50% of U.s. Vinyl Buyers Don't Own a Record Player
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As the vinyl market booms, a surprising stat has emerged: half of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player, sparking a lively debate about the true purpose of physical media. Commenters weighed in, with some revealing they're among those who buy vinyl to support artists, even if they listen digitally. A consensus emerged around the desire for a simple, middleman-free way to directly support artists, with suggestions ranging from "donation buttons" on artist websites to "pay what you want" models on platforms like Bandcamp. The discussion highlights a shift in how people value music, with physical media becoming a "token of identity" and a means to directly connect with creators.
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And those who don’t almost always only set a minimum price, so you can still pay more if you want. And if you buy on BC Friday [0] (next is February 6th), Bandcamp doesn’t even take a cut of the revenue.
[0]: https://isitbandcampfriday.com/
Bandcamp Friday is such a fun day, I always have +5 purchases lined up from the previous month, and usually keep track of the social media of the artists I buy from that day, and many of them post something really wholesome about how much they made on that day :) Such a fun time all around.
https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/fan-support/
https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/getting-a-fan...
As a bar/restaurant owner who sometimes host electronic parties, that sucks and does mess up a lot. But as a dance party attender, that sounds like a good thing, the parties tend to have way too high attendance, and if there is no space for people to actually move around and dance, I don't really know what the point of it even is anymore.
They have now started touring in Europe instead. Many cities with short distances, and people actually show up for the show. Much more rewarding to play with actuall audience.
I don’t know why they do this, but I do know I have an ever growing stack of tapes I can’t listen to…
What? Do you have an example?
I'd rather them spend this time on doing their art, or going on with their lives. If you want to give an artist a token of appreciation, send them money. I always increase the suggested price of an album or track on Bandcamp to some interesting-looking number.
To produce, ship, and store an otherwise unused complex artifact just as a token of appreciation which is not otherwise enjoyed by the parties looks wasteful for me.
But come on do you listen to music of a band becase they are great in taking pictures? Or because they are really really good in standing next to a vinyl press?
No
You appreiciate their music and you don't need a commercial token to do so.
I support artists I like by going to their shows and buying lossless digital copies where possible (even if I listen to their music elsewhere).
But I don't want or need more physical "stuff".
So I sold and donated all of it, kept what had special value, and re-acquired a lot of it digitally.
I still think I made the right decision, although every now and then I miss something specific and regret it, but I get over it pretty fast.
The only "cheat" was a half-dozen boxes of childhood keepsakes in my parents' basement - that are now in my basement. ;-)
I don't share the anecdote to suggest in any way that you or anyone else would feel the same.
Yeah, in some way that's true. In the house music scene almost every producer also sells vinyls of their best songs, sometimes "collectors editions", and also DJs obviously sometimes pride themselves on only playing vinyl. For the artists I really do enjoy, I tend to buy their songs + with the vinyl, as a way to support them, but I indeed have no way of actually playing them, and haven't had for more than a decade.
So here I sit with 20+ vinyl records, most of them unopened, and no record player. But I don't mind, I just want to give money to the artists that provide me joy.
The secondhand market becomes saturated with inferior pressings that are inevitably bound for landfills since they don't meet the quality/expectations of the people who actually play vinyl.
Hypothetically.
Little do they know, the true sonic experience comes from wetting the disc with a special felt pad and watching the stroboscopic markings on the edge of a turntable platter...
This was a 5 year play by my dad. Shout out.
Sometimes I wonder how much INTENTIONAL engineering people's discontent for good or ill happens across the spectrum of human activity. One thing is for sure, people don't talk about it much.
I can think of many examples.
Liquid Death, bottled water, and household water filtration are unbelievable luxuries. Manufactured status for the masses. True luxuries: my examples are completely unnecessary for drinking water in developed countries.
Pools and green lawns have higher status when water is more expensive/scarcer.
I don't hang out with extremely high-status people, or the extremely wealthy, but I'm sure both of those groups have some surprisingly luxury water.
Luxury is a human concept that is completely disconnected from the underlying product.
Provenance, Branding, Myth, Science all matter for status.
[1] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf
I'd love to learn how you came to this definitive conclusion. At no point in human history have humans not worked (I'm sure there are some limited exceptions, none of which have been sustainable).
Perhaps you meant to say the point of life is to survive, but you have to work to make that happen.
This is a non sequitur. The discussion is about the point of life. At no point in history have humans not pooped, but I would imagine that few consider pooping the point of life.
“Art is the proper task of life” -- Nietzsche
"Art is to console those who are broken by life." -- Vincent van Gogh
Broadly speaking, creation is the meaning of life, not work, although some creation could be considered work.
There are no such things as "basic needs". If people can easily satisfy their basic needs, they simply expands this concept until it ceases to be easily satisfied
In other words, abundance is a myth promoted by mentally ill cultists, and meeting the basic needs of all people is unattainable.
