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1 of 1- Steve Fay
- Senior Member
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- From: Fulton County, Illinois, USA
- Registered: 26/5/2011
- Posts: 359
The Vinyl Record IS Coming Back!
(Two or three recent threads have touched on vinyl versions of Crosby materials newly available. It seems like we may be seeing increasingly more vinyl releases than we have for some time.)
I just discovered another used vinyl record shop has opened up about 45 minutes west of where I live. The article revealing this to me, posted on the website of WIUM, my local public radio station, went on to explain not only that it seems to be a good idea for a record merchant to open up so-called brick-and-mortar store (rather than relying only on internet sales), but also that new vinyl records "are making a comeback. The Recording Industry Association of America reports the number of vinyl records shipped last year increased nearly 26%." Presumably that refers to a 2010 increase over 2009 figures. Writing in November of 2009 on RIAA's MUSIC NOTES blog, Gregg MacDonald reported that vinyl record shipments the year before that had more than doubled "to $57 million, the highest level since 1990!" So there seems to have been significant growth in the new and re-release vinyl record industry over a sequence of recent years.
McDonald went on to cite several contemporary artists who were bringing out new records on vinyl. I must confess that a couple of years ago I wondered if that phenomenon was a fad; however, when I visited another used-and-new music shop (carrying CDs and vinyl) just recently, I discovered that what had been a few bins of new vinyl records had now been expanded to the entire length on one side of a thirty-foot long aisle!
According to Eric Astor, president and CEO of Furnace MFG Media Duplication Solutions, in Merrifield, Virginia, [quoted in a longer article by MacDonald on FairfaxTimes.com] "Vinyl never died. What happened was that sometime in the late 1980s when compact discs were all the rage, all the major record labels put out an edict that discs were the way to go." Apparently since then nearly all of the machinery formerly pressing 12" black platters has ground to a halt. According to MacDonald, in 2009 Astor's company claimed to be " 'the sole U.S. provider of high-performance, vinyl records.' The company -- as part of its overall compact disc, DVD, Blu-Ray and USB duplication business -- also manufactures vinyl records for major labels and artists such as Tom Petty, Neil Young, Green Day, R.E.M., Metallica and Madonna."
According to the WIUM news article, Courtney Blankenship, Director of the Music Business Program at Western Illinois Unversity "said artists trying to stand out from the pack today sometimes do so by making their music available on vinyl." And there is another rather counter-intuitive reason that record companies may be embracing their recording artists' interests in vinyl: with CD sales clearly declining while MP3 downloads and music streaming are increasing, vinyl records are actually becoming MORE PROFITABLE! As Astor of Furnace MFG explains, "Vinyl is more expensive to make than a CD, but you make more profit from it than you do from selling downloaded music."
While many of the used (and new re-release) LP shoppers may be mainly interested in jazz and classic rock, with contemporary artists releasing new albums on vinyl, too, younger generations are also beginning to partake of the "vinyl experience," enough so that the argument over whether clean well-made vinyl played on good equipment can sound sound as good or better than the digital variety seems to be ratchetting up, rather than dying down.
Clearly a partisan in that battle, Astor told McDonald, "Music used to be fun and dangerous. There was a level of insanity that was unpredictable. A vinyl recording captures that much better than the limited frequency range that digital recordings are capable of. People are hearing music again the way musicians actually made it, and the way they wanted you to hear it."
Am I listening for the "danger" when I put on one of my Crosby LPs? The danger on my mind might be worrying about holding it so lightly and carefully that I drop it and scratch it (spoken from experinece). Maybe danger isn't the right word most of the time, but there definitely could be qualities of the voice heard better in the analog, compared at least to certain over-compressed digital versions (I'm thinking smallish MP3s more than CDS here). In any case, more new and re-released vinyl certainly seems to be a music industry trend as (and parlty because) CDs are declining. What would Bing think of that? He was always ready to embrace new technologies -- better microphones, magnetic tape, even the Edsel! On the other hand, he never promoted a CD player, but sold millions of Philco record players. And if he ever saw a pile of CD's, he just might think they were Bob Hope's tiddly winks.
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Last edited by Steve Fay (15/12/2011 4:38 pm)