Recording - June 2019 - 10

The

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Resurgence
From A of Vinyl

Human Point-Of-View
By Jack Sharkey for KEF

In the last twenty years if you wanted to own a business with
flat growth at best and steeply declining revenue the rest of the
time, you would have owned a record pressing plant. That's
why by the dawn of this century there were only half a dozen
or so pressing plants in the US cranking out vinyl for DJs and
the occasional nostalgia piece. There are now sixteen plants
nationwide, and most of them are running three shifts a day,
seven days a week to keep up with demand. Nashville's United
Record Pressing plant just added sixteen new presses to keep
up with demand. If the vinyl resurgence is just a fad there are
an awful lot of people investing a ton of money in it.
There is no doubt CD sales are in a steady decline, but one
trend that shouldn't be overlooked is the overall decline in sales
of digital albums as well. Streaming
services like TIDAL and Spotify are
responsible in some part for this, but
to say that streaming is single-handedly killing the physical product
market might be a tad short-sighted. CDs and digital album sales are
dropping while vinyl is increasing
almost exponentially.
The music industry is not dying a
slow and painful death. The sales
are still there (as are the income
streams), they're just different now:
Most industry insiders acknowledge
the decline in physical product is offset by the increase in subscription and ad-supported streaming services. Twenty years
ago we called that "radio."
A lot of folks are downplaying the increase in vinyl sales as
temporary, but since every format is flawed in some way, maybe
we should look at the increase in vinyl sales as the result of people finding out that they may actually prefer vinyl over the other
formats. Maybe people have become over-technologized and
their antidote is the beautiful imperfection of an analog record.
Sure vinyl sales are a mere drop in the bucket when compared to CDs and digital, but you cannot deny a 32% increase
in anything. Is it possible we're moving toward streaming for
our casual listening and back to vinyl for our serious listening?
Is it possible people are becoming interested once again in

serious listening? Maybe there's room for every format and
- wait for it - maybe the choice of how we listen can be left
solely to us and not the experts. I know that's technological
blasphemy, but it may also simply be true.
Physically, when we download a song, we have no more
connection to it than we do all of those people we're 'connected' to on Facebook. When I really want to connect with a
friend, I go to a bar and sit and talk (until he starts checking
his phone, then I just get annoyed and leave). When I really
want to connect to a song, I want to be immersed. I want to
listen. I want to hold a record sleeve and read notes and look
at pictures.
Vinyl is an album experience, so it will never replace streaming in terms of convenience and the
ability to eliminate bad tracks from
a set, but nothing can really replace
the immersive musical experience
vinyl provides. But to me, the greatest part of the vinyl experience was
and always will be the trip to the
store and the search for the record,
followed by the drop of the needle.
It was a complete musical experience that digital cannot replicate.
And lastly, have you noticed,
back in the days of vinyl you listened to music with other people
and now you pretty much just play music in the background
while you're busy doing other things? We humans are social
animals who thrive on shared experience. That's why NFL stadiums are generally full in spite of the weather, team record, or
the amount of drunken people in the stands. Football is much
better on television but somehow, sitting next to some drunk
guy who drinks milkshakes and beer and then belches in a horrifically unnatural manner throughout the game (true story) is
more desirable than sitting alone on your couch eating nachos
while your dog stares at you.
Maybe we're getting fatigued from all the 'i' in our music and
we're missing the 'we." That may be the
single greatest thing we lost when technology took over our music.

Maybe we're getting
fatigued from all
the 'i' in our
music and we're
missing the 'we."

10 RECORDING June 2019

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Recording - June 2019

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