Vinyl Will Outsell CD's For First Time Since.....

[Murphy Slaw]

1986

Well, I'll be darned. Who'da thunk it...?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/techn...cid=spartanntp

[BrunoBlack]

Do you know how this compares to digital streaming & download? I guessing physical copies like CDs and vinyl have become a small niche.

EDIT — I just read the article and see — “Streaming remains the most popular way to consume music, accounting for 80% of industry revenues...”

[Bob Womack]

I think the most interesting portion of this whole trend has been how it was engineered by the music distributors rather than led by the consumers.

Bob

[jpd]

Originally Posted by Bob Womack

I think the most interesting portion of this whole trend has been how it was engineered by the music distributors rather than led by the consumers.

Bob

Me too. I listened to an interview with a well known guitarist talking about the reversal of income. He said years ago you made a living from sales of your recordings. Now, you only make a decent living getting paid for live shows. The future of the recording industry is going to be very unstable with all of this.

[imwjl]

Originally Posted by Bob Womack

I think the most interesting portion of this whole trend has been how it was engineered by the music distributors rather than led by the consumers.

Bob

I'm not sure how it is engineered by the distributors in this day and age. I'd be very curious to know. I follow retail - have to. Where I work the real estate division has small and large tenants and our own stores share space with independents and retailers I'm sure most or all here know. For music the tenants include an independent music/book seller with a vinyl niche that's grown.

It was entertaining for me when my daughter now in college was among high school friends getting a lot of interest in vinyl records.

[1neeto]

Originally Posted by Bob Womack

I think the most interesting portion of this whole trend has been how it was engineered by the music distributors rather than led by the consumers.

Bob

Very interesting way of looking at it. I don’t think RIAA engineered this. Once CD’s were able to be burned into a hard disk and shared over the Internet, everything changed. The convenience of having thousands of songs in your computer then evolved to portable players. The drama with Napster is what really opened the door for the recording industry to monetize after taking down the free file sharing behemoth. Then the iPod changed everything again. A 1GB iPod fit comfortably in your pocket and could store about 1000 songs. Consumers drove this to happen, the recording industry simply reacted to it, and here we are today. I haven’t bought a physical CD in about four years.

[Bob Womack]

The RIAA is an industry association, not the industry themselves. I read an article in which the main thesis was that as soon as the CD format got established people began ripping the music so the distributors and labels had been seeking a wait out of the format ever since. They also began mechanizing a format that would have minimal manufacturing cost as well. Under the guise of portability they brought in file download which spawned streaming and that has completed the dissolution of the profit structure of recorded music.

Bob

[RedJoker]

Originally Posted by Bob Womack

The RIAA is an industry association, not the industry themselves. I read an article in which the main thesis was that as soon as the CD format got established people began ripping the music so the distributors and labels had been seeking a wait out of the format ever since. They also began mechanizing a format that would have minimal manufacturing cost as well. Under the guise of portability they brought in file download which spawned streaming and that has completed the dissolution of the profit structure of recorded music.

Bob

I'm confused. Are you saying that digitally downloaded music was developed by the distributors and labels as a cost saving measure and that the consumers don't really want it? I think I'm missing something here....

[imwjl]

Originally Posted by Bob Womack

The RIAA is an industry association, not the industry themselves. I read an article in which the main thesis was that as soon as the CD format got established people began ripping the music so the distributors and labels had been seeking a wait out of the format ever since. They also began mechanizing a format that would have minimal manufacturing cost as well. Under the guise of portability they brought in file download which spawned streaming and that has completed the dissolution of the profit structure of recorded music.

Bob

The RIAA and conventional music industry were out to lunch.

I had to be aware of the change and licensing when I was what some called an Apple evangelist and when I worked for a voice, sound & media over the Internet startup. My job was only a technician but the display, demo and proof of concept stuff we did involved higher ups because the stuff was demonstrated and piloted in Fortune 500 firms and a major retailer I was assigned to. One of the two jobs was also in partnership with AT&T.

Still in the 1980s I was shipped early Sony, Philips and Apple products that became our taking CDs with computers for granted. The hardware and software in the was all the developers or originators of the standard. Sony, Philips, MPEG group, CCET, and for a while Intel with what became early cameras and video across the Internet. Sony via owning what I recall was Columbia or CBS was the only conventional or traditional music and recording industry player in it. In a time when we made trips and demos between the SF Bay area and in my case Fortune 500s with HQs in Midwest states the demos we did made it really clear it was all about shaking up what people thought of as media, voice, and cameras.

I digress, but those early demos were also funny because demos and pilots moved from private networks to the beginning of the Internet there for all. When demos were done done across private WANs and early telecom or BBS services someone had to be watchful so execs didn't happen on pre-historic Internet porn.

This current phenomenon is driven by consumers and not the industry. CD and DVD is a dead on the limb format without any niche like what carried on or has been reborn with vinyl. A fun bit to me was or is seeing my now in college daughter's generation get into vinyl in past years. A group of kids added to DJs and some who kept their interest in that physical format.

