I keep being told by lots of people that Vinyl is outselling cd’s in significant numbers.
Is it really?
The new Peter Gabriel album has gone to number one after its first week of release.
Sales units were 11178 x cd’s and 2328 x lp’s. A difference of almost 5 to 1 in favour of CD’S suggests the propaganda machine is in overdrive to justify agendas set by record companies and manufacturers.
I have read other reports that indicated CD’S were selling in much higher unit numbers but that news seems to be concealed to suit a different argument.
As some buffoon in the USA once said – Fake News.
I believe generally the overall revenue from vinyl is higher than CDs even if they sell less.
I am pretty certain that in North America vinyl does indeed now outsell CDs.
The Gabriel example is not really a comparison as there was effectively a box set of 2 CDs and a Blu-ray (3 mixes) selling for less than the price of 1 LP where you only got one mix of your choice
And why would there be an agenda? Record companies just want to make money and CDs are cheaper and easier to produce.
The issue isn’t which sells more, CDs or vinyl. The issue is how poorly all physical media sells. CD looks terrible because of how far it’s fallen in sales since its heyday. Vinyl hasn’t dominated the market since the introduction of digital audio, so just about anything is an improvement. Any market share for either of these formats is just crumbs compared to streaming.
Yes, I didn’t say anything different.
@SteveT is the one who thinks CDs are deliberately being suppressed by Big Brother or something š
I buy both, CDs mainly in big box sets though. In most cases am not going to pay 35 quid or whatever for an LP that is a digital transfer anyway, but I like to have some albums on vinyl. Wilco ones always sound amazing.
I’m not against vinyl. I have about 5,000 LP records in my collection. But the reason I have them is because those particular albums were never released on CD. Given the choice between a CD, LP, SACD or blu-ray audio for stereo I pick CD every time. It’s a great format.
Yes but @dai the margins for cd’s are much smaller which is why there is the agenda.
In the record shop I work in we have perhaps about 10 percent cd’s or even less.
We still get customers who only want cd’s and decry the fact we have so little choice.
Iāve said this in another thread, but in my shop CD sales are well into double digit year on year growth, and not from a tiny base either. Itās also encouraging that, and I acknowledge that this is anecdata, the teenagers are buying them, not just crusty old Afterworders.
That’s nice to hear, it means both LPs and CDs are having a double-digit growth year. I wonder how cassettes are doing (albeit from a much lower starting point)?
Probably 5000% or something up to 5K units.
CD sales are actually expected to be down 6.6% in 2023 @fentonsteve @slotbadger. @SteveT They are falling less quickly than before but still at their lowest level in decades.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/dec/28/taylor-swift-and-rolling-stones-drive-christmas-surge-in-uk-vinyl-sales
It’s been some geological eras passed since I was a teenager, but I was fascinated to read teens are buying CDs, not just vinyl – teens who have the entire history of recorded music a swipe away, are opting for CDs.
From the anecdata you’ve gathered in your shop, would you say it skews to a type? Eg alternative, indie types, buying reissues of cult bands? Or are teens across the board, buying mainstream stuff on CD?
It is indeed bollocks. 11.6 million CDs were sold last year in the UK as opposed to 5.5 million LPs.
Vinyl is generating more revenue though – prolly because of people buying pricey collectors’ editions, plus the scaling up of production to 1990s levels will be bringing unit costs down while the retail prices actually go up.
In the 80s-90s CD was pushed because the profit margin was bigger – the same is now happening with vinyl.
https://webgrafikk.com/blog/news/vinyl-sales-for-2022/#:~:text=The%20actual%20figures%2C%20according%20to%20the%20British%20Phonographic,5.5%20million%20vinyl%20LPs%2C%20combing%20in%20%C2%A3150.5%20millions.
Yep. It is quite possible for “fewer sales of an expensive thing to make more turnover than more sales of a cheaper thing” to be true.
I’m really surprised that vinyl sales have seen double-digit growth* this year, as prices have increased dramatically from my POV. Up to a couple of years ago, new vinyl was around Ā£25. It it now more like Ā£35. As I rarely pay more than 25 quid for anything, I’ve bought more CDs in 2023 than in the previous 10 years.
(*) Possibly due to the vinyl presses not being block-booked for six months this year, churning out millions of Adele albums that nobody wanted to buy.
Does it really matter?
