daft Punk and Daft Punk was made for TRON: Legacy and TRON: Legacy was made for Daft Punk and the result is magical.
Started playing and the sound was great. Flipped over to Spotify and played the same album and the sound was also great.
Honestly, couldn't tell the difference.
Played one or two other things, but, the record player went on a shelf that day and is still there.
I still collect records, especially rare or limited ones of things I particularly like, or ones where there's something unique or special about the vinyl copy, but, I don't listen to them anymore.
> the record player went on a shelf that day and is still there.
When I moved I never plugged in my amplifier and speakers for my record player because I couldn't figure out where to put them. Eventually I realized that they didn't need to be on the floor "waiting" for me to set them up -now they're in the garage while the records/player are out on display. I just listen to music via a smart speaker and streaming most days.
I still buy the occasional vinyl though. I like them as gifts because they're physical and also personal. I tell everyone to give me a record of an album that means a lot to them so I can think of them when I play it (because gifts are about emotions, even if I don't play them directly).
I've tried to have a good sound system. I've been to friends' houses that have nice ones.
I got an array of Sonos speakers and ask an Echo to play things on them. It's a wonderful, maintenance-free experience and, combined with Spotify's access to most things I'd want, makes intentional listening a zero-friction experience.
Whether you can hear a difference is going to depend partly on the equipment and mostly on the particular album you’re playing. I don’t think tron legacy got a vinyl specific master/mix so it’s basically just a recreation of the digital mix - if anything you might lose a little detail because it takes a pretty high end turntable to be 100% as transparent as a decent digital setup. On the other hand, if you look at a catalog like Blue Note’s for example, all of their vinyl releases are remasters made specifically for the format. Especially compared to the Rudy Van Gelder 90s digital remasters on streaming, there’s a pretty immediately obvious difference in sound. Not really a “if know what to look for” thing either, on some recordings it is very obvious.
This goes beyond vinyl vs digital too. What mix/master was used can make a difference in any context with different formats. Giorgio Moroder’s From Here to Eternity hasn’t gotten a transfer from the master tapes in decades, and the version on streaming is actually a rip from a vinyl record or another poor quality or worn transfer. If you seek out a CD mastered directly from the tape, there’s an incredible difference in the dynamic range.
Maybe. Maybe my ears just aren't good enough to hear the difference (I don't have particularly good hearing).
Anyway, I'm not unhappy about it. I love the soundtrack (and the music on every Vinyl I own) and I love that I own the Vinyl copy. Some have really cool artwork/books included which just don't exist anywhere else.
I think, perhaps, the point you're making is that the master matters more than the medium, which I would strongly agree with.
I buy a lot of new rap vinyl because having a physical copy is the only way to guarantee the music doesn’t change (unless you can find and download the files online which can be hard)
Many artists don’t clear samples and are forced to make updates or remove them entirely.
While streaming has given us quick access to almost any music, it has also created a new impermanence in the industry that’s very frustrating.
On top of that, it’s not uncommon for rap albums on vinyl to come with the instrumentals that are never made available on streaming at all. I’ve been ripping them to have the MP3s on the go
It's CDs that ensure music doesn't change. The music changes every time you play a vinyl record, as well as simply while the LP is on the shelf. CDs by contrast store an immutable copy of the music.
A friend made me a copy of Robyn Hitchcock’s “Black Snake Diamond Röle” when I was 16 or so. Totally floored me, it’s imprinted on my brain.
It was re-released a few years ago, but the opening track is missing the sax because they no longer could find the master tapes with it. The song on Spotify and new pressings is just not the same at all.
That’s my reason for always buying a physical copy if I can.
An excellent point. A prime example of this is "Captain Murphy - Duality", which currently costs 1300$ on Discogs. It's a record released in 2013 in limited copies with high unlikely chance it gets reissued due to sample clearance restrictions.
Great point. I'm annoyed every time I listen to Biggie and the songs have been changed. Luckily I have most of the original CDs, but have been too lazy to re-rip.
It’s great that musicians can sell a high cost item (vastly greater revenue vs streams per customer), but I do worry the labels are over-indulging here and heading the market towards a Funkopop like crash. Most record stores I go into have reoriented towards very mainstream new releases and overpriced ‘rare’ vintage albums. Meanwhile the more serious collectors market has moved to Discogs and Bandcamp/direct. So when the market turns on vinyl, physical stores will be the biggest direct losers. And even an average shop in the neighborhood is better than none at all.
Funkopop collections are a 2010s/2020s Beanie Babies. They released so many licensed lines that eventually the demand waned and collectors had ‘lost’ thousands.
