IMO the renewed popularity of vinyl appears to be based on a romanticized perception that does not reflect the reality of the past.
When I’m talking about, reflects the reality of the present. I’m talking about what I and other vinyl enthusiast experience today.
The fact is, my tendency to listen to a whole side of an album or an entire album occurs far more often when listening to vinyl, then listening to streaming. And as I said, that is an experience described by countless modern vinyl enthusiasts. Nobody needs to go back in the past to talk about their experience now.
Remember, this is no dig at all on the digital or streaming experience. I stream music all the time. And to say that I happen to find records have a certain value in how I listen says nothing at all about your experience, which may be entirely different. There is no “ one person is more virtuous about this than another” - it’s simply trying to explain my experience and others who share similar experiences.
In reality, however, vinyl in the 1960s and 1970s was a mass-market product, widely available at a broad range of price points (like discount record shops) . Music listeners were just as selective then as they are now:
As somebody who grew up with records that wasn’t my experience.
I mean, of course it wasn’t the case that every time somebody put on a record, they listened to every single track. Obviously there were times where people were all playing only select tracks at a time.
But it wasn’t until cassettes came on the scene when my friends and I started doing mixed tapes, which introduced another level of a selectivity, similar to playlists.
You can’t ignore the way the medium affects an experience. It’s not for nothing many people, certainly many ASR members, talk about how streaming has positively affected their music listening - the amount of exploring they do now musically, how it is the breath of music they’ve exposed themselves to etc. Why? Because streaming made access to music far easier for people. If you make it easier to skip tracks If you make it easier to skip tracks, more people are likely to skip tracks. If you make it easier to select individual tracks people like, they are more likely to create playlists rather than listen to full albums. This is human nature.
And the evolving nature of how people are listening to music has been studied, for instance:
According to a global study conducted in January 2020, just nine percent of surveyed adults in selected countries around the world preferred listening to albums, with 40 percent expressing a preference for playlists instead.
www.statista.com
According to a global study conducted in January 2020, just nine percent of surveyed adults in selected countries around the world preferred listening to albums, with 40 percent expressing a preference for playlists instead. Only 36 percent of adults listened to albums in chronological order, which means that many listeners fail to appreciate the full experience of listening to an album carefully constructed by the artist to create meaning, tell a story, or convey a certain style.
A new study from streaming platform Deezer shows that "over half of us listen to fewer albums than 5-10 years ago." Read on to find out more.
mn2s.com
WHILE STREAMING MUSIC MAKES LISTENING EASIER THAN EVER BEFORE, A NEW STUDY SHOWS THAT “OVER HALF OF US LISTEN TO FEWER ALBUMS THAN 5-10 YEARS AGO.”
So the idea that new technology has not impacted how people choose to listen to music and a significant way is fairy naive.
And that is what many people, even especially a lot of younger people getting into vinyl, have picked up on.
Remember, experience happens in context.
When the only game in town was vinyl records, yeah perhaps people more often got up to change songs. But the current context for many people is having grown up with music available ubiquitously streaming.
When some of these folks discover vinyl, it’s a new experience, a whole different workload than just streaming playlists on their phone or whatever, and so this gives a sort of
“ special” quality to vinyl then the digital world they have inhabited. So it’s not surprising that they find themselves attending more to the vinyl experience, and it shouldn’t be surprising why so many people report it changes how they listen.
This is very typical:
Listening to records changed the way I listen to music
Again…
for anybody who feels their hackles getting up about this talk…NONE of this means your digital or streaming experience isn’t just as rich and just as authentic. This is simply trying to understand what SOME people find valuable in vinyl records in this “digital world.”
