Much like you, I remember listening to Blood on the Tracks on Saturday mornings playing GameBoy or reading The Hobbit. We'd have Asleep at the Wheel playing during a card-game, or overlaying bad sports commentary.
Fast Forward to High School. I was hired as a retail salesperson at a Mom-And-Pop hot-topic like store at the local mall. Given my somewhat decent taste in music, the shopkeeper let me determine music choice.
So now, as I've had Groove/Zune/Spotify subscriptions going on (basically continuously) for nearly 12 years, I still try to buy at least 15 or so LPs a year. That used to be CDs, but now that I'm an adult with some space, I carved out a section for Vinyl records. They weren't purchased for the different 'warmth', no, they were purchased because I love music and vinyl is one of the purest expressions of that love. It's cumbersome and pretty stupid, but it places the art with prominence and connects your body and actions to the music moreso than any other medium (purely since you have to flip sides every fifteen minutes or so). I like to think back to my saturday's playing GameBoy, and now I gulp down coffee while reading Gaddis or Foreign Affairs as Bob Wills blasts throughthe speakers
Once I realized I just needed to give its recommendation engine more fuel to work with and started liking/adding things I actually wanted to listen to, it went right back to giving me cool stuff with loads of obscure artists I'd never heard before but liked a lot. (It really only took me about two weeks to right the ship).
Spotify's recommendation algos are excellent.
Edit: And it almost always is something I really love. That playlist is the killer feature on Spotify for me at the moment.
I don't like rap, hip-hop, or metal. I mostly like rock, some pop etc but that too not too loud. I don't really know how much "not loud"; that's where I thought these recommendation engines would kick in. I have found couple of artists/songs that I just love on Bandcamp (awesome place). But Spotify, Apple Music (this one has been an utter disappointment for me), and many other streaming services that I've tried in my country just didn't cut it.
What have helped me over the years are films, blogs, tweets etc. Something random playing on a bus, or a film soundtrack, a TV show theme song. Like that song A Chi that I heard while watching The Best of Youth. It was in Italian and I didn't understand a word but I just instantly connected to it. I loved it. That German song from The Night Porter - from there I discovered Marlene Dietrich's Lili Marleen. Or Many a tears from October Sky, or that song from Twelve Monkeys. And there are some like Amélie (well, every tune is fabulous in this one) where I disconvered Guilty by Al Bowlly. A friend once, out of the blue, told me to check out Imagine Dragons and later I listenred to Demons like crazy; on repeat. Or a chance hearing of a tune in an Iranian film that was composed by an Iranian artist. It's the best song of melancholy I have ever heard and it doesn't have any lyrics.
I even found some nice ones on WCD before it was burnt down. I got there late; or rather started exploring late. Its recommendations were a lot better than the streaming serives, at least for me.
What I find surprising is that I benefit from recommendation services for books, films a lot, but for music I've never been able to find recommendation service that tries to find that nerve or even something close to it that is a person's musical taste and then recommends tunes around that. Maybe unlike books just the lyrics of a song aren't enough and it's very difficult to discern how a tune would sound good or boring to a listener. I've tried a lot and after some time I gave up. Maybe I was doing soemething wrong or I should try services that just to music recommendation, and not streaming maybe.
This was the important part for me at least. There are a lot of songs that I think I'm not into. Once I forced myself to listen to all of them all the way through I found a lot of good stuff.
I understand your point about listening to a whole album being preferable to singles, I feel the same way but I'd still much rather listen to a CD than an LP.
Analog is neat. To me, at least. There's a microscopic groove cut into some plastic in which a tiny chunk of diamond connected to a cantilever is pulled through, and the motion it has gets converted to a tiny electrical signal which gets amplified. To hear this at home on speakers or headphones is cool enough; to hear it in a venue with excellent sound is really something else for me. Something so powerful coming from something so minuscule.
Maybe it's 40, 50, 60 years old, too. It's something that has a history, a past. I can listen to a record made in Brazil in 1968, that somehow found its way to Europe in my hands, or I can buy some sterile, boring CD copy of it. I can listen to my parents' very own records that they had in the 70s, that I also listened to growing up. I can even listen to classical records from before they were born. I can listen to a record from a country that doesn't exist anymore.
Not everything got released on CD (or streaming).
