spin the black circle

i like when media trends come to me instead of the other way around…

…and i still remember my rebuttals:

it sounds warmer

it sounds more natural

it will better stand the test of time

it’s just the way it was meant to be

so went my conversations when i would explain why i wanted, say, depeche mode’s songs of faith and devotion on vinyl lp instead of cd. at the time i didn’t have cd in my car, i had cassette – so it made sense. some bands embraced it, so anticipated releases such as pearl jam’s vs. and vitalogy and tool’s Ænima were released WEEKS in advance on lp and then the cd followed (i dubbed six versions of that last one on tape for half the 101x staff since nobody had a turntable except me – and i didn’t even work at the station at that point!). us vinyl junkies? not a lot of respect in the cd era for us…

…i will admit, i kinda liked cd’s over cassettes for the convenience factor – sure, both played in your car, and cd’s scratched easily, but you couldn’t warp one if you accidentally left it in your car in direct sunlight during a texas july like you could a tape. you could also skip track to track without having to wait for tape to rewind or fast forward, but i blame a little of this convenience on how music went to shit around then, too – jumping track to track made it easier to skip the songs that sucked, which made the artists more like to have more filler on a cd…they KNEW you could just skip it, so who gave a shit? back in the tape or vinyl era, more often than not, you sat through the whole recording, so it all needed to be good. this, of course, begat the digital age where folks could buy a single song for a cheap price, leaving the rest of the album to totally suck and the band would still chart. where’s the motivation for today’s artists to NOT suck?

but the times, they are a’ changin’…

a few years ago a weird trend emerged…vinyl started to outsell cd’s. and it still does. in fact, this last quarter vinyl not only outsold cd’s, but also generated more revenue than the non-premium services like slacker radio and spotify. for the first time in several years a tangible good of prerecorded music outsold a digital streaming music service.

fucking awesome.

all of a sudden my 2K+ record collection doesn’t seem so antiquated, does it? now i just have to clean and organize my studio enough to actually ACCESS it…