- cross-posted to:
- music@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- music@lemmy.world
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CD fans right now:
CDs are just digital files plus waste. Vinyl is a musical ritual.
CD is still the only way to buy a digital popular music in most countries.
No it’s not. The iTunes Music Store is available in the majority of countries in the world. Plus there are other services that cover some of the other countries. Vanishingly few people can choose only a CD.
iTunes music store is not available in mainland China, which is 1/5 of the world’s population
Yes, but this is about what is available in most countries, not what is available in all countries. That still leaves 119 markets and 80% of the world’s population being available. Pretty sure that counts as “most.”
Also, the point isn’t about iTunes, it’s about alternatives to CDs for digital music. China likely has some online store to buy music, but I have no idea.
To make the claim 80% of population has it you have to have the numbers, since South Korea doesn’t have it, a lot of African countries (just going down the list, Algeria, Angola, Benin, etc) don’t have it
It looks like half of the world doesn’t have iTunes music purchases
They do, maybe, but the streaming services often can’t get the original master so they play rerecordings of the songs
I just pirate it
vinyl is cool, but cd is the digital recording, mastered in a known manner, to a high degree. It’s the most consistent form of product you will get from music. Plus it’s a physically collectable thing. And it’s cheap.
I’m not made of money over here.
CDs are digital files plus ownership.
I download my MP3 and FLAC files and then I own them and play them on any device I want.
There certainly are some services where you can legally download MP3 and FLAC files. Bandcamp, for example. If you download your music like that then, yes, you do own it.
But I’m not aware of anywhere you can get music from the major music labels nowadays (Amazon used to sell MP3s and so did Google Play Music, but neither does any more). If you do, I’d love to know.
On the other hand, you can still - although it’s getting harder - buy CDs for major label artists and then you own the music (that copy of it).
True, CDs are the most reliable way to get the digital file.
7digital is a site where I’ve bought major label music and get the files. If it’s not on bandcamp it’s often on 7digital. They don’t have everything though.
If you’re curious, nearly half a million cassettes sold last year, too, according to Billboard.
I’m more curious about who’s still selling music on cassette and who’s willing to buy it.
Prisoners.
I see a lot of folks on bandcamp who sells cassettes for instance
Do you know why they choose to sell cassettes rather than or maybe along with other formats?
Cheap short runs. National will do 50 unit orders and you can sell em at 5-7$ and you’re still doubling your money on tour tapes.
But do enough people still have functional cassette players?
idk how many people have functional tape decks but you can still buy new production component and portable ones and there’s a healthy used market.
Not for sure, but I have a few leads.
I’ve heard and discussed with artists who mentioned that producing vinyl was very expensive compared to cassettes, which are cheap and easy to DIY.
Then I’d add that cassettes have a retro appeal nowadays. Lastly, they are an analog format, opposite to the CD which is the 1:1 copy of the downloaded FLAC album downloaded from Bandcamp.
Analog, sure, but very low quality. 1/8" tape is not enough to reproduce sound accurately and there’s a lot of tape hiss. There’s a reason why professional analog multitrack studios use 1" tape.
Ehh, all those 1” tape machines are 8-tracks and designed for editing, not playback. Magnetic tape fidelity has a lot more to do with medium, bias and processing than the width of the tape itself.
Hell, plenty of analog shops use four and eight track machines that run 1/4” tape!
Compact cassette also has the potential to sound very good. If you would like a demonstration, look up the vwestlife yt channel or listen to a good tape on a good tape deck.
I wanna go even further than retro. Gimme the hottest new single on wax cylinder for my phonograph…
I could get back into cassette tapes.
Not me, I don’t miss rewinding them shits. CDs are still good though, I still buy those because you can’t go wrong by having it on the most highly-detailed and durable medium.
My first CD I bought in the mid 80’s still plays fine. The selection of CDs was paltry and the only thing I could find at my parent’s town that I was remotely interested in was ZZ Top’s Eliminator.
Haha that’s funny because I bought that ZZ Top album on cassette as a kid, one of my first music purchases.
And later due to lack of options, I bought Fabulous Thunderbirds “Tuff Enuf”.
What is everyone’s opinions on the sound quality of vinyl?
I understand the collectibility of physical media, and the novelty of owning a vinyl and the machine that plays them. The large art piece that is the case (and often the disc itself). Showing support for your favorite artists by owning physical media from them.
Those are great reasons to collect vinyl.
But a lot of my friends claim vinly is of higher audio quality than anything else, period. This is provably false, but it seems to be a common opinion.
How often have you seen this and what are your thoughts on it?
It’s good.
Higher audio quality than CD? No, that is demonstrably false.
More pleasant to listen to than CD or other digital formats? Yes, that I agree with. It’s entirely subjective, but I’m definitely not alone in the feeling. The fact it is hard to quantify is why lots of people don’t “get” vinyl until they’ve sat and heard it on a decent system. Something about it is pleasing. As another commenter mentioned, it might just be the imperfections.
So I guess it’s a bit of a philosophical question. If CDs technically sound better, but vinyl sounds more pleasing: does the vinyl then sound better? People tend to chase pleasure, and in the time it takes someone to explain how much lower the noise floor is on CD or how we can only perceive so many samples, etc, etc – you could have been chilling with multiple records and had a great listening experience.
