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…] .