Plenty of reasons one might prefer vinyl over a CD.
Either it's something newer that I just really love and want the big cover art and physical "object" for collecting and appreciation. Often times I'll be at a show and buy the band's new album instead of a T-shirt as a way to support the band I like. Those often come with download codes so I can still get a high quality digital version for portability.
If it's something older I find at a Goodwill or a yard sale, I tend to buy it because it looks interesting enough to be worth the $0.50-$2.00 asking price. It's almost like buying some small novelty or other impulse purchase. It may be great. It may be awful. It may just be fun to have a bunch of old comedy records on my shelf. And if they are uninteresting, the cost is low so the risk is as well.
And occasionally I've purchased the vinyl versions of albums I copied from friends' tapes in high school or downloaded illegally years ago. As with buying the record instead of the Tshirt at a concert, it's a way to support the band I discovered for free but has since earned my payment.
We thought vinyl was going the way of the dinosaur when the CD came, but now that they are back it feels like they are here to stay. Both vinyl and cds were bought to get the music the first time around. CD had no trouble displacing vinyl for the quality of the sound.
But this time, when it's more about the cover art and the ritual of listening, than it is about the sound, I don't see how something could display the LP. I know a lot of vinyl buyers now that buy the albums but then listen to the streamed music. Just to hold the album but have the convenience of digital.
I've been DJing various Techno genres with Vinyl for ~15 years and I've watched the scene shift towards CD and MP3 devices, yet turntables (Technics SL-1200 or thereabouts) are still almost always guaranteed to be at most dance venues (often with CD-DJs hooked up nearby). I also somehow prefer carrying my music around with me, it forces me to pick out ~50 pieces and then lug them behind me to the event, arriving all sweaty and out of breath because that shit's heavy. But it somehow gives me a sense of accomplishment even before I lay down the first record. And I know that my records will play, as long as the mixer isn't totally destroyed.
And my point was mostly that if you're DJing with them, it's hard to keep them in pristine condition.
I download most of the music I consume from torrent communities in FLAC. For those times I am inclined to buy the physical artifact, it is far better to buy the vinyl version as it has full-sized artwork and is more suitable as decoration in my home (google "Hang Up Your Old Vinyl Records!").
Like an enormous number of vinyl purchasers, I don't even own a turntable. I'd never play the vinyl, instead I play FLACs off a Raspberry Pi media center. I imagine most young people buying vinyl these days just listen off YouTube.
It's a distribution issue. You can't even get some of these songs as torrents ha. You have to find the physical record or find a high bitrate download.
- CD's scratch and then skip easily
- CD's come in horrible plastic covers that break if you look at them wrong.
- Skipping to a certain part of a song is much more difficult with CD's.
- The benefits vinyl provides (large artwork and liner notes/ lyrics, posters etc.) don't all apply to CD's and at that point there's not much/any benefit CD's have over digital.
Are you serious?
NB: I'm thinking about actual CD players here, not your CD through iTunes or something where you can click to skip on a progress bar.
Nowadays, a good professional CD player (or DJ equipment) will have something like an infinite-turn knob, which you can use to seek.
Nope; many CD players, like the first one I got in 1986, had only a two-digit led display for the track number -- there was no time display at all.
EDIT: It was a Fisher Studio Standard that looked like this, so I guess it did show an "index number" while scanning through a track.
I imagine they are not!
Only if you mishandle and abuse them. Doing that to vinyl records is going to make them sound lousy too. Both of them are fairly delicate.
>- CD's come in horrible plastic covers that break if you look at them wrong.
Those jewel boxes are easily replaced, because most of them are standard (the exceptions are weird ones, like the double-CD ones). The plastic boxes keep the booklets and artwork in pristine condition. On vinyl records, there's no plastic, only paper/cardboard, so the more you handle it, the more worn-down and beat-up it gets. There's no way to keep it mint-looking without simply never opening or handling it. With CDs, as long as you're careful handling them, they'll stay mint-looking indefinitely (as long as they aren't those stupid "recyclable" ones that are mostly cardboard without the jewel boxes).
The only advantage LPs have is that there's physically more space for artwork/notes. But that's not a big problem; in the CDs, it's just shrunk down to 1/4 its LP size. Get some reading glasses if you have problems seeing that.
