Comment by superultra

I love both for different reasons. CDs sound better, they can be ripped and archived and can be carried around without any loss in their digital form.

On the other hand, vinyl is great for intentional listening. Putting that hour aside to brew a nice cup of coffee and listen to something while exploring the feelings the album evoke, then get a break to flip/change the record and continue.

It's a kind of personal care for me. I even recently showed a little love to my old record player (an Akai AP-D210) so it can regulate its RPM better and play smoothly as it can.

I can argue that CDs are for listening to the music, and vinyl is for listening to yourself.

Nobody loves CDs any more and I don’t get it.

Anecdotally, I see more and more stores that sell music now carry CDs.

Just yesterday I saw an entire wall of new-release CDs at a Barnes and Noble bookstore.

CDs are great for ripping into FLACs and then playing them from Jellyfin.

For me there is no point storing digital music on optical discs. Easier to steam it or listen from a hard drive.

On the other hand the larger format of vinyl and rather peculiar way it works scratches the “tactile” part of what makes physical attractive a lot more.

Each to their own of course but that’s me.

> Nobody loves CDs any more and I don’t get it.

I loved CDs, but I was forced to stop buying new CDs decades ago because I can't stomach supporting the RIAA. That said, it is still my preferred physical media for music (followed by minidisc) even though ultimately my CD collection was digitized and stored.

CDs are annoyingly delicate to handle. Vinyl does not care about your finger tips. Vinyl sleeves are also more attractive than CD cases and easier to store on a shelf or bucket.

During the entirety of the 90's 11883 records sold at least 50 000 units[0]. If we assume $3 royalty each[1] that's ~1200 artists making $150 000 or more in an average year. That's ~$300 000 adjusted for inflation.

In 2024 1450 artists got over $1 000 000 in royalty from Spotify.[2] Additionally 2.3% (~276 000) earned at least $1000 and 100 000 earned at least "almost $6000".

It seems to me that there now is a long tail of artists making a few thousand a year on Spotify that assume they would have sold tens thousands of records each year in the 90s. E.g. the 100 000th most popular artist on Spotify assuming they would have sold as well as the 1200th most popular artist in 1998.

The more likely case is that the top ~10 000 artists would have made less back then than they do now and the rest would have made essentially zero dollars from selling records back in the 90s.

0: https://bestsellingalbums.org/decade/1990-238 1: https://dailybruin.com/1998/09/27/paying-the-price 2: https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2025/03/12/spotify-loud-and...

I think that makes sense and was in a way unavoidable.

Compare a physical shop with Spotify. A physical shop has limited space, so old stuff has to be pruned out to leave room for the new releases. So sales for old stuff gradually stop, and there's a small selection of current releases you can buy.

Spotify and the like aren't like that. It's an infinitely growing amount of music you can play. New releases may be completely unnoticed by users who follow recommendation algorithms. You can trivially follow impulses like "So what else did the the band that made Video Killed the Radio Star make?".

Since digital is infinitely reproducible and not perishable this will keep getting worse and worse. Any new artist competes against all of the music that was released before them.

> Compared to the plastic waste produced daily it's a drop in the ocean. And at least this is kept and collected.

Basically anything taken individually is a drop in the ocean. Problem is all those drops add up and that's what creates the ocean.

Perhaps they meant digital download sales such as Bandcamp & Beatport and less so for iTunes, Amazon, etc... as there are still real revenues to be made from selling digital music. It all depends upon how many middlemen between purchaser and the artist but vinyl adds in unavoidable production costs, risks of unsold stock, etc... versus Bandcamp where there is little upfront cost, low risk and low transaction costs.

> And at least this is kept and collected.

Just to expand on this, there is a reasonable distinction made between multi-use and single-use plastics. Things like a shampoo bottle, plasticware, drink bottles, etc. are considered single-use. (Yes, even the shampoo bottle despite being in your bathroom for weeks because its thrown out when it's empty.) As the parent comment mentions, purchasing a vinyl record does little—practically nothing—to contribute to daily plastic waste, especially with how few customers there are (compared to shampoo bottles).

I will spend more in a month on a digital download at times than what I would've paid Spotify in years.

This is part of the problem for sure, but it's also how the revenue is split between back catalog vs new music.

In the physical media era, when you bought a record/CD you owned it forever and your marginal cost of listening to a song approached zero over time. Most dollars went to new music.

Now, it's close to a 75/25 split of dollars going to back catalog vs new music on streaming services.

If you're a new musician, you're not competing against new music, you're competing against the entire history of recorded music. You're fighting for a piece of a pie that the Beatles are still taking a chunk of.

And the labels are a part of the problem there, they made the deals with the streaming services that allows back catalog to dominate.

It’s labels plus the limited revenue available due to competition.

15$ or so just doesn’t reflect the work that goes into a month’s worth of music listening.

At some point in the future, the owner will pass and their children will have a mass of plastic to manage.

