Tuesday Timesuck: Let’s Review What We Should Know About Vinyl
With vinyl sales still ticking upward year-over-year–Canadian sales are up 35% from 2015–it might be time to take a breath and look at vinyl in general. I’ve compiled a few resources that you might find helpful.
1. Watch a Vinyl Record Being Made
A good article from Nerdist.
2. What You Should Know Before Investing in a Record Collection
This comes from TechRadar:
The music landscape is always changing. We’ve gone from analogue to digitaland from super compressed MP3s to lossless FLAC in the span of 20 years. But in that transition, we started to lose what made music so special: soul.
Loving vinyl isn’t about perfectly crystal-clear sound quality or the ability to take songs with you to the gym, it’s about a mindful listening experience. It’s about choosing which music you want to listen to, manually putting on a record and indulging in sound.
If you can’t tell, we’re big fans of vinyl and we think you might be, too.
And, according to the data, we’re not alone. A report on Forbes says vinyl sales are at a 28-year high, growing 32% in 2015. To put this into perspective, vinyl sales last year were higher than those of ad supported music streaming services like YouTube and Spotify Free.
This profitability and resurgence in a bygone medium has led popular artists like Adele and Taylor Swift to release their albums on the vintage format – making now the perfect time to get into the format that your mom, dad, grandpa and grandma got down to all those decades ago.
But whatever your reason for starting a record collection there are a few things to know before you dive down the rabbit hole. Here’s everything you need to know about getting into vinyl.
3. How to Care for Your Vinyl Collection
Some good hints from Digital Trends:
As the twin krakens of Spotify and iTunes have wrapped their tentacles around the music industry, a curious thing has happened: Vinyl records, those big black discs that were once all too common in garages and dorm rooms, have made a resurgence.
In fact, the vinyl industry has seen a straight decade of year-after-year growth. That’s impressive for a product that seems so antithetical to our modern philosophy of convenience. After all, vinyl collections aren’t easily portable, require a record player to listen to, and are prone to damage that can destroy their sound. In an age dominated by streaming services and the ability to flit between songs like gnats, the vinyl record seems as archaic as straight-razors or horse-drawn carriages.
4. The Best Online Resources for Vinyl Collectors
There are plenty of places to go online for help, tips and advice. The Vinyl Factory offers this guide.
s that brilliant New Yorker cartoon will testify, having a record collection is not without its complications. Whether the expense of the records themselves, or the inconvenience of sorting a fully functioning hi-fi set up, first-timers and experts alike can always do with a helping hand.
Having launched our own series of Vinyl FAQs, we’ve also selected some of the online tools you should bookmark to generally life-hack your records, whether checking prices (or trading them) on huge mainstays like Discogs or Popsike, or prepping your next set with the bpms of your most obscure records.
You’ll want to bookmark these.