The reason I (and I imagine lots of other music lovers) am now buying increasing amounts of vinyl is that LPs sound better than CDs.
The fact that lots of other people may be doing likewise doesn’t enter into it
Sound ābetterā? I beg to differ. CDs have no pops or crackles for a start. It also depends what you play them on.
The endless discussion. The mastering is vital, CDs these days tend to be more “brickwalled” than vinyl i.e. lacking in dynamic range.
I wouldnt know a brick wall if I walked into it. I am not entirely sure one sounds necessarily better than the other but there again I only have a modest piece of equipment in which to play lp’s and cd’s on.
“Tends to be” is not definitive enough to be asserted as fact.
Go to any online discussion of vinyl records and you’ll find frequent tales of shoddy pressings. Sometimes entire runs of a particular release. This is also non-definitive but it is a factor.
Digital audio (how audio tends to be recorded in studios these days) is recorded in 24-bit resolution and CDs are a 16-bit format so there is a reduction there, but vinyl is subject to additional post-recording mastering over other formats, to make it conform to the RIAA curve of frequency response, in compensation for the non-linear frequency response of vinyl. Digital audio files can be released in 24-bit but are frequently released in 16-bit form.
Commercial pop and dance music are the only genres where “brickwalling” is still relatively common. You certainly won’t find it on classical, jazz, folk, country etc. recordings. Where you do find it, it will be across all formats of the release.
All of these formats rely on the quality of the music and musicianship of the players, the studio and it’s equipment, the skill of the recording engineer and the mixing engineer, the foibles of the producer, the quality of manufacture of the chosen medium, the equipment the listener plays the stuff on, the environment in which they play it and, ultimately, on their ears and mental state.
The entire argument that one of these three formats is superior to the others is at best extremely subjective and at worst rather nonsensical.
Most (no, I don’t have a definitive number) vinyl is pressed from 24-bit files nowadays. Many 24-bit downloads are either upsampled from 16-bit or just as badly mastered as the CD.
There is no one rule for all, each is an individual case.
Take, for example, the recent A Certain Ratio releases. The vinyl sounds great because it was mastered with Martin Moscrop present at the cut. The 24/96 download sounds awful (brickwalled), as does the CD (probably just down-sampled from the 24/96), as mastering was left to Mute’s in-house person (or just run through a plugin). I haven’t tried the cassette.
There is no logical sense to any of it.
I genuinely don’t know what is meant by brickwalling.
Could you enlighten me, please?
Dynamic range limiting. Turning all the quiet bits up (and all the loudest bits down a bit) to make the overall level louder. Everything sounds loud all the time.
So called because, when viewed on a waveform display, an album looks less like a mountain range and more like a brick wall (with the ‘mortar’ the gaps between the tracks).
Peak limiting has been around for decades (to stop the needle jumping out of a vinyl groove) and isn’t really a problem.
Think: Oasis, or Metallica’s Death Magnetic album.
But why exactly is that done @fentonsteve?
If an album is recorded to sound quiet and loud , then why mess with that?
And in response to another thread, I loved cassettes. Particularly my cassette of āItās my Mixā by Talk Talk.
It was initially done to sound louder on the radio, and then to overcome the poor playback quality of iPod earbuds.
But almost nobody listens to the radio in the internet age, and everybody has better earphones nowadays, so I din’t know why some CD mastering persists on being so bloody awful.
Fair enough, ta, but I still donāt really understand why, if something has been recorded with quiet and loud passages, that would then get nullified.
The Pixies must be furious.
It’s nullified because the quiet passages aren’t really quiet any more and the loud passages head into distortion
I kinda know that but itās not what the band who recorded the song would have wanted! Surely?
Fred, amongst my chums I have one Hi-Res Mastering Engineer and one Hi-Fi reviewer. They both say “first release format is as the artist intended” (if they attended the mastering session at all). Hence, I suppose, the inflated price of first press batch vinyl, etc. Artists rarely attend remastering sessions.
In other words: pre-1963(ish) 78s; 1963-1988 LP; post-1988 CD.
Each with provisos, obviously. I struggle with the sound of 1980s CDs, f’rinstance.
Yes I suppose if the band wanted it brickwalled for all versions/formats then that should be adhered to.
Regarding the band’s interest in mixing/mastering. Allegedly, at least up to The White album in 1968, the Beatles were heavily involved in the mixing of the mono versions. but then went to the pub leaving George Martin and his engineers to knock off the less important stereo mixes in a few hours.