Something about it is pleasing. As another commenter mentioned, it might just be the imperfections.
I think it’s the slight hissing sound you hear as the needle drags. That faint, slightly pink noise isn’t dissimilar from white noise people use to go to sleep, and I think human brains like that sort of sound.
IMO is just placebo effect. In a blind experiment, all else being equal, I doubt you would be able to tell the difference between a vinyl and a CD. That’s my two cents
I know for a fact I would hear the difference – but primarily because of the imperfections in the vinyl, as well as the different bass response. I can rule out placebo.
And I bet horse carriages outsold the Ford Model-T this year too
Wow. What is that ‘other’ physical medium? Is MiniDisc also coming back and beating CDs?
There are things like Super Audio CDs and MACDs etc… I believe there may even be some blue ray audio releases.
Those are kind of rare, though; can they really be outselling CDs by so much? Or maybe the author mislabeled the key and ‘other’ is supposed to be the sliver on top?
I don’t know how widespread it is outside of metal, but I’ve been seeing more and more bands offering tapes. Sometimes a release is only on tape, other times the tape might be $6, the CD $15 and the LP $25, so there are different ties available for those who want a physical copy. I probably got 10 tapes or so within the last year.
Tape makes a lot of sense audio-quality wise especially for people who insist on analogue for some silly reason, the prices don’t make sense, though: Tapes are expensive to manufacture. CDs and vinyl are pressed whole while tapes need to be run through a machine, centimetre by centimetre. Though maybe for small runs it does make sense as you don’t need a physical master.
You hit the nail on the head. Even ten years ago people would use national audio and get the shortest run possible (50 units).
I never got below $2 unit cost, but there’s good money to be made selling short runs of tapes after a set.
Can’t beat analog audio. A lot of newer releases are mastered digitally anyways so sometimes it’s not worth buying those on vinyl. I prefer to get some older albums on vinyl because there’s some shit you can’t hear in the streaming versions of certain tracks. CDs are a pass for me, they are basically just flat USB drives.
I don’t even know where to start with your comment.
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Digital mastering was already a thing when vinyl reigned.
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CDs have much more fidelity than vinyl, no matter what vinyl enthusiasts say.
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CDs being flat USB drives… what does that even mean?
Anyone who says vinyl is better is really just enjoying the experience. And you know what? That’s fine. The problem is, some of them do a terrible job of explaining that it’s not actually about the audio quality. When it is actually about the audio quality, vinyl is worse, but some people enjoy that aspect too.
I picked up a little bit on the “audiophile” hobby in the last few years because I was bored and was tired of listening to crappy sound systems with tinny speakers and wanted something a little more premium.
In the “audiophile” community there is all kinds of stuff being marketed mostly to those with more money than brains trying to eek more quality out of their vinyl setups using $10,000 “cartridges” and “record cleaning machines” and the like. I have no idea what these people are thinking because a much easier path to getting quality music to your speakers is to use a digital source.
However, I don’t know who at this point would use CDs either. CDs are obviously better quality than vinyl, 8-track, or cassette, but these days you can get CD quality (or even better, master quality from the mixing boards) digitally and losslessly via the Internet and save yourself the collecting of disks.
So I think CDs are kinda stuck in no man’s land. Vinyl enthusiasts are in a few groups: loony tunes buying $10k cartridges for their record players, people who like the “aesthetic” of vinyl and don’t really care about the quality, people who sample / mix / DJ from vinyl…and the overlap between those groups…CD enthusiasts are people who…like the quality of a digital format but want to still…collect things? Dislike convenience? I’m not sure.
long tangent
I am probably at the exact right age and demographic to be a CD enthusiast (it was my primary listening method in my early to late teens so that should trigger nostalgia, I’m a big music fan, and I was one of the few people dorky / techy enough to make “mix CDs”) and I cannot imagine ever wanting to go back to CDs…digital files overtook all other source types for me less than a decade after I started having a substantial CD collection. I ripped all of my CDs to digital files at one point and tried to go get some money for a large CD collection I had and watched as the music store guy went over every single (working) CD with a fine tooth comb and explained why I could get $0 for basically all of them at the farmer’s market. I wound up dropping the entire box of CDs in a visible place in the store parking lot so someone else could get them for free and then I drove off.
Then there’s everyone else…if you are OK with digital formats (like most people) you’re probably already on a streaming service. CDs provide quality but little else. They’re fussy, they require a physical collection, they’re easily damaged, they skip, etc. etc.
I would not be surprised if at some point cassette tape sales rebound and overtake CD sales because I think cassettes sit in similar nostalgic / aesthetic territory to vinyl.
As it is, I don’t even know what device I would use to play a CD if I bought one. Maybe my PS5?
CD enthusiasts are people who…like the quality of a digital format but want to still…collect things? Dislike convenience? I’m not sure.
CDs provide quality but little else. They’re fussy, they require a physical collection, they’re easily damaged, they skip, etc. etc.
The funny thing here is that vinyls have everything you’re complaining about CDs, but worse.
I can see CDs going the vinyl route in terms of enthusiasm in a couple of decades.
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