CD’s Are Dead, Long Live Tape and Vinyl

contributor: Hoyt Emerson, May 24, 2009

The time has come.  Our dependency to foreign oil, non generic prescription drugs and useless music mediums is finally over.  We can now bask in the lavish lifestyles of electric cars, Canadian medication and digital downloads.  No longer are we to trivialize our excitement of purchasing music by bringing it home, putting it on our computer and promptly throwing the physical part away.  We can now listen to our music without the non recyclable byproduct.

This is obviously, a Utopian dream.  While I do think our independence of all of the mentioned above is possible, it is highly unlikely for total freedom anytime soon.  The latter of the three feels like the most probable, however, considering that a simple assessment of CD’s can be made now a days.  The reality is, PEOPLE DON’T LIKE THEM.

The Vinyl Record

I’m by no means trying to suggest that CD sales are currently non existent, or that people would not purchase CD’s.  I am saying that they are a current consumer inconvenience.  When you think about what consumer’s want now, it is convenience.  Being able to get music from the Internet just makes sense.  Now that iPods can be plugged into radios though multiple methods (just like CD players before cars made them standard) its officially a preference for drivers.  Before we go ahead and crown the mp3 as the king of media, however, keep in mind a growing interest in the experience of music again.  What do I mean by experience?  Well, mainly, I’m referring to music mediums that represent the true sound from an analog level.  I am referring to vinyl and tape.

Why does vinyl and tape give us a real experience?  That’s a two fold question that is different for each one.  First, we’ll start with vinyl.  Vinyl is the physical waveform of the music etched onto a wax cartridge.  When you are looking at a vinyl you are not looking at a digital representation.  The grooves in it literally make the music.  That “warmth” that describes vinyl music is distinguished by the fact that it is not compressed digitally to a format.  There is just the actual sound of the music on a physical product that cannot be “ripped” to your laptop.  Obviously there are ways to rip the songs from vinyls to your laptop, but this is an obvious response by the consumer to keep up the convenience.  If you look into it you will notice that sales for vinyl have gone up.  Subsequently prices for vinyl and vinyl production is slowly going down.  This is due to supply and demand.  Even if ripping songs from vinyl to computers became more streamlined, it would still be a different experience than a turntable.  You can now buy a turntable at Target stores.  When you start to see large stores reacting to a trend, it probably means that the trend is on the verge of being mainstream.  Other than the actual sound of vinyl, the physical product we get has an endearing quality to it that CD’s have failed miserably to reproduce.  Since vinyls are not necessarily as durable as CD’s we take pride in keeping them clean.  Vinyls are touchy, and you can easily hear scratches on them.  Indeed, the quality of someone’s vinyl collection is a labor of love.

The Mixtape

Tape does not necessarily share the same endearing, collectible quality that vinyls do.  They do, however, carry a much more personal use and that is the mixtape.  Remember when we would slave over our playlists?  To get them down just right before recording the songs to tape?  The labor of love put not only into the song list itself, but also into the recording.  The way that you could really surprise people since they couldn’t simply plop it into the disk drive and see what was on it.  I can’t think of a better way to woo the opposite sex really.  Nothing is more personal to someone than a mixtape.  It is truly an art form.  Tapes themselves hold an honest audible quality that makes listening to your favorite music that much better.  It is a hassle to go from song to song.  It’s even more of a hassle to find one specific song.  So instead we tend to let our tapes just play.  We listen to the entire recording.  Our experience of the music is magnified this way.

Good Riddance CD’s.  We are no longer driving 93′ Ford Probes and no longer want ginormous booklets of discs we never listen to.  We’ll take our iPods with us when we leave home and experience our music from an honest point of view when we are home.  We will remember what music could sound like again.  Our appreciation will increase.  Not just due to convenience, but also due to experience.