Vinyl makes small comeback
Tuesday, 10. June 2008, 13:01:24
This item from the Associated Press.
"It was a fortuitous typo for the Fred Meyer retail chain.
This spring, an employee intending to order a special CD-DVD edition of R.E.M.'s latest release "Accelerate" inadvertently entered the "LP" code instead. Soon boxes of the big, vinyl discs showed up at several stores.
Some sent them back. But a handful put them on the shelves, and 20 LPs sold the first day."
Hey, I've started a trend, and I am not referring to the annoying and just plain wrong practice of starting a sentence with the word "but". Is it so hard to type a comma rather than a full stop if you want to use the "but" word?
But I digress...
"The Portland-based company, owned by The Kroger Co., realized the error might not be so bad after all. Fred Meyer is now testing vinyl sales at 60 of its stores in Oregon, California, Washington and Alaska.
Other mainstream retailers are giving vinyl a spin too. Best Buy is testing sales at some stores. And online music giant Amazon.com, which has sold vinyl for most of the 13 years it has been in business online, created a special vinyl-only section last fall."
And it also really annoys me when people start a sentence with the word "and".
"The best-seller so far at Fred Meyer is The Beatles "Abbey Road" album. But musicians from the White Stripes and the Foo Fighters to Metallica and Pink Floyd are selling well, the company says."
Abbey Road? OK, it's not quite as mediocre as Sgt. Pepper but I am surprised at the popularity of this album. Surely Revolver, Rubber Soul, Hard Day's Night, Help and Magical Mystery Tour (roughly in that order) are the Beatles albums to have?
Apparently sales of vinyl in the US rose 36% in 2007 to 1.3m discs or, to put it another way, a year's worth of sales for Dark Side of the Moon in its seventies heyday. (That was a total guess, by the way.) Is it grammatically correct to start a sentence with a bracket? Am I obsessed.
Anyway, let's not get carried away. Vinyl is not coming back into fashion in any meaningful sense. DJs and hi-fi buffs may stick with it but in an age when people are prepared to spend 2 minutes looking for the remote control rather than 15 seconds walking to the TV to change the channel, vinyl is not going to cut it.
"But it's not just about the sound. Audiophiles say they also want the format's overall experience -- the sensory experience of putting the needle on the record, the feeling of side A and side B and the joy of lingering over the liner notes."
Not to mention the experience of trying to blow a stubborn bit of fluff off the record, the joy of crackles played at 90 Db and the "this chorus is going on a bit, isn't it?" deja vu experience of the stylus getting stuck. Good point about the album covers though. Perhaps they should sell them individually with a licence code to download the music?
"It was a fortuitous typo for the Fred Meyer retail chain.
This spring, an employee intending to order a special CD-DVD edition of R.E.M.'s latest release "Accelerate" inadvertently entered the "LP" code instead. Soon boxes of the big, vinyl discs showed up at several stores.
Some sent them back. But a handful put them on the shelves, and 20 LPs sold the first day."
Hey, I've started a trend, and I am not referring to the annoying and just plain wrong practice of starting a sentence with the word "but". Is it so hard to type a comma rather than a full stop if you want to use the "but" word?
But I digress...
"The Portland-based company, owned by The Kroger Co., realized the error might not be so bad after all. Fred Meyer is now testing vinyl sales at 60 of its stores in Oregon, California, Washington and Alaska.
Other mainstream retailers are giving vinyl a spin too. Best Buy is testing sales at some stores. And online music giant Amazon.com, which has sold vinyl for most of the 13 years it has been in business online, created a special vinyl-only section last fall."
And it also really annoys me when people start a sentence with the word "and".
"The best-seller so far at Fred Meyer is The Beatles "Abbey Road" album. But musicians from the White Stripes and the Foo Fighters to Metallica and Pink Floyd are selling well, the company says."
Abbey Road? OK, it's not quite as mediocre as Sgt. Pepper but I am surprised at the popularity of this album. Surely Revolver, Rubber Soul, Hard Day's Night, Help and Magical Mystery Tour (roughly in that order) are the Beatles albums to have?
Apparently sales of vinyl in the US rose 36% in 2007 to 1.3m discs or, to put it another way, a year's worth of sales for Dark Side of the Moon in its seventies heyday. (That was a total guess, by the way.) Is it grammatically correct to start a sentence with a bracket? Am I obsessed.
Anyway, let's not get carried away. Vinyl is not coming back into fashion in any meaningful sense. DJs and hi-fi buffs may stick with it but in an age when people are prepared to spend 2 minutes looking for the remote control rather than 15 seconds walking to the TV to change the channel, vinyl is not going to cut it.
"But it's not just about the sound. Audiophiles say they also want the format's overall experience -- the sensory experience of putting the needle on the record, the feeling of side A and side B and the joy of lingering over the liner notes."
Not to mention the experience of trying to blow a stubborn bit of fluff off the record, the joy of crackles played at 90 Db and the "this chorus is going on a bit, isn't it?" deja vu experience of the stylus getting stuck. Good point about the album covers though. Perhaps they should sell them individually with a licence code to download the music?
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