Hence the revisionism of the stereo mixes, firstly with George himself re-doing Help! and Rubber Soul for first CD release in 87. Now son Giles with Sam Okell are going through them again even though the likes of Abbey Road and the White Album had a good stereo mix to begin with.
Note the mono mixes remain untouched until now as far as I an aware, just mastered a bit differently when they were re-released in 2009/2014
Extreme dynamic range can be a problem with classical – especially symphonic – recordings, where quiet can be very very quiet, and loud very very loud. This works brilliantly in the concert hall but can be a pain on record where you find yourself turning the sound right up at certain points only to wake up the entire neighbourhood a few seconds later.
On the whole, Iād rather use headphones on those occasions, than suggest wholesale brickwalling of classical recordings.
Re: NigelT. And how often you play the vinyl. Every time you listen to a vinyl album it deteriorates to a greater or lesser degree. This does not happen with CDs. CDs also don’t come with the risk of a ‘bad pressing’ or warping – and if you scroll down enough in Discogs it becomes very apparent that not all new vinyl albums measure up to audiophiles’ exacting standards.
Cough. PDO rot. Cough.
As Dai says, a lot of it nowadays comes down to the mastering.
If you have a good cartridge, well set up running on a reliable turntable and you change the stylus when recommended the amount of wear on a record should be minimal. Certainly good for thousands of plays without much audible deterioration, maybe not tens of millions like CDs, but who has the time? š
Agree with the sentiment from NigelT, but does it depend what you play them on?
I’m currently listening to a 50p Kinks’ CD on a Ā£36 CD player, and it sure sounds like the Kinks ever did to me.
Kinks CDs are notoriously awful for sound quality, but depends a bit which one you have
Not to me they’re not. It’s “Something Else” from 2004 with all the As and Bs at the end. I can’t think that there is a wafer’s difference between hearing Wonderboy on this CD and hearing it on the radio in 1968.
Yes, that’s a very poor digital transfer, probably hard to notice on a 36 quid player though
Those extended versions have great tracklistings though
Dai’s right – there was a good while (all of the 1990s) when their albums were not available on CD and bootleggers filled a gap in the (grey) market. Sanctuary came to the rescue in the early 2000s.
I have the Sanctuary CDs with the extra tracks, all bought for a song in Fopp, and they’re fine, but I mostly play the Mono Collection vinyl box (see also: Fabs).
That mono collection set is one of my prized possessions, sits next to similar Beatles, Dylan and Stones ones on my shelves.
Indeed. ‘Tis a lovely thing, and a lot more reasonably priced than the Fabs & Stones boxes.
Slightly ironic that the mono vinyl issues is what prompted Sanctuary to track down the first-gen master tapes… and then do properly-mastered CDs. Those CDs from 10 years earlier were mastered from (ahem) “various sources”, but at Ā£3 each I could hardly complain.
LPs measure poorer on every single metric of fidelity you can name… dynamic range, distortion, signal to noise, frequency response, wow/flutter… CDs are 16/44.1. If an LP were digital, it would be about 10/24. LPs also have defects that CDs don’t, specifically clicks, pops and inner groove distortion. The only advantage new LPs have is larger cover art.
Lot more engagement with vinyl than CDs
Especially when its in trouser form…
I’m told
Itās a good job I refrained from using the word
ātactileā or weād be swapping smutty comments
All weekend
Are you, by any chance, using a Crosley record player to make those measurements?
Crazy, I know, but I suspect CD sales would be bigger in my local town if W.H. Smith, Sainsbury’s etc. still… erm… stocked CDs.
The conspiracy to promote vinyl runs deep. You think it began in 2012 with the fresh pressing of Rumours? Think again. Think bigger.
Let me take you back to the period right before the great financial crisis, when a group of record company executives held a secret retreat on the banks of Lake Geneva. The subject of this symposium? Nothing less than a total reworking of the Great Format Hierarchy.
Over a gruelling five day period they sketched out a plan so fiendish and ambitious that only a handful of people alive have been willing to testify to its very existence. A plan that would shake up the way people listened to music (or at least believed that they listened to music), that would cost lives on multiple continents and that is understood to have been sworn to in blood by no less than three sitting US Presidents, the Chairman of the World Bank and Nipper the dog himself.