I don't believe we have much or anything with music retail that isn't entirely or mostly driven by the consumer. Long after that neat time when I was beta testing the tech we take for granted I work for a parent company that is in retail, real estate for retail and food business. We have our own stores, retail properties in the commercial real estate, and whether being the landlord or tenant are at same properties with music sellers. That's Best Buy, Target, Barnes & Nobel, Apple Store & a still surviving used music and book seller. Distributors respond to consumers more than anything.

[RP]

I suppose this is kind of cool for those of us who grew up on records (we didn't call them "vinyl" in those days), but I sure don't plan on going back down that road....

Originally Posted by Bob Womack

The roll-out of "CD is dead" was done when CD was still a very viable format...

Bob

And yet I continue to buy them. Maybe someday I'll be back in step with the current trend; but having reached an age when I don't even buy green bananas, probably not.....

[Bob Womack]

The roll-out of "CD is dead" was done when CD was still a very viable format and was done by Apple and the record companies.

Bob

[imwjl]

Originally Posted by RP

I suppose this is kind of cool for those of us who grew up on records (we didn't call them "vinyl" in those days), but I sure don't plan on going back down that road....

Yes, we at the sum-total dream of what all the product manager, marketing and sales staff present would say when my job was the tech part of making all the prototypes or crude old versions work.

I've pointed to the fruit crates full of LPs when my kids bring up some 1970s stuff they like and same for my turntable but we keep using that monthly family plan subscription.

Maybe tinnitus and hearing loss influence some of lack of interest but I don't want to hear scratches or pops. I'll keep getting out of the chair as something more fun or functional than changing disks. I'm not going to cry over the new version of my car not having a disk player. I've never used the one I have now.

[Inyo]

Original poster proclaims that: "Vinyl Will Outsell CD's For First Time Since.....1986."

Yet another wholly misleading statistic.

Cds are still outselling vinyl records over two to one, per unit basis. It's just that vinyl records are approximately twice as expensive to purchase than cds.

The raw facts, unadorned, straight from Rolling Stone Magazine, September 6, 2019:

"Vinyl records earned $224.1 million (on 8.6 million units) in the first half of 2019, closing in on the $247.9 million (on 18.6 million units) generated by CD sales."

That means that vinyl records, on average, are currently selling for about 26.06 dollars per album.

Cds, on the other hand, are selling for roughly 13.33 dollars per cd.

And further--even the premise that cds outsold vinyl in 1986 is misleading.

Observe: Direct from a most interesting read from a United Press International story published in the Chicago Tribune newspaper on December 2, 1986--( Compact Disc Sales Booming ):

"Although the price of compact disc players has declined to as little as $99, the cost of the recorded discs has remained relatively high. An album that would sell for $8.98 costs between $12.98 and $14.98 on compact disc."

Another excellent, pertinent, retro-read is available over at The Vinyl Days
, dated October 26, 1986.

A salient statistic from that article:

"Although there are some 80 million turntables and fewer than three million CD players in America, the dollar volume of vinyl and CDs is now roughly equal and shifting slowly toward CDs. CDs sell for twice the price of records."

Ergo, per unit basis, vinyl still outsold cds back in 1986.

By the way, here's a most fascinating chart, showing the historical distribution of per unit cd sales since 1983 (up to 2018). Notice that it's an almost perfect Bell Curve:

[Dirk Hofman]

Napster came out 4 years before the iTunes music store, which is a lifetime in tech. Yeah, the iTunes music store put the nail in the coffin, but the coffin was already in the ground. It was a completely tech and consumer driven change that the record industry flailed at addressing until Apple figured out a viable model. For a while. Now it's Spotify.

[FrankHudson]

Because I like so many different kinds of music I will always be the customer of whatever method and media get me the most of it the cheapest, regardless of what that is.

I was fast to LP because singles cost more per song.

So I was slow to CD because they cost more per unit and because a lot of music I liked wasn't on them in the early years.

I was fast to cassette because of live recording and the old evil of tape your friends' LP. Of course it wasn't long after CDs came out the Achilles' heel Bob W. points out was discovered. The fears of "home taping" were a low volume warm up.

I was fast to digital files often because "free"--yes free is detrimental to the industry and likely so to artists and then to the art. I tried to by as many CDs as I could afford, but listened to them on digital files more often.

Streaming is close enough to free for this consumer to be happy with it as a consumer and researcher/critic. Inanely convenient. The remuneration to artist aspect is troubling, yes. And it'd be nice if it was higher quality and listened to in a higher quality context, but my old scratchy LPs on a cheap record player weren't "Hi Fi" regardless of what was on the label.

The 21st century has brought us is an incredible and problematic oversupply of content. Music and most of our arts are struggling to deal with this, even if they don't recognize this is an over-riding change requiring analysis.

You know what's the one thing I miss about the vinyl LP? The packaging. Maybe it was just my youth, but a lot of records were also interesting as objects--and the foot-square format allowed a lot of visual data! CD box sets tried to carry that on, but there's no real streaming equivalent, though the multimedia project drop these days tries to supply a beyond-sonic experience, it seems ephemeral as the linkage of the extra-musical stuff fades away and isn't carried with the music media in one object.