The simultaneous advent of streaming music and the vinyl renaissance has led to some very interesting recording industry statistics over the past few months:
Last month, the RIAA reported that vinyl revenues outpaced sales from streaming services, despite actual streams vastly outnumbering physical vinyl sold. Now, Nielsen has released data revealing that, for the first time ever, old music (the “catalog,” defined as music more than 18 months old) outsold new releases in 2015.
Hat tip to Tyler Cowen, who also notes this factoid: Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon was the third-best-selling vinyl record of 2015.
But compared to CD sales in the nineties, which peaked in the year 2000 with 2.455 billion units sold, vinyl sales are still abysmal. All current vinyl bestsellers combined didn’t outsell singles by the Spice Girls! I believe it’s a generational thing, listening to vinyl or buying physical media in general, and part of the current nostalgia wave, which hipsters are also riding. Retro is in fashion!
Meanwhile younger people simply stream music. My neighbor for example only ever listens to music via YouTube on his smart phone. He doesn’t even have a few mp3 files on his PC, or even a PC…
List of 2015’s best-selling vinyl:
Place – Artist – Album name – Sales
01. Adele – 25 (116,000)
02. Taylor Swift – 1989 (74,000)
03. Pink Floyd – The Dark Side of the Moon (50,000)
04. The Beatles – Abbey Road (49,800)
05. Miles Davis – Kind of Blue (49,000)
06. Arctic Monkeys – AM (48,000)
07. Sufjan Stevens – Carrie & Lowell (44,900)
08. Alabama Shakes – Sound & Color (44,600)
09. Hozier – Hozier (43,000)
10. Guardians of the Galaxy OST (43,000)
I have a fair number of CD’s but really only ever listen to them in MP3 format. I have a lot of additional MP3s from various sources too, but honestly I find that 80%+ of my listening time is monopolized by Youtube at this point. Tried Pandora for a while but its selection algorithm couldn’t figure out what I actually liked so I stopped.
One of the reasons Youtube is so good for music is that you can discover quite a lot of new stuff in the vein of what you’re listening too by just following the sidebar suggestions.
Since these days 99/100 times the machine you’re listening to music on has memory and a web-connection there’s little incentive to own music in a physical medium.
I just sold my 1976 Marantz direct-drive turntable for $200 off craigslist to a young city guy. I sold it in 4 hrs, 300 miles away. The same units are going for $400-500 on eBay.
Oh, sound is a physical reality. Digital sampling of an analog phenomena has became amazingly good in comparison to several years ago. But notice, the best speakers are still horns. No inventions have improved that. Vacuum-tube amplifiers and tape through horns are still the best sound reproduction available in the opinion of the “high end” audiophiles. I have yet to hear any digital repro which catches the nuances and complexities of live recordings as well as analog, especially at the low frequencies.
Digital sampling has been more accurate than the best human ear since before the invention of the compact disc. Audio engineers took a while to catch on, is all. The math behind it (Nyquist) goes back to 1928. The D/A-A/D work done by the HDD in this computer makes a CD look like a 5th-grader’s science project. (Think the data on a HDD’s disks is digital? Think again. It’s analog off the disk, and analog out of the preamp chip, and not ones and zeroes until it leaves the controller chip.)
The most efficient speakers are horns. Which makes them the “best” for low-power tube amps.
This particular “high end” audiophile (defined: spends more on his audio equipment than his cars, and drives pretty nice cars) thinks that vinyl, tube amps, any speaker wire more expensive than what you can get off the big roll at Home Depot, etc. are a waste of your money. Of course, he’s also an electrical engineer who understands all this stuff, and doesn’t have to trust the salesmen at the high-end audio shop.
I don’t know what “nuance” and “complexity” look like on an oscilloscope, but I assume they’re some combination of wow-n-flutter, distortion, missing high and low frequencies, microphonics, soft clipping, and all the other problems you simply can’t design out of vinyl/tube gear.
Low frequencies? Digital is ruler-flat to DC/0Hz. Analog is not. (OK, technically it’s only ruler-flat to what fits on the disc, so about 0.00023Hz for a CD. Heh.) Vinyl analog is not even close, though a really good tape system can go lower than what the human ear can hear (though probably not what the human body can feel). If you get more bass off a vinyl recording than a CD, it just means the audio engineer who made the CD was grossly incompetent.
And accurate bass? Bass is almost always rolled off (around 60Hz) and summed-to-mono (around 100-150Hz) on vinyl, which isn’t even “subwoofer” range yet on half-decent modern gear. If you get better bass off a vinyl recording than a CD, it just means…
If you’re trying to put together a decent audio system, spend 80-90% of your budget on speakers. Competently engineered, they’re the only piece of equipment that can change the sound that’s on the recording. The CD player, cables, preamp/amp (transistor, not tube), and speaker wire have to be intentionally or incompetently mis-designed for that to happen.
If you prefer the sound of analog/vinyl equipment, that’s great! Many people do. But to imply that it’s technically superior to digital, or more accurate than digital, is simply incorrect.