There are pockets of baby-boomer-aged music fans who swear that music sounds better on vinyl. They still own turntables, very expensive ones, and keep their power amps stocked with tubes. They buy high-priced reissues of their favorite old records from specialty companies that issue the albums by kilograms of weight, because the thicker the vinyl, supposedly, the better the sound. I can't say they're wrong, but it seems like a lot of effort and money when CD's sound great. But do younger music fans already think the same of me and my CD's?
Friday night I got a jones to hear Def Leppard's first major-label release,
On Through the Night. It wasn't at the used CD store and it was tagged at just $7.99 at Best Buy. Then I got to the register, and with Best Buy's "read our minds" pricing policy, it rang up at $6.35 with tax! What a score!
I expressed my excitement to the young cashier, pointing out it would have cost that much at the used CD store for a slightly beat-up copy. He said, "Well, I get most of my music online." I said yeah, I could've ordered from Amazon.com, but after shipping it would've still cost about that much. He became more explicit: "I burn my stuff illegally. I've got an iPod."
The declining fortunes of the recorded music industry are well known, and way over 50% of young people say they download 100% of their music from pirate sites. Many people under 25 say they haven't paid for music in years, if ever.
Am I not right, though? Isn't there just something special about having the cover art and that shiny silver disc in your hand? Just watching a MP3 slip into your MP3 player...it's novel to watch the technology in action, but if I care enough to listen to Traffic, I want to see artwork and liner notes that tell me even more about what Traffic represented at their place in time. Just a file that looks like 500 others in my Creative Zen doesn't cut it, however handy it might be.
Or am I analogous to a 55-year-old raving how nothing sounded better than an 8-track tape?
Here's what I say to anybody who will listen: The music industry screwed themselves when they got rid of the single. Kids used to pay $1.50 for a 45 of something they heard on the radio. Then when singles went from vinyl to CDs the record companies took a look and realized that they could make a full-length CD for exactly what they were putting into a CD single. So they figured we'd be forced to shell out $15.98 for the whole album. Where else would we get our music from? Well, ha ha ha, then the internet came along and not only did we not have to buy the whole album, we didn't have to buy anything at all.
So Amazon and iTunes will sell you a song online for 99 cents. Well no matter which way you look at it, free is still a better price.
Now there's a whole generation of kids that have no idea what a "single" even means. Like I said, it's all compressed into some shitty-sounding mp3 file and emailed ad nauseum to whoever wants it. It's valueless to them.
But what do these fucking kids know anyway?