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.
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
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
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 $2 unit cost, but there’s good money to be made selling short runs of tapes after a set.
If you’re curious, nearly half a million cassettes sold last year, too, according to Billboard.
I’m more curious about who’s still selling music on cassette and who’s willing to buy it.
I see a lot of folks on bandcamp who sells cassettes for instance
Do you know why they choose to sell cassettes rather than or maybe along with other formats?
Not for sure, but I have a few leads.
I’ve heard and discussed with artists who mentioned that producing vinyl was very expensive compared to cassettes, which are cheap and easy to DIY.
Then I’d add that cassettes have a retro appeal nowadays. Lastly, they are an analog format, opposite to the CD which is the 1:1 copy of the downloaded FLAC album downloaded from Bandcamp.
Analog, sure, but very low quality. 1/8" tape is not enough to reproduce sound accurately and there’s a lot of tape hiss. There’s a reason why professional analog multitrack studios use 1" tape.
Ehh, all those 1” tape machines are 8-tracks and designed for editing, not playback. Magnetic tape fidelity has a lot more to do with medium, bias and processing than the width of the tape itself.
Hell, plenty of analog shops use four and eight track machines that run 1/4” tape!
Compact cassette also has the potential to sound very good. If you would like a demonstration, look up the vwestlife yt channel or listen to a good tape on a good tape deck.
Cheap short runs. National will do 50 unit orders and you can sell em at 5-7$ 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.
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.