I’m unable to share the fine details on this forum, but suffice it to say the Geneva Accords, as they were later dubbed, call for a radical reworking of music listening habits, enforced via any means necessary, be that maliciously withholding stock, artificially lowering the audio quality of CDs, inserting subliminal messages into music websites, or the administration of experimental vaccines. Voracious industry negating your life; rarely understood, less easily stopped.
Who puts their finger on the scale? Who keeps the hard rock audience male? They do. They do. Who releases dodgy stats? Who discredits streaming apps? They do. They do.
That’s about as much as I can say without jeopardizing the safety of every man, woman (ha!) and child (double ha!) on this website, but what I will close on is this. The conspiracy to place vinyl back atop its throne is an onion, in that it’s big and complex and it will make you cry if you dig into it. But also like an onion it can be peeled back; carefully, delicately, layer by layer, to reveal at its heart the mad genius behind it all. And that genius is Kid Dynamite. And slap bang next to him in the middle of that onion? Taylor Swift. Search your heart, you know it to be true….
oh Bingo, I had hoped it wouldn’t be you who dug this deep. You have made some powerful enemies now, and I can only advise you start checking under your car in the mornings.
I’ve been checking under my car for years. And you know what I find there each and every time? Vinyl. Freshly pressed vinyl.
Chilling.
You’ve already said too much. You’ve been reckless here.
I buy quite a lot of vinyl but the vast majority of it tends to be second hand. I wouldn’t ordinarily buy something new on vinyl unless it was by an artist I already like- Macca or The Waterboys for instance. Sometimes, as with the Morrissey album ‘California Son’ or ‘Defiance’ by Ian Hunter I’ll buy them on both vinyl and CD. But hey. That’s me. I’m crazy like that.
I played my LP copy of Sticky Fingers again the other night that I got in the late 70s. No audible scratches, pops or clicks. Sounds better than ever. Of course it’s subjective to a degree but subjective is important too.
Going back to what I said above, the fact that LPs are more tactile and more engaging also means you get more emotionally attached to them.
Never really lost sleep over a lost or damaged CD, but feel quite sad if I have to try and replace an LP for those reasons. Especially if itās an album I got in the days when I could only afford a couple of LPs a month
Totally agree. They are proper artifacts, and for me a direct connection to my dad.
The process, the turning over, the feel of the thing (steady), perusing the sleeve. All lends itself to a immersive experience. I tend to think it’s right to play it as originally conceived at the time, how the tracks were ordered. The idea of sides seems to matter. These things aren’t entirely rational anyway. It’s about feel.
If there is a gatefold sleeve you can wear it as a hat. It looks smart, like a bishop.
Santana’s Lotus opens up with so many flaps you could almost make a dress out of it.
Does it still have the working zip? Very tactile. Up and down. In and out. Damages the LP next to it.
The zip works fine. Better than on many a jacket bought since. A bit of card is torn off, sadly, leaving a glimpse of underpants beneath. A bit like my own torn and frayed garments. Highly immersive. You don’t get that with CD.
I have a pair of jeans I caught the arse pocket on a door handle and ripped, and now wear for gardening. Mrs F told me to throw them away, but I told her they were my tribute to Sticky Fingers. She rolled her eyes and told me to throw them away.
Dog walkers and/or neighbours passing by occasionally get a glance of my undercrackers. Mrs F just tells me to throw them away.
Is there a tribute to Sticky Fingers at the front as well?
….. asking for a friend
Thankfully not. I don’t have the, erm, capacity to do it justice.
I would hazard a guess that the vinyl resurgence and debates about vinyl v CD is very much an Anglo American pastime. I seem to recall residents that in Germany CDs were still outselling vinyl 5 :1 a year or two back, when the ratio was closer to 2:1 in the UK. And I very much doubt that people in Japan or Korea have switched to vinyl in large numbers. People in India, even the wealthy ones, don’t appear to buy much physical product at all. Nor will vinyl be troubling the scorers in Africa.
I was listening to a couple of hipster announcers on local indie radio. Discussing CDs one says to the other, in a semi derisive tone,”have you still got a CD player”. The other says “I have one in the car”.
These guys are collectors. One worked, I think, in Records and Tapes in Notting Hill Gate . No way would they have ditched their entire CD collections. In fact I know they haven’t coz they play CD on their shows. So why not have a CD player in your house?
Fucking stupid!
I blame car manufacturers, no longer supplying CD players as standard, thinking the ability to stream all that a driver should need or want. They are wrong.
