Vinyl record sales in 2020 surpassed CDs for the first time since the 1980s:
"Vinyl records accounted for $232.1 million of music sales in the first half of the year, compared to CDs, which brought in only $129.9 million. ... Since 2005, sales for vinyl have grown consecutively. In the first half of 2020, vinyl revenue was up 4%, while CD revenue was down 48%, according to the RIAA."
It seems like an opportunity for Apple to create a "vinyl filter" for Music, like a photo filter, to simulate the slight EQ profile and the physical scraping of playing a song on a turntable. I mean, if you really want it to sound worse, go ahead. It's no different than applying a "Polaroid" filter to a modern digital camera snapshot.
I think that would be the worst of both worlds, the good part of digital media are no rewinding, in your pocket, on demand. And the benefit of physical are big artwork, tangible, one copy. It is not about the sound of vinyl, but having it in your hands.
Sounds about right. Streaming is about being able to listen to anything you want. Vynil is about keeping what you like.
My Spotify history is full of songs and playlists which I don't even like, and I use it to explore other genres and artists. It's reasonable that only 5% of everyday people listen to is good enough to be acquired permanently.
From a purely financial point of view, if that's all that matter, yes, you may compare streaming/vinyl/CDs.
... those are _different_ markets:
- Streaming is about subscription to a right to listen to music passing by, attached to a specific set of account (with all the metrics that come with it).
- Vinyl is about physical analog copies that you can transmit to someone across space and time and that are barely trackable.
Edit: but indeed, huge markets crush small ones...
I do the same thing! I find that with vinyl I’m more likely to listen to the whole album. With streaming, I’ll hear a song I like, remember another song, hop around all over the place.
This was (is?) the idea behind Paper & Plastick Records [0] in the MP3 heyday. The "paper" is a download code, and the "plastick" is a vinyl record along with it. Pretty fun concept IMO.
Besides, what in the digital realm is not skeuomorphism to begin with?
Every single item in the digital world down to a pixel (off of the `pt` points system) we see online is skeuomorphic inspiration off of something! Typesetting and the alphabet is skeuo off the typewriter systems/foundry, buttons––of course skeuomorphism, web-page and scrolling follow from pulp and physical scrolls, header, footer, body inspire off of letterheads.
Anyone who claims 'skeuomorphism this, but !skeuomorphism that' is a digital noob and doesn't quite understand where the world has been and how it got here.
There is a difference between (1) being able to trace design inspiration back to something non-digital, and (2) skeumorphic design. The latter is more about making a nostalgic leap back to a specific pre-digital aesthetic, painstakingly hiding the interim steps.
The difference may be subject to nuance and debate, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.
Wow, that page is spectacularly broken on Chrome mobile: it disables zoom so that I can't see the whole graph, and if I view it using 'Desktop version' the page becomes unresponsive due to either too much Javascript, or due to CSS hacking.