I don't know if it is guys like me skewing the numbers here, but I have a not insignificant LP collection that I've had for over 30 years now. I got rid of my record player decades ago when moving house but carted my LPs around, with the intent to buy a decent home stereo setup once I got established again and had the disposable income to buy something decent.
I am at that stage now, so will invest in a decent HiFi kit sometime this year. I guess I am also a bit old school in that I don't really listen to music while working etc., so things like Spotify and Apple Music etc. are not my thing. I treat listening to music as a bit of an event, that harkens back to my younger days of having album 'listening parties', so I expect I will still consume my music that way again once I get my record player.
Readit News
All that to say I mostly just like collecting colored vinyl, and supporting small bands and artists you like by buying a product significantly more profitable than millions of Spotify streams is pretty cool.
----
"I have two basic food groups of music: protein and carbohydrate.
The protein listening is new music, where it’s unfamiliar to me so I’m listening, sometimes taking notes, researching the band while the music is playing. I do quite a bit of this, usually during the week.
On the weekends, I will allow for some carbohydrate listening, which would be records I’m familiar with, that I’ve been playing for years. This music is not exactly background, but more of an environmental asset for elevation of mood."
https://www.discogs.com/digs/music/henry-rollins-food-groups...
That said, the deliberate experience of sitting in your couch, doing/thinking nothing else but the music you're listening, is for me an invaluable ritual. It's like meditation.
Well, the objective sounds quality is always _worse_ than eg CDs. (In the same sense that lower mp3 bitrate is always worse in some objective sense.)
But often the sound engineering and mixing is done more carefully for vinyl; and aesthetically you can prefer whatever you like.
This is what we did with cassettes and then CDs. I had dates where we sat on the floor and just thumbed through our CD catalogs and played music for hours. Even today, I still prefer to listen to whole albums.
Just imagine if you could do that with a CD or even an album of MP3s! But that's just not possible, it can only be done with vinyl records.
It’s not like meditation. It is meditation. As a meditation teacher, I can definitely say that.
What you're describing is mindfulness meditation.
But most of my vinyl is of old albums that nobody bothered to re-release on CD. It's fun to buy them cheap at the thrift store, wash them, and see what's on them.
In fact I love everything about vinyl except the sort durarion of each side, but even that makes me focus more closely on the experience. I know I'll have to turn it over shortly...
Dead Comment
Dedicating time to listen to a specific album. My kids may never understand it. An album is an interesting art form, it captures a few pieces of time: when it was made and then then it was consumed. The cover art and liner art. The order of the songs. All assembled with intention. There are albums I’ve heard hundreds of time and I will still hear little new bits I never quite noticed before.
I do love digital music and having it everywhere, but it is special to just listen and take it I’m.
It seems like a fairly universal human quality to want to intentionally listen to music.
Except I hate coloured vinyl. But hey each to their own :)
Dead Comment
But I kept around 20 of my favorites and just rotate them for display on my bookshelf. If I'm playing one of them on Spotify, I'll even rotate to show that LP while I play it. The really bizarre thing is, there's a particular old album I'm thinking of purchasing just to be able to display its cover, because of what it means to me.
It's the same with books -- my favorite ones are in my bookshelf, but even if I read a book I own physically, I pull it up on my iPad because I prefer to be able to highlight, look up words, adjust text size, read in a dark room, etc.
So I'm shocked to discover that I like having the physical artifacts even when I still consume them digitally. It's almost like bringing back souvenir knick-knacks from a vacation. This is not an outcome I ever would have expected.
Deleted Comment
That usually causes the needle to skip! And the danger with disco records is feedback from the speakers to the needle.
Dead Comment
And because of all of the above, I understand why a lot of the buyers don't have actual record players. Vinyl is a bit like 8-bit cartridge gaming, it's a mix of nostalgia with physicality, holding something fun and cool in your hands. It's more like buying a book... The albums had pretty covers, and I do remember liking to hold them in my hands, read lyrics (often included in an insert) while listening to the music. That was a nice aspect of it, but it was overall so cumbersome and lossy that I'll keep my FLACs, thank you.
The appeal to the vinyl is the ritual that we kind of lost buy going digital. I've also gone back to start reusing CDs, at least the little I kept. I donated most of my CD collection when I moved country and kind of regret it.
People keep talking about quality to praise digital media. But most people saying this listen to music through crappy bluetooth speakers nowadays. There is a very small amount of users still using decent hi-fi equipment.