How much growth is required to achieve good lives for all? Insights from needs-based analysis - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S245229292... | https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wdp.2024.100612
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43465127 - March 2025 (26 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42529256 - December 2024 (10 comments)
(Decent living standards for 8.5B would require 30% of current resource use)
> Decent living standards for 8.5B people would require 30% of current resource use
That claims seems to be based on your first link. 1. They define decent living standards as including things like 1 cooking appliance, a mobile phone, and internet, but not things like a microwave, a Netflix account, etc. 2. To achieve this, they specifically say that existing resource uses that are wasteful, such as buying extra clothing, wasteful entertainment, etc, should be “reallocated” to the basic needs of society.
So in the context of the grandparent commenter’s argument, we would have to take away a lot of the luxuries (which is probably a fair description) that most Americans have like entertainment, buying more clothes than they need, etc and would not include things like any trips/travel, eating out, etc - and you believe people would react the opposite of what the grandparent claimed, that they would not consider those things to be “basic needs”? I guess if we were truly able to eliminate most inequality and all millionaires, etc, then maybe people would accept life without those existing things they have as basic needs? But I am not sure if your argument is meant to be a thing that could happen in real life, or merely a “If I was dictator I'd ensure peace on earth” type idea?
This video and timestamp comes to mind: https://youtu.be/2sxKJeYSBmI?si=ikuOuZl-Ho5_VK4k&t=1613
My interpretation is that back in his day, TV was grayscale, grainy, and interlaced, and therefore demanded that the viewer exert their imagination to "complete the picture".
I imagine that if he were to see today's 4k full-color 120Hz panels, he would call TV a "hot" medium.
Its only really recently that CRTs have been surpassed by modern screens in terms of colour.
However I'm not going back to CRTs anytime soon. Just a dumb OLED public signage display, and some high bitrate codec
However, a huge difference is that on CDs you're up against a fixed maximum (0 dBFS) so all peaks are equal, which is fatiguing; on vinyl you're up against the adjacent groove, so your maximum amplitude any given moment depends on the amplitude of things in the recent past and near future! Ways to optimize for this are prevalent, amazingly, and the result is less fatiguing.
Dire Straits - Brothers In Arms (1985 release, first CD to sell over a million copies) also sounds greats, and IMO better than most modern releases.
Some early CDs were recorded using pre-emphasis, similar to the RIAA equalization used with vinyl records. CDs using this have a flag set in the metadata to tell the player to apply a matching de-emphasis filter. I sometimes see people blaming digital production for early CDs sounding "thin". I think it's more likely they heard rips of CDs using pre-emphasis that didn't have the proper de-emphasis applied.
An average CD from the 80s sounds better than an average CD from any other era, because it pre-dates the loudness war, and because it's intended to be played on a good home stereo (which if you were buying CDs back then you could probably afford).
There's also a noise floor that limits your dynamics.
Since CDs are digital sound, there's not really the same reason reason to use CDs over a digital release.
https://now.tufts.edu/2016/07/11/does-music-sound-better-vin... https://www.soundonsound.com/sound-advice/q-why-vinyl-not-be...
IMO, use a lossless digital file if you want to a more accurate sound, and use a vinyl if you prefer the sound/mastering of that release.
Every signal can be represented as a combination of pure sine waves. That insight is the basis of Fournier analysis / transform.
https://testufo.com/
But in the case of analog recording, nobody can distinguish a pure analog recording from the same thing but with a good ADC/DAC pair in the signal path in a blind test. It's theoretically possible to hear undithered 16 bit quantization noise if you turn the volume up extremely loud, but correctly mastered CDs should be dithered from higher bit depth.
And 44.1kHz sampling rate can theoretically represent arbitrary waveforms up to 22050Hz. The only complication is that this requires a brickwall filter, which is impossible to implement. That's why the sampling rate is set higher than needed to exceed the 20kHz limit of human hearing (in practice the limit for adult hearing is almost always lower). The higher sample rate allows for a practical filter with a shallower transition band to be used.
- 44.1ksamples/sec can only represent arbitrary waveforms at some point lower than 44.1kHz/2.
- Example: The only 22.05kHz waveform you can encode at 44.1ksamples/sec is a square wave (for 16 bit samples: -32767, 32768, -32767, 32768, etc.)
Going down to 44,099 samples/sec you could only do an extremely crude "steppy" approximation of a sine wave, sort of like the NES's triangle channel.
https://wiki.xiph.org/Videos
There's some audiophile content on Blu-Ray disks encoded at 24-bit/192 kHz, intended for people who subscribe to The Absolute Sound.[1]
(Typical TAS review: "Their Crystal Cable Infinity power cords markedly lower background noise; increase resolution, density of tone color, and dynamic contrast; and add a more substantial third dimension to images." US$34,000 for a 2 meter AC power cable.)
[1] https://www.theabsolutesound.com
[1]
Mastering is mostly done purely digital, so only when they are pressed are they converted to analog grooves. This can never add new data / information.
Gain staging against an analogue noise floor, not having nonlinear/nondestructive editing, etc. would be, to use a technical term, "fucking stupid."
