Vinyl Records Outsell CDs For the Second Year Running (theverge.com)
- Reference: 0173389959
- News link: https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/24/03/26/196210/vinyl-records-outsell-cds-for-the-second-year-running
- Source link: https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/26/24112369/riaa-2023-music-revenue-streaming-vinyl-cds-physical-media
> That's 6 million more than the number of CDs sold in 2023, marking the second time since 1987 that's happened and reflecting the steady 17-year-running growth of vinyl sales. Vinyl, which tends to be pricier than the newer format, also far outstripped CDs in actual money made, raking in $1.4 billion compared to $537 million from CDs. The RIAA's report shows that CD revenue was up, too, but in terms of physical products sold, people actually bought about 700,000 fewer CDs in 2023 than the year before. (If you're curious, nearly half a million cassettes sold last year, too, according to Billboard.)
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/3/26/24112369/riaa-2023-music-revenue-streaming-vinyl-cds-physical-media
Why? (Score:2)
They're expensive as shit.
Re: (Score:3)
Expense and sound worse.
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
> Expense and sound worse.
When you consider what The Loudness Wars did to recording and producing, vinyl is actually the superior recording.
CD audio had the opportunity to sound better. It was pissed away by Greed. You will find a rare exception, but it’s certainly not the norm.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
> CD audio had the opportunity to sound better. It was pissed away by Greed. You will find a rare exception, but itâ(TM)s certainly not the norm.
That may be the case for rock and pop, but it's certainly not the case for classical. In classical, the loudness war doesn't exist and CDs are not compressed to within an inch of their lives by greedy record producers.
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>> CD audio had the opportunity to sound better. It was pissed away by Greed. You will find a rare exception, but itâ(TM)s certainly not the norm.
> That may be the case for rock and pop, but it's certainly not the case for classical. In classical, the loudness war doesn't exist and CDs are not compressed to within an inch of their lives by greedy record producers.
You are probably correct about this given the lack of demand for classical compared to others, but feel free to share the specific catalogs to validate.
On a related note, if any music should be preserved properly it’s likely more every other category of music. We’ve managed to preserve “classical” for hundreds of years now. Literally.
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> CDs are not compressed to within an inch of their lives
I even have seen recordings that came in two masterings so you can choose. I have this particular album [1]https://www.svetlinroussev.net... [svetlinroussev.net] you can read "bonus CD inside Mobility mastering" (the other CD is called "fidelity" mastering).
[1] https://www.svetlinroussev.net/discography/blog-post-title-one-8zcjb-4dm8m-3kndr-t8g25-rlkld
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Greed manifested itself in other forms for philarmonic music: by removing the 3 letters indicating if the source/master/remix was digital or analog.
My first CDs had DDD, meaning digital from start to end. But AAD CDs did tend to sell less, so they got rid of that information.
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> When you consider what The Loudness Wars did to recording and producing, vinyl is actually the superior recording.
Vinyls haven't been recorded or mastered separately except for rare exceptions for well over a decade now. Those vinyls outselling CDs are the same loud masters.
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>> When you consider what The Loudness Wars did to recording and producing, vinyl is actually the superior recording.
> Vinyls haven't been recorded or mastered separately except for rare exceptions for well over a decade now. Those vinyls outselling CDs are the same loud masters.
Fair point and I stand corrected. Vinyl was the superior medium. That said, vinyl outselling the vinyl player by quite a large margin tends to validate that new vinyl owners aren’t buying them for the sound. They’re buying them for the art, so I guess our point is mute, pun intended.
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So what about music mastered and recorded before then - 2010 and earlier? 2011-2024 hasn't exactly been a golden era for music. Plenty of current vinyl sales are people buying classic albums released decades previously.
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CD Audio is digital. It literally offers no difference to all other Digital Formats, excepting for bitrate differences. Most listening is via some sort of digital conversion.
Vinyl is analog. There is a real benefit to analog, as it does not have some of the clipping effects digital is known for. Can most people tell the difference? Probably not.
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There are no clipping effects in digital audio that also doesn't exist in analog. Analog have zero benefits over digital, this is all just myths based on people looking at PCM and falsely believing that it represents the sound wave sent to the speaker.
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There is clipping in low bitrate Digital. It USED To be a thing back in the day of the very first digital playback devices (not CD players). CDs haven't changed since then.