I have a few hundred CDs in my collection which I started collecting around 1990; the large majority of them were acquired during the 90s. I have precisely one CD where there's actually any damage that causes playability problems (at one point on one track), from one of my earliest ones. All throughout the 90s, I played these CDs over and over, countless times, both at home and in my car. I never stopped in the car until I finally got an MP3-CD player for my car and started making MP3 CDs (somewhere in the late 90s), and at home when I finally ripped them all to Oggs and just started playing them on my PC or my portable MP3 player, so there's at least 10 years there in my teens and 20s where I was constantly handling these things. Somehow I managed to never cause any major damage to them, even when I was changing discs while driving. What's your problem with handling CDs?
By the same reasoning, I suppose I should throw out my tablet and replace it with an iPhone and a magnifying glass.
You can back up a CD's audio tracks digitally to PCM files, with no loss. You still have the music even if the CD is completely destroyed, and your backup survives.
Vinyl records are also sensitive. They can skip even with slight vibration, because the arm which holds the needle is delicately balanced to exert only a small force to keep the needle in the groove.
Vinyl records easily warp from heat. They still play, but the warps make it easier for skipping to occur.
Fun personal fact: my grandma hard a way to make records flat again. She sandwiched them between cotton cloths, and gave them an ironing!
> Skipping to a certain part of a song is much more difficult with CD's.
Skipping to a certain part of a song is very difficult with a vinyl record. The song consists of a strip of grooves that are only a couple of centimeters wide. The resolution for navigating is not very good. Even if you could pick a specific cycle of the groove, which you won't, your precision is still limited by the rotating latency. At 33 rpm (let's round off to 30 rpm), you have one revolution every two seconds. (Sure, you could stop the rotation, and fiddle with it for five minutes to get the exact spot in a four minute song.)
With a CD-ROM drive and PC/laptop, you can script up some software to seek to a position with sub-second precision.
A decent media player lets you mark off two points, A and B, with sub-second precision, and loop them.
A bookmarking feature is plausible; there is no reason why a CD playing application wouldn't let you make bookmarks associated with CD's. Pop in a CD, and see a list of bookmarks; pick one and there you are at your favorite part of a favorite song. (If this doesn't exist, propose it ... say for VLC, or hack it yourself.)
Why would you even play the CD? Just rip it once to your media center in a lossless format, and then put it back on the shelf and never touch it again unless you suffer a hard drive failure with no backup. On a media center, it is easy to skip to whatever part of the song you want. Plus, if you don't open the CD's jewel case again after that initial rip, then you won't have to worry about the jewel case breaking through mishandling.
They can also be regenerated for cheap as long as the scratches don't reach the data layer and only affect the plastic protection layer. Vinyl discs, on the other hand...
Making Vinyl sometimes better than CDs
I don't think that using a new technology for most things precludes having physical copies of the pieces of culture you find most important.
I got rid of my CD collection 10 years ago to get rid of clutter. I had a great collection curated on grooveshark, but since that was shut down I've mainly listened to streaming radio.
I've found buying vinyl second hand in antiques stores or used record shops to be an interesting way to discover music. Often the price is cheap enough to be able to take a chance on something that looks intriguing. I probably have 100 records now, with production dates from 1932->2016, with lots of interesting albums that probably aren't even digitized (or at least readily available.)
I don't mind flipping. If I'm busy momentarily, it'll just spin with the needle in the deadwax...not a big deal.
It's a different music discovery and listening experience than streaming. Go buy some obscure music on CD/LP and listen to it over and over for a day.
Must admit, I have resisted the LP movement until now. Might check it out =)
Buying CD's used to be a weekly ritual for me and I missed it for years. Putting on a new album on a Saturday afternoon with a beer or glass of wine while I start cooking is a very enjoyable moment for me. Now, obviously this was for the most part because I would have access to new music. That experience has not come back as I can put on anything on my laptop. However, there is a nice sense to putting on an album and being "forced" to play it from one end to the other. With streaming, I have a tolerance of 10-20 seconds of jarring music before I lose my patience and skip the track. Which is good but also means that I miss out on some of the tracks that take more effort and are in the "acquired taste" category. And in my experience, those tend to stay pleasant whereas the hits suddenly reach a threshold after which I can't stand listening to them any more.