[The Concert for Kampuchea has never been released on CD. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.]
According to Billboard, "As of Oct. 28, vinyl albums have scanned 766,000 units--up 22.4% from the 612,000 units scanned in the corresponding period last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan. What's more, vinyl is outselling the cassette album, which has scanned 247,000 units year to date, by a little more than 3-to-1. But the vinyl album still consists of only 0.02% of total album sales. In contrast, digital sales are now 10.7% of album sales and increasing."
We're glad to see vinyl sales are rising--anything with better fidelity than mp3s is solid in our book--but is this a hipster-fueled trend or an honet-to-goodness alternate take on purchasing and enjoying music? Hopefully the latter.
As for those of you wondering what the above quote is referring to in terms of cassette albums, we'll have you know that for about a year or so before going under, the downtown NYC Tower Records location was doing relatively brisk busines selling pre-recorded cassettes @ 3 for $10. I was told "people going on road trips" were the format's main consumers. (It would seem most of the cars currently on the road are from the '90s and have cassette-based stereos.)
But back to our original premise, the aforementioned crazy idea, here it is:
According to Billboard, "As of Oct. 28, vinyl albums have scanned 766,000 units--up 22.4% from the 612,000 units scanned in the corresponding period last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan. What's more, vinyl is outselling the cassette album, which has scanned 247,000 units year to date, by a little more than 3-to-1. But the vinyl album still consists of only 0.02% of total album sales. In contrast, digital sales are now 10.7% of album sales and increasing."
We're glad to see vinyl sales are rising--anything with better fidelity than mp3s is solid in our book--but is this a hipster-fueled trend or an honet-to-goodness alternate take on purchasing and enjoying music? Hopefully the latter.
As for those of you wondering what the above quote is referring to in terms of cassette albums, we'll have you know that for about a year or so before going under, the downtown NYC Tower Records location was doing relatively brisk busines selling pre-recorded cassettes @ 3 for $10. I was told "people going on road trips" were the format's main consumers. (It would seem most of the cars currently on the road are from the '90s and have cassette-based stereos.)
But back to our original premise, the aforementioned crazy idea, here it is:
What if EVERYONE decided from now on to release their music in vinyl format only? No CDs, no digital downloads. What do you think would happen?