I know "Okay Boomer"
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Low bitrate digital recordings suffer from quantization noise, not clipping. Get your terms straight. However with CD (16-bit) recordings the ratio between the music and this noise is 96 dB which beats any analog medium by several orders of magnitude. Even you admit that this "clipping" phenomenon does not exist in CD, so why did you even mention it?
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And I'm out of mod points at the moment. Yes, this.
Re: Why? (Score:2)
Oh please, vinyl is factually worse as a normal CD, want the 'warm' sound of a vinyl record? Change your equalizer settings. Thanks to CD you can hear things that just weren't possible due to the limitations of a vinyl record.
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Here the price between CDs and Vinyl isn't very different. As for sound, a lot of people collect vinyl and don't listen to them. What you do get is far nicer album cover art and additional collectables which you can enjoy looking at while you stream the songs from Spotify.
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That's really the only thing I miss about vinyl -- Thos great big album covers. Especially the two disc sets, which had covers that opened like books, or even were books.
Anyone who doesn't remember this can get an idea of what it was like [1]here [youtube.com].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nKeeH2xGOs
Re: (Score:1)
Thanks for bringing this up. This is the reason I buy and collect vinyl. I have vision issues and enjoy the bigger format and the artwork. As far as pure audiophile quality, my old ears are probably too damaged to notice, but at the Rocky Mountain Audiofest I've heard really (really!!) expensive rigs setup with both (and big, wide, reel to reel tapes, too). All three mediums sound fantastic to my ear. So, all things being equal (to me) I'll take the pretty one with the big artwork that other collectors also
Re: Why? (Score:2)
My husband uses reel to reel at home. Sounds a lot better than vinyl to me. No comparison.
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> Expense and sound worse.
So don't listen to them using your AirPods. Problem Solved.
If you must, get some first class BEATS earplugs or a top quality Grado headset.
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They look cool. I've see a couple of articles lately where the younger crowds buy vinyl to use as a decorative "retro" music library. Many don't even have record players so what they sound like is irrelevant.
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I'm going to invest in a wax cylinder factory to beat the next trend. So long suckers...
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This. Vinyl sales are more about art, not music.
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It's also about providing an additional revenue stream to artists to help make up for the loss of revenue from streaming.
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I have bought a lot of vinyl straight from the artists at shows and off their websites. They often (almost always) mention that they make more from these type of sales. I also enjoy them more (due to the artwork). I have also heard from my favorite artist (Amon Amarth), when buying a signed album at a show, that vinyl sales make them more money than shirts do. Wow!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The article says CD players are way less common now. A lot of new cars don't include them. A lot of new computers don't include them. So, if you gotta buy something to play the physical media, might as well get the better-quality vinyl. Regular CDs always have been, and always will be, garbage.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Funny)
The worst part about CDs is the mechanical wear from the laser touching it. Or if you don't pick the laser off the CD properly it can scratch it.
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I wonder if vinyl is better at preventing loudness creep. Bigger grooves seem like they'd hit a limit at some point.
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> I wonder if vinyl is better at preventing loudness creep. Bigger grooves seem like they'd hit a limit at some point.
The answer to this is "it depends". Sometimes vinyl records are mastered using a better version of the mix with less dynamic range compression applied (counterintuitively, dynamic range compression makes a digital recordings sound louder ), but it's also possible to cut a record using the same mix as a CD by attenuating the bass a bit and reducing the recording level. That basically just results in a nosier, worse sounding version of the CD.
But hey, if you stamp it on some really cool looking colored vinyl
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I buy vinyl because I like the art and I like the collectability. I often get the 320Kb/s MP3s for free when I buy them (off Amazon for example). So, I get some high quality dynamic range as well as a cool physical artifact. Just sayin'.
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Recording Engineers generally try to master separately for vinyl if they are allowed to do so, but whether or not that is actually done depends on the record label and artist's wishes. Most of the time, the label wants to do the thing that costs the least. Given the opportunity, those same engineers will also create separate mixes for mono and stereo and possibly some flavors of multichannel (e.g. Atmos) as well.
I don't like the way vinyl sounds and I hate the idea of a medium that degrades every time it's
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> I wonder if vinyl is better at preventing loudness creep. Bigger grooves seem like they'd hit a limit at some point.