Perhaps their children will cherish it for generations, or perhaps their children will have different musical tastes from their great great great grandpa and the plastic ends up in a landfill, forever un-played.

It's all waste eventually.

Then buy it used! That's one of the advantages of physical objects!

> It’s a lot of plastic. A lot of waste.

And yet again customer demand and financial gain supercede environmental concerns. There’s no hope for a better, less consumer-oriented culture if even the indie creatives among us acknowledge the problem yet succumb to it.

Technically they could get some paper stating “you own one vinyl” and we would use less plastic and storage (and we’d get an alternative monetary system perhaps).

> And I’ve been wondering why would anyone buy the cassette or CD?

I have no interest in cassette or vinyl. I love CDs because they provide the highest music quality, uncompressed audio that’s trivial to rip to lossless FLAC files, complete with metadata.

So you go to work, earn money, then you buy yourself some object to put it in a shelf?

And thats basically it?

You are not even playing it?

To do what with it? Letting your kids/family sell your collection with a loss?

Is it background decoration for you? Couldn't you just buy bulk of Vinyl no one wants to use it for your decoration purposes?

That feels like consumerism at the peak.

>And I’ve been wondering why would anyone buy the cassette or CD?

Many people I know buy the CD because they prefer owning a physical medium, and the CDs they actually play and have a collection of them.

As for cassette, I don't know about buying regular releases on it, but there's a small but very passionate music community around cassette releases for experimental and indie music (same as a demoscene using old computers or people making new 8bit games).

I buy cassettes. Mostly old, period-correct ones, but some new. I also have a fairly high end tape deck, that these days can be had for rather good price. Our perception of cassettes are mostly warped by the experience of badly recorded tapes played on horrible, unmaintained players, but inherently the tape is much less of a limiting factor to quality than most of the things people use to play music nowadays. In fact, when comparing my vinyl and cassette purchases, I have higher change of getting a bad sounding vinyl than a bad sounding cassette.

Notably, tape decks with separate play and record heads let you listen to the recorded signal, while it's being recorded and quickly switch between the tape and source signal. Even on a good pair of headphones, when correctly dialled in, vast majority wouldn't be able to recognise which signal is the tape.

I'm curious - does the music content actually matter to you? Would you buy an album from an artist you've never heard just because the cover art was great?

If you use the records as a display (and though I don't do that, I empathize; CD covers just don't generate the visceral reaction that LP covers do), wouldn't it make sense for publishers to offer record covers without the actual records?

I'd say it's varied & most often a combination of multiple things.

- They want the cover art

- They want a physical token representing an artist they like

- They want to financially support the artist in a direct way

- They speculate they might get a player someday (much akin to book buyers leaving books on their shelves unread for years on end)

1 of the above might be the primary driver for any given buyer but I'd assume all of the above play some part in their motivations.

Anecdotal data from my Gen-Z daughter, currently a college freshman, is that they want the cover art. Her dorm room walls are decorated with vinyl albums in frames where they cannot be listened to.

I own a very nice record player. Absolutely love listening to vinyl while looking at the cover art (Jethro Tull has the best album art and I'll fight anyone who disagrees).

For me it's a time machine back to my childhood. We grew up poor and couldn't afford tapes and then CD's. We had thrift store vinyl albums.

For my kids, vinyl was this weird thing that sounded scratchy. Then they grew up and found that the plethora of selection was both a blessing and a curse. They now frequent local record stores and invest in physical media like vinyl specifically because it forces intentional choice.

There really is nothing as good as finding an amazing album you didn't expect, and there's nothing as crushing as realizing the album you just bought based on one song only has that one good song on it (any album by The Police, I'm looking at you).

Also Gen X... though don't own any vinyl or a record player... mostly ripped CDs through the later 90's up through 2010 or so. Since then, mostly just use online streaming.

That said, I did once consider getting a record player only to rip/archive my grandmother's collection of vintage vinyl that wound up going to my niece on her passing.

I just prefer convenience/portability. Of course, as far as purchasing goes... I bought far more music when original Napster was around... it lead me to discover a lot of music that lead my to outright buy/rip full albums myself. It's the one thing that is significantly worse today without actual DJs in control of music at radio stations in favor of automated industry garbage controls.

I have no good way to discover new music any more. At least nothing I actually find myself using.

The best example to me why I buy vinyl without a record player is the Flying Lotus - Your Dead album art. It is an incredible work of art:

https://www.turntablelab.com/products/flying-lotus-youre-dea...

More and more though I would rather just buy merch to support the artist.

A friend was selling a parent's vinyl collection on eBay, and a couple of times buyers asked to be sent only the slipcase to save weight and therefore postage costs.

Confused by this until I realized you meant "Shellac (band)" and not "Shellac - resin secreted by the female lac bug" which was used to press records in the 1920s.

The last shellac record was indeed made from shellac. And shellac is a natural (or at least non-manmade) material; does this make it more environmentally friendly than vinyl or PET?