But I was shocked at what I encountered. Few of the albums I wanted were available in vinyl. Prices were outrageously high. The whole market seemed designed to discourage buyers.
I’d heard so many grand claims for the vinyl resurgence, but the reality was tremendously disappointing. And I was a late adopter—the revival had been going on for a decade, but record labels still didn’t have their act together.
In my case, I ended up buying vinyl albums, but mostly used ones. I simply couldn’t find new pressings of the records I wanted. This was fine for me, but lousy for musicians and labels—who make no money on the sale of a secondhand vinyl album.
Ted Gioia is unimpressed by the vinyl market as it currently stands. I am, frankly, a vinyl skeptic; I remain unconvinced about its supposed superiority to digital (especially when it’s produced from digital sources, and didn’t Mobile Fidelity fuck up on that account recently) except insofar as vinyl doesn’t (usually) fight in the loudness wars as much as digital recording does. I no longer understand why I used to think having stuff on vinyl was important (unless that was the only way in which it was available), most of the stuff I do have on vinyl I now have in digital form too (whether CD or flac files), and in any case I have nothing to play it on anyway. And, apparently, I’m not alone there. Ted further observes:
But here’s an even more ominous sign. Half of vinyl buyers don’t own a record player. They apparently bought the Taylor Swift album as a kind of memorabilia—something a little nicer than a band T-shirt.
This can’t be a good thing for the record business. After all, how many records are you going to buy if you don’t have a turntable? This is like trying to sell Teslas as a status symbol to people who don’t drive. […]
I guess it could be worse—but it couldn’t be much worse. The music industry took its fastest growing segment and killed it through greed and laziness.
I get the appeal of the physical artifact and all that, but a vinyl record is… a bit useless in thar regard if you can’t play it. Especially given how expensive they tend to be, which is what really puts me off them these days… At the moment JB Hifi is selling a vinyl edition of Neil Young’s Eldorado for $54.99, which is not only a 34 year old catalogue item, it’s a fucking EP, not even a full album. And they want fifty-five dollars for that? To be sure, JB are also selling Neil on CD at kind of absurd prices too (thirty-eight dollars for a single CD of one of his bootleg series?) so I wonder if that particular case is a Neil thing, and it should be said some of JB’s vinyl actually is rather more reasonably priced… but not a lot of it.
The ludicrous price of new vinyl is the chief sign that the vinyl revival is really pitched at hipsters with money to burn, with the industry basically just doing what it did when CD was new, i.e. lazily bilking people out of money for music they already owned, except now they’re presenting the twelve-inch disc rather than the five-inch one as The Thing To Have, and I’m afraid I’m just not buying it (literally or figuratively). Mind you, I can kind of understand the nostalgia aspect of the vinyl revival in some ways; what baffles me is the cassette revival. I remember when cassette tapes were still a thing and they always left a fair bit to be desired. I don’t understand the appeal now at all. I mean, the revival isn’t exactly big; Gioia’s piece has a graphic showing that cassette sales aren’t even into seven figures, although numbers are rising even so. But the fact that it’s happening at all confuses me. That’s the modern world, though, it has that effect on me generally…