No they aren't for 2 reasons: a) music on vinyl has trivially hit saturation limits of phono stages ever since the RIAA curve was introduced. b) 99.9% of vinyl is the digital master pressed on vinyl.
What may actually work the best against loudness creep is Spotify and Apple music telling producers their shitty over loud recordings will be normalised to -12LUFS defeating any purpose of trying to master hotter, in fact the hotter the master the less loud it will sound on streaming services.
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Mostly because they're collectible and the large album covers can be hung on the wall (whether that's tacky or cool is entirely in the eye of the beholder).
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Very future-proof. Properly cared for, it may be possible to play vinyl centuries from now. There are already Edison cylinders over 100 years old, and the composition of modern records may be even more stable.
The CD-format hasn't changed in decades, but it's still wrapped up with some fairly advanced technology that's much more easily lost if society breaks down. CDs have only been subject to simulated aging tests at best, no real world experience with it as a century-long archiving format.
Re: (Score:2)
Why not?
They're expensive as shit.
They're not that expensive. CDs albums were something like £15-£20 in the 90s. I was listening to a new album today, and I looked it up on a whim since I bought two albums from that band on CD in the 90s and one on tape, and the vinyl is £15 plus shipping so, realistically under 20 quid with no fuckery. Probably around £18.
It's a good bit less than half the price that I regularly used to pay for music when I was at school and
Re: (Score:2)
> Also, let's just take a moment to remember that the RIAA are a right bag of festering dicks.
Ironically, every vinyl record is mastered with what's called [1]the RIAA curve [wikipedia.org], which attenuates the bass and boosts the treble, with the inverse curve being applied upon playback (Meghan Trainor [2]approves [youtube.com]).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PCkvCPvDXk
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CDs are a now-inconvenient media format for the sake of playing music inherently, superseded by digital purchased music (which is generally DRM-free) or streaming. For the sake of convenience of the 90s, the packaging compromises on art and liner notes to avoid being more intrusive than the music media.
Vinyl records are accessories that come with big expressive album covers and liner notes. I wouldn't doubt most newly sold vinyl never gets played.
Re: (Score:2)
Nostalgia is big business.
I too would rather have a vinyl record (Score:2)
than a crossdresser.
It be 2024... (Score:1)
Vinyl: trendy and hip boutiques with knowledgeable small business owners ready to debate the finer points of an era of music and their favorite artists collections and the limited releases topping $50+ per record, or
CDs: Whatever Walmert's electronics dept still decides to stock in their dwindling racks, or second-hand collections from some mid-sized resale stores that make more money on consignment goods and t-shirts than their music sales, aside perhaps from their vinyls.
Of course Vinyl's doing bett
Re: (Score:1)
Speaking of 2024 - Slashdot needs spelchek... :-)
Discs will come back as retrofuturism. (Score:5, Insightful)
Especially as people become rightfully more and more paranoid about streaming services revoking and/or arbitrarily fucking with their music collections. Already happening with movies and TV shows due to some conspicuous outrages.
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CD players are complicated devices. Sure, there's a few companies still making them but once that stops it'll be like the current situation with VHS VCRs - there will be only aging used equipment available. Turntables are comparably simple to manufacture, so vinyl records will probably still be around long after CD players become unobtainium.
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Any bluray player can play CDs.
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Nah, discs are only good for whipping at people you don't like. Homemade server filled with SSDs streamable to every device in the house best way to go.
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> Homemade server filled with SSDs streamable to every device in the house best way to go.
Why would you use SSDs for storing media content? That's the ideal use case for those extremely cheap SMR drives; they work fine in media servers and you can't beat the dollar-per-GB ratio.
Re: (Score:2)
Mostly because I just don't like them. I'm impatient and don't enjoy their slow read/write times. While the read time isn't really an issue, I don't like waiting on writing to them when I need to.
Re: Discs will come back as retrofuturism. (Score:2)
I use a striped array for my NAS . ZFS raid z2. 8 x 14TB. Excellent write times. Does not quite saturate the 10Gbps LAN, but close.
112 TB of SSD was quite costly back when I bought these drives in 2019.
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Because he's a dumbass.
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Says the retard.
I still buy CDs (Score:3)
Mostly used though, so that won't be included in their stats (or their profits).
Then I rip them and use them just like streaming, except I own them forever.
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Glad I'm not the only one. Used CDs are where its at. Rip, Stream, Enjoy the lossless quality.
