50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player

Re:50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player by drzaiusx11 on Friday January 02, 2026 @09:46PM (#46472280)

I love the associated rituals and the physicality of vinyl records. The large format album art, liner notes & inserts are great as well. As for sound quality I'm no audiophile so I won't pretend to make any claims of vinyl being better or worse than any other music medium, but I will say I don't get the same intentionality of listening with the streaming services I've tried: Google music, Amazon music, Spotify, etc which all seem to mess with your library by injecting ridiculous things like AI DJ interludes or "enhancing" your playlists by injecting songs into your carefully curated playlists at random. That and I have some really old shit that I haven't been able to find on other mediums.

Both Google music (before it turned into YT Music) and Amazon Music briefly allowed uploading your own music to stream which significantly helped with my use-case, but they both removed that feature during their inevitable enshitification. I toyed with self hosting and doing my own rips of CDs and vinyl, but I find throwing on a record more relaxing than futzing with lossy encoder parameters or patching streaming servers.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player by catgirlinspace on Saturday January 03, 2026 @03:34AM (#46474128)

I’ve never had Apple Music add random songs to my library and the closest thing to an AI DJ is AutoMix which is easily disabled and I’ve never had it re-enable itself. Can also add your own music to iCloud Music Library with the Apple Music app on Mac and (I think) Windows. Think this requires iCloud+ though but I’m not 100% certain. Annoyingly can’t do it on the web app or an iPhone :/

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player by tanjtanjtanj on Wednesday January 07, 2026 @09:10AM (#46526523)

I don't think it requires an additional subscription. Apple music started as solely an "upload your music to play anywhere" service. I use apple music over the other offerings solely for this feature and for a large portion of it I didn't even have any apple devices and so didn't have iCloud+.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player by drzaiusx11 on Thursday January 08, 2026 @09:00PM (#46549240)

Good to know there's at least one sane streaming service option left out there, although at this point I'll stick to my physical media. I've been burned by music providers enough times to think that Apple will eventually follow the same path as the rest.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:50% of U.S. vinyl buyers don't own a record player by tanjtanjtanj on Saturday January 10, 2026 @06:03PM (#46570850)

Absolutely the right move, I buy as much physical media as makes sense (hence using Apple Music so I can merge the two listening types)

[ Parent | on HN ]