With Jack White. Supposed to record direct to disc live on the show on a refurbished 1947 Voice-o-Graph vinyl recording booth
The news I have been able to find doesn’t mention this demonstration, the losers, but Fallon talked about it Friday night.
NME: Neil Young on Jimmy Fallon
Pretty cool if it actually happens.
Neil is promoting his ‘A Letter Home’ album
On Gizmodo an article on the rise in vinyl sales caught my attention last month.
There were only a few salient points from my perspective:
1. Vinyl went from sales of 1M to 6M in the last 6 years
This must be great for those few places that are still selling vinyl. Six times the sales in as many years. And six million… that is certainly more than just what we are buying 🙂 though one might rationally think that the readers of this blog, and certainly Fremer’s MusicAngle cum Analog Planet blog must account for a large percentage of these.
2. CD sales are still at 165M, declining. Digital Music at 118M.
Vinyl is still firmly in the ‘small minority’ seating. And we can only expect it will always be so.
3. That 118M digital music number is declining for the first time since iTunes launched.
Yay. What a stupid idea. Paying money for an inferior, and in the end quite ephemeral, collection of bits. Anyone who paid good money for Windows 3.1, even windows 386 [like me :-)] learned that lesson a long time ago.
4. Streaming music is growing rapidly, now accounting for 16% of sales.
I expect it to be more like 99% in ten years.
The article is mostly link bait, witness the title “Why Vinyl Is The Only Worthwhile Way To Own Music”.
Besides the traditional almost pathological need to incorrectly quote ‘science’ [some mystical God that only blog writers and comment posters seem to have direct and easy access to] as definitively ‘proving’ that ‘digital’ is better than analog the article proposes that it is the ‘music buying experience’ that must be responsible for the surge in LP buying.
Yeah. Right.
* All that time in the back of dusty thrift shops with the rankest carpet since the Alexis Park. So MUCH fun that is. [you know, it kind of is, but it kind of is, you know, not].
* All that time leafing through new LPs who want me to spend $30 a pop for an album I have bought 10 times already or have never heard before. Yep. What a joy.
* And the fact that we get a lot of our stuff at Acoustic Sounds anyway – just has a larger collection than even Amoeba I imagine – well, not much of an ‘experience’ there, you know. In fact the exact same as the CD buying experience.
All I can say is, if the article’s supposition is true, then when someone makes streaming music as fun and social as buying LPs in real life [not that high a bar, IMHO. In fact quite pitifully low] then vinyl will quickly return back to the 1% range.
And making streaming music fun and social? We’ve talked about ways to do that here – perhaps even as part of Ultimist – and I am sure we are not the only ones who read this blog who are working on it ;-). Hopefully there will be many varieties of experience to be had – and they won’t all be on Amazon [which I mention because the latest TiVo sucks and we are going to move soon to the Amazon set-top box and Amazon seems to be taking over our lives bit by bit by bit…] .
… or band… or genre.
Or, for many people, a set of test tracks that they use over and over.
Whenever I get to catch the Grateful Dead Hour on the car radio, I think we should just make sure our system does great Grateful Dead. There are 1000s of live shows and a steadily growing catalog of official releases, so quite a body of work. The Dead, 24x7x365.25.
Neli actually did this in an earlier life and on a budget. Klipsh speakers and Adcom electronics. You can imagine how it does kind of approach concert like dynamics and volume. And when you are young [excepting this latest generation], the idea of playing a stereo at below concert-level volumes just seems… well, wrong.
I’ve often thought that our previous system, especially with the EMMLabs digital front end, was optimized for Dark Side of the Moon. It just presented that song in such a magical manner that worked on so many different levels: intellectual, emotional, hormonal, and practical audiophile levels. Yummy.
And many audiophiles try and optimize for Classical Music.
Before the Acapella Atlas speakers got here I was fixated on making Imagine Dragon’s Radioactive song sound as good as I could get it: My Imagine Dragons ‘Radioactive’ playlist.
I know this is wrong, intellectually, from a system designer / optimizer’s perspective. But there is still this really strong emotional need to make the system sound really good for My Music.
Which, you know, changes. But that is all to the good.
What this is not is having to ‘change what you like’ because nothing else sounds good on your system. So many audiophiles just play 4 piece jazz, or 3-piece Jazz plus female vocal. They act like this is their favorite music. Great music, sure. Enjoy it myself.
But seriously? I am sure there are closet Death Metal enthusiasts, for example, who are audiophiles, but they have been told to not optimize for Their Music so they go along with the small jazz program.
So, as we optimize the Atlas speakers, we try to just make them sound their best, of course.
But darned if I don’t stick in my favorite music a lot to see how IT sounds. 🙂