When mass produced media first became possible, people probably said you could only listen to live music and the experience of not being in a venue was lost. Then everybody who grew up with a gramophone, modern turntables, Sony Walkman, etc, think the version they grew up with is the best because of nostalgia.
> People keep talking about quality to praise digital media. But most people saying this listen to music through crappy bluetooth speakers nowadays. There is a very small amount of users still using decent hi-fi equipment.
Lossless digital recordings are the _closest_ way to listening to the originally produced audio authentically. (It still will have artifacts from the equipment itself - the media is the message after all) You can use crappy equipment to listen to any audio, but digital is closest to ideal.
No way in hell do 15% music listeners own record players.
Assuming Luminate's numbers are not entirely made up, their sampling method must be deeply flawed, which brings into question their ability to determine how many record buyers own a record player. Maybe they asked the question in some idiotic way that confused the respondents.
That's also a weird statement in general, sure there might be a group of people who actively avoid music, but aren't most of us music listeners. Perhaps there's some special meaning to "music listeners" as a term.
Deleted Comment
Record players, however, are a really common sight in garages and the back of closets. Even younger folks have picked them up from estate sales and flea markets on a whim and never used them.
People who don't move on a regular basis don't really take the time to assess what it is worth keeping or not.
That seems unlikely. I'm in my mid 40s and I bought my first music on compact cassette, but that was almost immediately supplanted by CDs. I never owned a record player.
Limited edition type stuff or just eclectic music I enjoy.
I bought an Audio-Technica AT-LP120BK-USB (and a cartridge, because, the one which came with my 300 record player was "trash") after I had accumulated a handful of them. Picked out the TRON: Legacy soundtrack and got it all hooked up.
For some context, I have a nice sound system which is optimized for movies/tv though I listen to a fair bit of music too.
If you're not aware, the TRON: Legacy soundtrack was produced by Daft Punk and Daft Punk was made for TRON: Legacy and TRON: Legacy was made for Daft Punk and the result is magical.
Started playing and the sound was great. Flipped over to Spotify and played the same album and the sound was also great.
Honestly, couldn't tell the difference.
Played one or two other things, but, the record player went on a shelf that day and is still there.
I still collect records, especially rare or limited ones of things I particularly like, or ones where there's something unique or special about the vinyl copy, but, I don't listen to them anymore.
When I moved I never plugged in my amplifier and speakers for my record player because I couldn't figure out where to put them. Eventually I realized that they didn't need to be on the floor "waiting" for me to set them up -now they're in the garage while the records/player are out on display. I just listen to music via a smart speaker and streaming most days.
I still buy the occasional vinyl though. I like them as gifts because they're physical and also personal. I tell everyone to give me a record of an album that means a lot to them so I can think of them when I play it (because gifts are about emotions, even if I don't play them directly).
I got an array of Sonos speakers and ask an Echo to play things on them. It's a wonderful, maintenance-free experience and, combined with Spotify's access to most things I'd want, makes intentional listening a zero-friction experience.
This goes beyond vinyl vs digital too. What mix/master was used can make a difference in any context with different formats. Giorgio Moroder’s From Here to Eternity hasn’t gotten a transfer from the master tapes in decades, and the version on streaming is actually a rip from a vinyl record or another poor quality or worn transfer. If you seek out a CD mastered directly from the tape, there’s an incredible difference in the dynamic range.
Anyway, I'm not unhappy about it. I love the soundtrack (and the music on every Vinyl I own) and I love that I own the Vinyl copy. Some have really cool artwork/books included which just don't exist anywhere else.
I think, perhaps, the point you're making is that the master matters more than the medium, which I would strongly agree with.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
Many artists don’t clear samples and are forced to make updates or remove them entirely.
While streaming has given us quick access to almost any music, it has also created a new impermanence in the industry that’s very frustrating.
On top of that, it’s not uncommon for rap albums on vinyl to come with the instrumentals that are never made available on streaming at all. I’ve been ripping them to have the MP3s on the go
It was re-released a few years ago, but the opening track is missing the sax because they no longer could find the master tapes with it. The song on Spotify and new pressings is just not the same at all.
That’s my reason for always buying a physical copy if I can.
Deleted Comment
Could you explain this?
Dead Comment
I am at that stage now, so will invest in a decent HiFi kit sometime this year. I guess I am also a bit old school in that I don't really listen to music while working etc., so things like Spotify and Apple Music etc. are not my thing. I treat listening to music as a bit of an event, that harkens back to my younger days of having album 'listening parties', so I expect I will still consume my music that way again once I get my record player.