I have one in my 10 yr old car. Really hardly ever use it. Everything is either streamed from phone (mainly Spotify) or mp3s on a USB drive. That way have easy access to thousands of albums. If I buy a used CD at a charity store I might play it on the way home ….
I have one in my 15-year old car – I listen to a CD every time I drive! I keep a Logitech wallet with about 32 CDs in the glovebox, swap them out regularly.
In my car I Blutooth my digital files on my Fiio. Simples! Well, it’s slightly more difficults than just pressing play on a CD player, but on the other hand show me a CD player with 3,000 LP’s worth of tracks on it.
I have a working CD player in my current 21-year-old car, but I can’t remember the last time I played a CD in-car. I very rarely even listen to the radio in-car, come to think of it. Usually only put the radio on to try and find out why I’m stuck in a traffic jam.
I sometimes used to play music from my phone via bluetooth, pre-retirement, in my work van.
Wow, cars! Individual transport ā that’s SO last century… š
Correct.
Individual motorised transport is unsustainable, long-term. Short-term, the public transport options hereabouts are limited and becoming more so. A large proportion of local buses are still diesel-powered.
My current silver-grey petrol-engined machine, Saabrina, is the most pleasant-to-drive car that I’ve ever owned, so I’m enjoying my limited* use of it** while I can.
*I drive it when I need to go somewhere, not just because I want to drive.
**Being an inanimate object, Saabrina identifies as gender-neutral, despite the female name.
My skoda has one. In the recess of the glove box on the other side of the car. Brilliant.
My 8-y-o VW Golf is like that – what a pain in the arse. 99% of the time I listen to the radio, the other 1% I play files off a USB stick.
The one thing my Skoda doesn’t have is a CD player. Not that I care, there’s an SD card slot in the glove compartment with roughly 100 CDs’ worth of tunes on it. Imagine having 100 CDs cluttering up the car! Also Apple Car Play and Bluetooth, so all good.
You need a CD player to give the mechanic something to listen to.
I have my waiting list of ā CDs to hearā in the car: the side pocket in the door and 3 shoe boxes. Yes, probably a 100, some forever getting shunted down the list and often stuff I have burnt and so know a bit, often from reviewing, so never listened at leisure or, if you will, for pleasure.
My Skoda has a 6 disc auto changer in the boot, but also has a CD slot in the head unit. Haven’t used either in many years. Stream (mostly podcasts) from my phone.
Yeah but I take a cd or two out of the shelf I put them on the seat. I play them. Then i take them back and get some others.
No loading onto a card , no formatting and they sound great.
I think you might be overestimating the amount of time and effort I put into formatting and loading up an SD card…
Questions.
What are you downloading from ?
Is it digitally downloaded music files? That sounds a pretty easy task. But for me I either stream or its the physical for me overwhelmingly.
If it is a cd you have to load it up then load it down donāt you? . Admittedly just the once but still seems are kerfuffle.
But it’s all part of the fun and enjoyment. I load all of my box sets into my office iTunes so I can listen to it while working (or Ā»workingĀ«…). Every track gets proper tagging with composer, producer, recording date, etc., and I make my own cover pix, too! That’s one Saturday afternoon spent if it’s the new Ā»Memphis Blues BoxĀ« (20 discs) for example. But it also allows me to put the tracks into new playlists (Jug Bands, R&B, Rock’n’Roll, 60s Blues, etc.), or maybe put all the Rosco Gordon tracks together. Then the various SUN recordings have to be added to the Ā»Sun Records Classic EraĀ« playlist, and the Ā»Best of 1928Ā« bunch needs updating, too.
And no, I don’t use Gracenotes or any other of those web-based tagging tools.
At home, we listen to music sitting on the sofa, and the sound coming directly from a record, disc or cassette.
I prefer an ipod.
Files in which format and which resolution?
I’ve no idea.
78 r.p.m.
Wax cylinders are ‘rad’.
You canāt beat shellac and a big hornā¦
Get a load of my barrel organ.
I think I’ve commented on the wrong thread. š¶
This exchange amply demonstrates the technological chasm that exists at the Afterword.
When I absolutely, positively have to take to the mean streets my limping about is enlivened by a Fiio Dap and a pair of wired iems burbling sweet jazz nothings into my shell-likes downloaded for offline listening from Tidal or Qobuz. Full fat Flac is the whole of the law so mote it be.