Vinyl Outsells CDs For the First Time in Decades

It still seems stupid. Couldn't they backup the source files off site, say in the office?

 

I was actually digging around threads here a while back about this subject, and gathered that flac files wouldn't play in order on a USB stick, like songs would just play randomly. From your enthusiasm I'm guessing this might not be the case. I actually only own one USB stick that a friend gave me of his home recordings. If I can download 6400 minute of lossless that will play in proper sequence this would be worth the learning curve for me.... Do they play in sequence if lossless? Are all thumb drive players such as your car stereo compatible with WAV or Flac? The one my friend made me is MP3.

I have different forms of media...Records/CD's/Cassetes/Flac/ WAV on hard drive and the one USB stick....At one time I had reel to reel and 8 track tapes.....

 

Not as a general rule.

That depends on the player software, not the storage medium. Most player apps on PCs, smartphones, MP3 players, car radios etc can be instructed to either play in sequence or randomly, but that is not the case on some of the cheap hardware players. Sometimes it's also a matter of users not figuring out how to tell the player what to do. Another problem is subdirectories which some hardware players can't access or only randomly. In either case it is not a problem of the USB drive. If a player app misbehaves, it will do so from a hard drive too.

Unfortunately no, the only format you can be sure to play everywhere is MP3, all others are optional. But support of WAV and FLAC is much better now than it used to be.

 

I use a 32GB thumb drive. The files are full resolution WAVs (I could have gone FLAC but I really didn't care about the space saving). At roughly 600 MB per 60 minute album I fit about 50-52 albums. The files have proper metatags and play in sequential order; though my player does have a random playback function.

 

There are approximately 35 record/cd stores in Vienna, that’s not including multiple branches of chains like Media Markt/Saturn and Müller which also have, in some cases large, music departments.

 

Sure, record shops are still there. But it's not the same as in the 1980s/90s/early 2000s which I consider the "golden age".

At the time there used to be the large record hypermarkets sometimed with several floors and an incredible variety. Here in Berlin we had WOM, fnac, Virgin megastore, Saturn, in London there was Tower Records, HMV, also Virgin, plus a variety of small shops for special interests.

The majority of those large chains has disappeared for good after 2010, or reduced their size considerably. Smaller shops are still there, but also fewer than there used to, and they're struggling. Which is why they invented Record Store Day.

From a buyer's perspective, choice in stores has dwindled and moved online.

You mentioned Saturn which is actually the best example I have in mind. They used to stock "everything", now only a much slimmer selection of artists and CDs.

 

CDs are faster than LPs and always will be.
OTHO, downloads...

 

Like, shove them in cardboard boxes and put in an unused room? ;-) Suppose you want to cull 10 million songs each one five minutes on average, this would be about 500 TB. Even with modern terabyte-sized drives it would not be easy, and if these drives are not online they are as good as clay tablets. It is easier to re-acquire deleted content from labels if need comes.

This is why smaller streaming companies have died and only the giants are still here — small guys cannot handle the pressure to have so much content instantly available. Fun tidbit: Pandora is not an on-demand service, it is "radio"-style service, so for a long time they had less than a million songs and when you asked for "something like" your favorite artist or song, they would play something similar from what they had. In fact, when they started they would not even display the artist's name because they thought it should be irrelevant to listener: they thought that the listener wanted to listen to music with certain mood and style and tempo, not to a particular artist or song. They changed their outlook since then. Now they have much more, 30 to 40 million tracks, still they don't have the pressure to have everything.

With all fairness, I am sure Spotify and Pandora have amassed enough resources to handle tons of data even despite them still being deep in the red. They became too much the part of infrastructure like Google or YouTube or Netflix, so they won't blow up in smoke. I am sure, their software collects information on what people search for, and if they don't have it and enough people search for it, they ask labels for that content. On the other hand, writing emails to them asking for this and that is completely pointless.

 

Among people who collect and value music both LP and CD sales continue to grow at a healthy rate:

Discogs Mid-Year Report 2020

In the first half of 2020:
Vinyl sales increased 33.72% year-over-year
CD sales increased 31.03% year-over-year

Physical formats will likely not become mainstream again, however just as surely individuals who value music will always exist as well and will continue to purchase LPs and CDs, as both are indeed invaluable treasures for music lovers.

 

The sets of individuals "who value music" and those who "will continue to purchase LPs and CDs" are intersecting at best.

 

Really? That's more than Berlin.

 

Yeah. And these kind of posts - vinyl is growing, CD is shrinking, etc. etc., have popped up with regularity ever since I joined SHF a couple of years ago. I'd say about one every coule of weeks.

Also, must be about time for another "Spotify is killing the music business" thread.

 

Just read this on Discogs:

Some of the greatest jazz of the 20th century was recorded in a Hackensack, New Jersey, living room by an optometrist who hated vinyl. Given vinyl is widely considered to be the ideal medium for jazz, that last detail is surprising.

“As far as I’m concerned, good riddance. I’m glad to see the LP go,” Rudy Van Gelder, that eye-doctor-turned-engineer, said in 1995 about CDs eclipsing vinyl. “The biggest distorter is the LP itself … It was a constant battle to make that music sound the way it should.”

Why did the most hallowed jazz producer of all time, one who recorded Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and scores of other geniuses for Blue Note Records, turn up his nose at vinyl? Because — as Analog Planet editor-in-chief Michael Fremer explains to Discogs — function hobbled form. “Rudy had to compromise,” he says. “In order to make the records play on cheap turntables, he would boost the bass at around 100 Hz and roll everything off below so [the needle] wouldn’t pop out of the groove.”