At least for the K-pop artists my daughter listens to.
I never really got onto spotify. I was always the youtube kind of guy, although I recently started listening to youtube music when I realized that my youtube feed was being impacted and youtube music's a better way to listen I guess
We really need to get to pen-drives first before CD as well I guess. Like downloading songs from youtube to run them in pen-drive or just listen to locally would show us youngsters something
I have been recently thinking of downloading all of my songs and uploading it to some vps so that I can listen to from anywhere. I feel like steps like these with media ownership would gradually help rediscovery of CD perhaps as well as we people would really love supporting the artists then as well and buying their CD might be the way if we end up downloading their musics.
Pen-drives are ubiquotus as well so perhaps we might need the pen-drive era in between
Also computers are absolutely removing the CD port. Even my desktop doesn't have it. I think it has the slot but I had my PC built in the store so they didnt really add it but literally no devices have CD except perhaps our car but I think even some new Cars might not have any CD's
If someone is forced to buy a CD player just to play CD's, it just adds more friction and I would argue that Vinyl is much more so for the aesthetics itself as well which I feel like CD's aren't really that much for.
So my point is, People aren't really using Vinyl for quality, they are using it for aesthetics. If CD's have a chance, they really need to get more on the ease of starting and pen-drives can help start the local-music movement.
https://www.minidisc.wiki/guides/getting-started/what-to-get
cassette can get to fuck. They were and always are, a shit medium.
Sure the sound quality isn't great, but cassettes have a great user experience.
My kids listen to stories on CD and Cassette. With Cassettes you can just stop and continue later exactly where you were. On CD they have to remember the chapter and the number of minutes. Which they never do so they are less motivated to continue listening.
The same is true for VHS. One of the great benefits of Netflix is that you don't have to keep track of where you were in a series and can quickly continue. DVD or separate downloads never had this, with Netflix you can just continue. The same is true for VHS, you can just pop it back in and continue where you were.
Also, with both cassettes and VHS you could very easily record things. This was never easy with DVDs, so much so that it basically wasn't a feature. HDD recorders were also quite bad.
Quality of sound and image is just one part of the equation. I would never listen to a music album on cassette, but the medium, from a usability point of view, is great for specific use cases such as stories and creating your own mixes.
Yes, there is cover art, I miss decent cover art and the thought that some people put into it.
VHS can also fuck right off. Sure I loved the stuff that was on them as a kid, but I fucking hated them as a medium. A nice Humax from the early 2000s obliterated VHSs.
Don't get me wrong, everything else about digital media suck arse, the shitty player and bollocks practices. But the experience of the media it's self is far far better.
Tell that to my uncle who worked on DCC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Compact_Cassette
I recently had a relative complain that they have to find and buy a CD player to listen to their music when they aren't in the car. I pointed out that they already have several in their home. Multiple game consoles and their bluray player supported playing CDs. The loss of CD drives in computers is unfortunate, but the format is still supported in a lot of devices that take disks.
One great product of this among my friends was the MP3 mix tape swap parties. You'd select a bunch of your favourite songs and put them on a thumb drive, then go hang out at a friend's house. All the MP3s would be put together, virus checked and then copied to everyone's thumb drives. It was a great way of discovering new music.
We should stop fantasizing about CDs and Vinyl and shit and just enjoying listen to music.
And if we think we need tokens in the real world, make them yourself or buy that one vinyl.
Otherwise I totally agree about aesthetics of vinyl. I have a rather large collection and still buy from time to time, but usually only 2nd hand. I threw away all my CDs because they stopped working after 20-30 years from being stored improperly, being scratched from being played too often, and overall I just prefer the convenience of MP3s.
Internet radio is also lovely (outside of Spotify of course), check out https://directory.shoutcast.com/ which works great with WinAmp (even the old versions from the 90s still run fine in Windows 11). There are of course other smartphone apps that use other directories, but Shoutcast was/is the first and still my favorite place to discover new music.
huh... and I thought the vinyl craze happened because it's more durable out of ye old formats
CDs are well known to oxydize in the span of decades of storage
I have ripped all my cds to flac on my NAS and put them on usb in whatever format as needed.
A vinyl record degrades every time you play it in a normal turntable.
Using the same master a CD would always sound better than a vinyl record, but I and many people would always take vinyl over a CD because of the praxis. Set and setting is important, in the end.
I don't have any that old, but I have some from the late 1980s which my dad bought. All still fine, my parents listen to them in the car.
She'll trawl thrift shops for CDs too.
New CDs in shops now are much much cheaper than they used to be as well.
Giving up Spotify isn't on the cards yet though. I'll teach her how to rip songs next I reckon.
I think they are. There was an article in the newspaper in the last month or so saying that CD sales are on the rise, and mainstream pop stars are releasing their music on CDs again.
As noted in another comment, I see CDs in music (and other) stores more and more where I live.
This has strong energy of "Teach your kids how to play Magic, they won't have money for drugs."
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