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Yes, and I can enjoy those lossless rips at home, in my car, and in a portable DAP easily because they all have a copy. And with the library backed up in multiple places it is a pretty bulletproof system. Don't even need an internet connection. Of course you can do this with non-DRMed downloads as well, but used CDs, excepting some rare ones, are pretty cheap.
I have a CD transport and do occasionally play a CD directly. It sounds marginally better than the Pi2AES I use for digital files, but if for s
Re: (Score:2)
I still buy them too. I can usually get them on Amazon with a free digital download for less than the digital download alone.
Thoughts on why this is (Score:3)
Totally aside from being both a trendy fashion and a reactionary response, I think a major contributor is sound. Before you groan, here me out - my reasoning may be different than what you're thinking.
First off, I think well-executed digital reproduction is inherently superior to even the best vinyl on the best deck with the best cartridge and tonearm. But the problem is that digital has enabled the most extreme abuses in what have been called the "loudness war". Most recorded music has been compressed so much - in order to make it sound louder and gain more attention - that there's no dynamic range left. With CD's you can get away with that - but with vinyl there are inherent limitations in both cutting the master and playing back the record. The medium just won't handle it, so the music on vinyl is much less heavily compressed than that on CD's.
I hear old songs which I know well, where the compression on recent releases is such that even the bass player competes with the lead singer for loudness. It sounds brilliant and exciting for about 30 seconds, then it just starts to be tiring. Sometimes it even hurts. It's not only audible, it's plainly visible in programs like Audacity.
I've compared new releases of a piece of music, side by side, with older releases. The new ones are so heavily compressed that they almost look clipped. Even when I introduce negative gain to the newer track to match the older one, it still sounds louder and crappier. In extreme cases, it's difficult to tell by looking at the screen that both sets of tracks are in fact the same piece of music.
So yeah, I can believe that vinyl sounds better, or at least is more listenable for longer periods. That's not because vinyl is great - it's because CD's and other all-digital sources of music have been enshittified.
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> it's because CD's and other all-digital sources of music have been enshittified.
Which, by default, makes vinyl great - at least until something consistently better comes along.
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> So yeah, I can believe that vinyl sounds better, or at least is more listenable for longer periods. That's not because vinyl is great - it's because CD's and other all-digital sources of music have been enshittified.,/quote> Keep in mind the music word isn't entirely rock and pop (and related genres)--other genres, such as classical, hasn't been "enshittified" by the loudness war.
Re:Thoughts on why this is (Score:4, Insightful)
Your points are very 2005. Nearly all music put to vinyl right now *is* the CD master. Unless you're collecting some analogue masters of classics and comparing them to the late 90s early 00s era remasters, 99% of your typical vinyl of today is just as compressed as the digital masters because they *are* the digital masters. Studios sell vinyl, they don't master separately for it, they just hand the digital file over to the cutting engineer who makes a few minor tweaks to it. On a really good record player, a lot of vinyl sounds... almost the same as a CD.
But that's irrelevant. The vinyl reassurance isn't driven by audiophiles suddenly going mainstream. Most people driving these sales don't give two shits about their sound, heck many don't even play them, and those who do throw it on a whatever cheap arse record player they find at best buy. They are just collectors items. Pretty colours with wonderful patterns attract people who like to own stuff. I'm no exception by the way. I buy quite a bit of vinyl. I really enjoy looking at the album art and lyric books while I listen to the album on CD or streaming service.
> That's not because vinyl is great - it's because CD's and other all-digital sources of music have been enshittified.
And that's actually false too. One of the strongest drivers to removing the enshittification of the loudness war is ... streaming services. Because unlike CDs or even analogue sources the likes of Spotify very clearly say whatever you upload will be normalised to -12LUFS. What that means in practice is if your album doesn't have at least that much dynamic range (which is on par with older well mastered music of the music golden age) then it will actually sound quieter, not louder.
That said we do still need to wait for a couple of old senile fuckers who don't understand this to retire / die out before music will actually revert properly for decent dynamics.
But no the vinyl being talked about (sales of modern music) does not sound better than the CD, but original vinyl masters of classics definitely sound better than their 90s/00s remasters.
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> Your points are very 2005. Nearly all music put to vinyl right now *is* the CD master.
How do you know?
