Poll: Are We Passing the Peak of Vinyl?

I hope vinyl is here to stay.. In the sense that it's popular enough for new music I like to be released on vinyl. If the media falls from popularity the "purists" say they don't care cause "they" likely don't buy new. So "they" could care less and have the attitude that they hate the hipsters or Johnny come lately's... But that's in my opinion a poor attitude. I want everyone to buy vinyl. I want it alive and healthy for all the great future albums from Rival Sons, Vintage Trouble, Leon Bridges, Wolfmother, JJ Grey, AJ Croce, Blues Pills ext......

 

I think it's still on the upswing. Us purist will continue buying it ether way as we always did.

 

Vinyl or Cd's, I don't care at this point I do like both formats. Cd's are good for storing and burn copy's for your car, vinyl media is more hard to copy that you can't copy easily, great if you have a real to reel tape recorder. Audible quality I think very few of us have ears to catch the difference, arguing about that is meaningless I think we just want to justify out purchases in equipment and the same goes for paying for quality recordings in either format.
I'm old school and back in the day nobody spoke about who mastered the album it was more like I got to have this record!
I buy music because I love the music and I had some of my vinyl sitting in the closet for more the thirty years and most of them got play once when I put it on a reel recorder?
Fun tread but it is a bit stupid do what you like and mix it up. lol

 

Our older siblings would buy CD's, and we had lot's of those circular CD players that could fit in a hand. My sister had a massive amount of Hillary Duff . I personally was lucky enough to have had Rhapsody in it's infancy, so I started out with streaming, and then when I got an IPod, I switched to MP3s. Then I went back to streaming, and now I balance both streaming and vinyl, as do most of my friends.

 

nice spin on my post, totally out of context...i said 2, got it 2, kids.

do you practice this, or does it come naturally?

i'm guessing you expected me to say its been years since i was in a record store, and when you didn't get the answer you wanted, you had to try to save face.

i hope everyone here sees through your horrible facade.

i am now puttiong you on ignore, so don't even bother replying.

 

I like comedy as well.

 

Actually, this is what you said...

And I get tired of these lame generalizations aimed at young record buyers that none of them give a **** about sound quality.

 

Maybe. What if clearly labeled vinyl rips were added to Spotify? The sound of vinyl with the convenience of streaming!

Would that affect sales and "peak vinyl"?

--Geoff

 

We will know that vinyl has peaked when Walmart has big cutout bins of vinyl albums again.

 

I realize that anecdote is not data, but I've mentioned here before the time I saw a young lady in a shop select over $1000 worth of LPs and then choose the cheapest, nastiest turntable (barely over $100) to play them. I was told by staff that this was not uncommon, and they don't see many customers looking to upgrade their hardware, either.

FWIW.

--Geoff

 

Tiles have always been superior to vinyl and they go back thousands of years

 

Lets stop knocking each other and simply accept that we ALL love music no matter which format we use to listen to it!! Its just personal choice

 

I voted yes. I think most people prefer downloads for their portable players and such. I'm sticking with CDs.

 

Just to put this into a broader perspective, if in the event that some life form from another galaxy ever "hears" human music it will probably be this. And this will be the medium.



I can imagine the conversation on Kepler-452b:
"Whoa, digital?"
"Man this ain't even MP3 quality."
"We streamed all this **** anyway like 6 million years ago."
"No upper-end definition at all. So much clipping."
"Who mastered this mess?"
"This is the best they could send us? What happened to these people?"
"Evolution man, there was a huge war and the vinyl-based life forms lost."
(Moment of silence.)
"And dude, they give us Chuck Berry and Louis Armstrong but no ****ing Beatles???"
"Word. Gear up y'all -- We're going back to Roswell and finish what we started!"

 

And yet at the dawn of the digital era we were told how CD was "perfect sound forever" and almost everyone drank that Kool Aid...

 

Not really.

 

I agree. I can't see a CD resurgence any more than I can see a resurgence CD ROMs and disk drives for computers. We have 6TB hard drives and 128GB USB thumb drives available on the cheap. CDs have long been replaced. I think the likelihood of a true CD resurgence is less than that of a cassette or 8-track resurgence.

 

You can also do whatever you want with the files once they're on a USB thumb drive. I just backed up my car's hard drive onto a 64 GB thumb drive the size of my fingernail so I could load the whole library of digital albums into my wife's car for a trip. Far easier than bringing along hundreds of CDs.

 

Sure, some people just want to hear the music, and that will never change (no matter what their format of choice is), but I think all you have to do is take a look over in the hardware section of this forum, where there are countless threads started by younger listeners seeking system advice. Emphatically stating that young people only buy records because they have zero interest in sound quality is pure BS. It's just old guy audiophile snobbery (and I say that as an old guy myself). There really is some weird bitterness towards the upswing in vinyl sales. It's baffling...like their choice to dump vinyl has to be continually justified or something. Each format has their advantages and disadvantages. Who really cares what the other person has chosen? I've got 2500 records and 2500 CDs.
People want to make this into Ford vs Chevy. Coke vs. Pepsi. Liverpool vs Man United.
It's not. It's just music.

 

You can't have a CD resurgence if it hasn't trickled to a niche market. CD sales are still higher than the peak of vinyl sales in the late 70s. Cassette and 8 track have all but disappeared and are almost beyond revival while quite a few vinyl plants kept chugging along to supply a hardcore market, so making a revival possible.

 

I believe it has peaked.

 

It will die again. All most new stuff is digitally sourced and priced too high, the good old stuff has shuffled around and made new homes, the trend/fad will slowly die.

 

At some point, all physical formats are going to die - that much is obvious. All music will come from your personal home computer system network, or whatever, played wifi to your speakers. You'll simply speak and say "Tim Hecker Mirages" and it'll start up from the wall-mounts. And it will all be 192/92 khz or whatever the bit rate is in 2035, and it will sound perfect. New vinyl will no longer be made, because vinyl buyers will start dying off, and new young generations will scoff at our clumsy needle/platter systems. The second hand market for vinyl will continue for quite some time, but what's going to kill vinyl are our grandchildren, that's who. The integrated home-systems they grow up in will phase out all manner of electrical appliances. "At some point" I said - and I'll even call it - by 2065. Except for vinyl kept in museums for posterity, ALL of the world's vinyl will have been melted down or be piled up in dumps, or have been rendered unplayable by the fact of global warming.

 

Not very optimistic at all but i beleive what you are saying can become reality considering in what direction things are going in right now.