music format transitions
In March I’ll turn 35 years old. Hard to believe.
I have the fortune of having seen the music industry gone through four different formats.
Records to tapes to CDs to MP3s
Before I was a teenager a lot of people still bought records. In fact I remember seeing full-sized 33 speed LPs of popular 1980s glam bands of the time in record stores. In my preteen years I literally saw the end of the vinyl record because there was only a small part of the store dedicated to it. That small part got smaller, and smaller, and eventually was removed completely.
Audio cassettes, better known as just tapes, was what replaced vinyl records. It was the way to buy music for at least a good 10 years. During my teens I bought many tapes.
CDs slowly but surely replaced tapes, but the transition was really long. This was mainly due to the fact CDs were (and still are) so expensive. In fact, they were so expensive that some artists in the 90s revolted against it. It was not uncommon to see some CDs – single discs mind you – for $26 each. It was pretty ridiculous. The same artist on tape wasn’t more than $12 at the most.
On top of that, most people didn’t have CD players in their cars. Oh sure, they’re common now, but back then it was wickedly expensive.
Two things ushered in the MP3 era. The internet and the iPod. And I know for a fact the record industry was dragged into that kicking and screaming all the way. They did not want to convert to a virtual product because it simply doesn’t make as much money as CDs do, and still doesn’t.
The record industry loved CDs for the longest time because copying them was difficult and expensive, therefore resulting in more sales. But that’s obviously not the case now.
Digital music only sells now because the record industry was forced into doing it. Nobody wants to spend $20 or even $10 on a CD anymore when you can buy digitally for half (or less than half) the price.
And that DRM thing.. what a laugh that was. It’s a good thing that’s mostly gone now.
The vinyl was always the best format
Vinyl had the longest run of being a popular format compared to any other. Tapes didn’t even last two decades as the popular format. With CDs, same deal. Vinyl on the other hand had many decades of being the #1 music sale format before it was cast aside.
The vinyl format has such a dedicated fan base that there are teenagers today who prefer it over anything else. Why? Because it’s (to them) different, interesting and the decidedly simple format does have the best sound.
If the record industry wanted to give themselves a boost in sales, the answer is simple. Bring back vinyl. Work deals with manufacturers to put good record players for sale in Wal-Mart and Target so people can buy one. Besides which, they can be manufactured for next to nothing so sales of them would make companies a lot of money.
People would genuinely appreciate those big sleeves with the nice artwork and the retro-yet-awesome way of playing records. It would totally work.
See, here’s the thing. When you buy a vinyl record, it just makes you happy. By nature they’re round, and round things psychologically feel better to the mind than square. In addition, you can put your hands all over them without worry of damaging playback. The artwork as mentioned is something really, really cool. Heck, the Alice Cooper School’s Out sleeve actually folded into a miniature school desk. Seriously! It was cool.
But the most important thing about a record is that you’re paying for something good. It is worth paying for. You just don’t get the same feeling from a cold digitally perfect CD. It’s just not the same.
I’m not even a record collector and I know this.
To the music industry: Seriously, you guys and gals, bring vinyl back. You want a physical product out there that makes money. Vinyl is your answer.
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Well, that’s an interesting theory. Vinyl is actually making a comeback.
I grew up during the vinyl period, just as 78 rpm records were beginning to be replaced by 45 and 33.3 rpm records — we had fun destroying the very breakable 78s by flinging them like Frisbees, and I sure wish we hadn’t done that!
I’ll tell you, vinyl records had their drawbacks. They scratch easily, and because it is a physical medium, with a needle actually being dragged through a groove along the surface, you can hear every scratch loud and clear; that process also eventually wore the groove down, degrading the sound each time the record was played, producing a rumbling sound, plus hisses and pops. People who wanted clear sound learned to handle the records by the edge and never touch the surface, and if you intended to listen to the music often, you would tape it and listen to the tape thereby protecting the surface from extended wear.
You also had to periodically change the needle on the player due to wear, or sometimes the entire cartridge, in order to protect the surface of the records, and buy devices to wipe dust off the surface everytime you played the record. It could be rather expensive and tedious.
Also, if you moved around a lot (as I did, going from home to college, and house to house, and a job in this city to a job in that city), you had to cart around heavy boxes filled with your ever growing collection.
So I actually welcomed the day cassettes and 8-tracks, and then CDs, were introduced to replace the vinyl records. I never got rid of my vinyl record collection, but they now take up space in a closet and I rarely play them other than to record them to my computer.