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I second this bullshit-flag. How do ya'll know? I only have one data point, a friend in a band (a fairly well known one with 8 albums) who said they specifically/specially mastered their vinyl releases. So, are they they only ones?
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> Your points are very 2005. Nearly all music put to vinyl right now *is* the CD master... Studios sell vinyl, they don't master separately for it, they just hand the digital file over to the cutting engineer who makes a few minor tweaks to it.
These up-to-date [1]sources [masteringthemix.com] [2]beg [musicguymixing.com] [3]to [veniamastering.studio] [4]differ [weraveyou.com].
> And that's actually false too. One of the strongest drivers to removing the enshittification of the loudness war is ... streaming services.
The loudness war began [5]in the 90's [wikipedia.org] and was hitting its stride in the early 2000's when streaming was still in its infancy. Streaming may be contributing to the entrenchment of over-compression, but it had nothing to do with its genesis.
[1] https://www.masteringthemix.com/blogs/learn/mastering-for-different-mediums-streaming-club-cd-and-vinyl
[2] https://www.musicguymixing.com/mastering-for-vinyl/
[3] https://veniamastering.studio/blogs/learn/mastering-for-cd-vs-mastering-for-vinyl
[4] https://weraveyou.com/tech/vinyl-digital-how-mastering-makes-all-the-difference/
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
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Damn man, you sure made it hard on the know-it-all "audiophile" children to sound smart. Couldn't you have just chilled out with all those facts and stuff? You hurt a lot of feels, man.
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I never considered CDs in the same class as quality vinyl. . Buyers I bet want our old riffs we enjoyed in the 1970s. Even quads !! Money of course is an issue. Decent turntables are expensive ( don't want to tear up the vinyl W/10 grams ) and the classical "sweet" 12-in speakers like Marantz and power supplies like MacIntosh are a pretty penny ... when you can find them. Costs are like 1990s computers.
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While ofc the greater dynamic range of the CD allowed for much more abuse in the loudness war, we should not forget nor ignore that the loudness war started with vinyls.
CD vs. MP3 (Score:1)
I like to buy a cd from the band I'm seeing. It's a lot easier for them to autograph a cd versus an mp3.
Got some vinyl albums signed by the band once. (Score:1)
I took four vinyl albums to a show once and had them all signed by every member of the band (paid them by buying two drinks a band member, except the basist, who I had to buy a pretty nice dinner for because they didn't drink and negotiated better) that includes an additional limited edition album they sold me at the show when I gave the manager some weed. It cost me about $300 or so. This was in the 1990's and I thought I was a fanboy idiot for the longest time until another fan offered me $5k for the set
video vinyl (Score:2)
I'm going to corner the market in 8' diameter 4500 rpm video vinyl. First title will be star wars, flip the recording mid-film to watch the second half.
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> I'm going to corner the market in 8' diameter 4500 rpm video vinyl. First title will be star wars, flip the recording mid-film to watch the second half.
Star Wars through Return of the Jedi were available as CED discs, which is basically what you're describing.
Vinyl is good but (Score:2)
a high resolution digital file (likely the master?) sounds the best.
All vinyl produced in last 30 years were digital (Score:3)
What's funny is that virtually all vinyl records produced in the last 30 years were processed digitally because they don't want to wear out the masters. There's nothing wrong with that of course, but one of the arguments for vinyl is that it's analog and doesn't have the supposed stairstep artifacts of digital music. The stairstep representation of course is bogus and digital recordings are discrete sample points that are converted back into near-perfect analog waves that are vastly better than any analog copy or analog recording.
Re: (Score:2)
People are still recording and mixing on analog tape. Rick Rubin loves tape. [1]https://www.analogplanet.com/c... [analogplanet.com]
[1] https://www.analogplanet.com/content/rick-rubin-interviews-rhcp-about-groups-new-album-recorded-and-mixed-analog-tape
How long until... (Score:2)
We resurrect LaserDiscs?
They had the same size for displaying cover art as vinyls. Even more as some discs had art imprinted directly on them.
Audio (Score:1)
More uniformed consumers following a fad. We have had 2 superior music formats for decades - DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD. Unfortunately both of them never caught on. Blu-Ray Audio has been around for a long time as well yet because of limited support all 3 formats have remained dormant. Oh what could have been.
Isnt the news CDs are trivial collectors items (Score:2)
Isn't the news CD-Audio are trivial collectors items?