Vinyl Could Save The Music Industry
ZACH THAT:
I recently made the plunge into the world of vinyl after buying a three dollar turntable that works like a charm. As I started to spin Leonard Cohen's "I'm Your Man", Tom Wait's "Real Gone", and Michael Jackson's "Thriller" I realized that this might be the only hope that the music business has to turn it all around. We all know the problem, nobody buys CD's anymore because everything is digital and you can find any track/album for free with a few keystrokes. If they eliminated CD's and switched over to exclusive Vinyl releases, they could come back in a huge way. Here is my thought process.
1.) Release every album on iTunes and for download from their official site for an eight dollar or so amount. This will still result in illegal downloading but you will never be able to eliminate that. With this, stop releasing CD's, people put all their music on an iPod anyway so cut out all the packaging costs of a CD.
2.) Turn to Vinyl. The die hard fans who want to actually hold the album will buy this. Most new vinyls come with a free digital download, so if they want it on their iPod they have it.
The questions that remains is...why Vinyl? Let me tell you.
-The Artwork is huge...it feels like an art piece you should hang on your walls and most people do.
-Their isn't a personal player for it. You will never see people walking around with a portable vinyl player or listen to vinyl's in their car. This makes the music the primary focus when you decide to sit down and listen. This, to me, is the big problem. People put on their iTunes, watch tv, surf the Internet, talk on the phone, etc. With Vinyl, you make a conscious choice to put on the record and listen. Yes, you can still do those other things, but in the end it stand on its own...you don't have to turn on your computer to play records. Let's make music about the music again.
-The sound is all it's own. I'm not going to get into the, it sounds warm vs it sounds shitty debate...there are a slew of people who can argue this better than me so I shall stay away. The point is, the sound is unique and to me makes the music much more present, I feel as if I'm hearing the bands play in my room.
Who would have thought when Vinyl started going away that it might actually come back as the savior of the music industry? For those of you who might not agree, look at the numbers: "CD sales were down down 17% last year, but vinyl sales were up by 36% over the same period" -The Huffington Post.
Go out there, buy a record player, a few of those over sized works of art, and get that feeling of leaving the house and buying an album back in your life. I did...and it feels great.
I love the increase in sales of vinyl....up 30% from 2006 to 2007 & appears to be surging even higher this year...but can it save music? no, not even close.
ReplyDeleteVinyl sales were around 1 million in 2007, representing a market share of around 0.2% That only edges out what the cassette tape did. Records are being bought right now because it's fashionable. People do enjoy the tangible record to digital copies & it helps that digital copies are tending to come with records these days. In the end though, I think the surge in vinyl is largely due in part to nostalgia for a time that the kids buying records heard about growing up. We've always had the CD, so now we're giving vinyl a spin which will last for a little while until we're bored with that, and then vinyl will be left to the domain of DJs and audiophiles. Will annual vinyl sales ever reach the 942 million units or more like they got from CD sales in 2000 needed to sustain the industry? In a time where we're more transient and demanding of conveniences than ever? Not a chance. Vinyl sales are giving the industry false hope that the old way can work, giving breath to those who see the industries doom and are working on alternative methods of distribution and payment...