August 17, 2024

For all the Vinyl Hype, This is Still the Era of Streaming

A great tool for visualizing the current state of the recorded music market is the RIAA’s U.S. Sales Database, which allows you to to filter and sort record sales data in numerous ways. Here’s a screen shot of overall sales since 1973. Although this only represents sales in the US, it still provides some perspective on the much-discussed rebirth of LP records and, lately, cassettes. The green-coded items are all some form of streaming, while LP record sales are in dark blue. It may be hard to see current LP sales in this screenshot, but they are at the tips of the bars representing the past few years. The big orange blob in the middle of the chart documents the rise and fall of the CD. Record sales chart

May 20, 2024

LP Sales are Still Going Up

LP sales chart 2023
According to Statistica, US sales of LP record albums increased about 14% in 2023 to about 49 million. The same site claims that 82,000 turntables were sold in the US in 2021. 2023 was the second year in a row during which LP records outsold CDs. But people still do not seem to be listening to their records. In one 2023 survey, 50% of LP buyers reported that they do not own a record player or turntable. The statistics suggest that buyers are not primarily attracted to the aural characteristics or physical form of the LP but rather something else, perhaps album art or merely the appeal of LP ownership and collecting. Meanwhile, Billboard reports that less than 500,000 albums were sold on cassette in 2023. Sales figures on other formats are not generally available, but anecdotal evidence suggests that there are recordings being released on various other media such as 8-track tapes. Cassette releases may be driven by consumer preference for the way they sound, although that seems unlikely to be the main reason. More likely, it it nostalgia. The same article in Billboard notes that the most popular cassette release in 2022 was the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack (2014), based on a movie that featured music on cassettes. Yet a mere 18,000 copies were sold. Streaming continues to be the most popular way to purchase music by a very wide margin. Nevertheless, one optimistic release on the Elcaset format, claiming (probably incorrectly) to be the first ever commercial release on the obscure tape format, is currently available for sale. That recording, “Blue Wicked,” by Jeremy Heiden is also available on DCC, cassette, LP, MiniDisc, and CD.

November 20, 2023

Bucks Burnett

Bucks Burnett, a Texas record collector, record store owner, and museum operator, died in October, 2023. Burnett was one of the early and vocal advocates of collecting music on 8-track tapes. In the early 1990s, 8-tracks were bottoming out in terms of popularity and value. Bucks was one of many who nostalgically latched onto them as collectibles. Yet Bucks became a sort of gadfly in the 8-track collecting community, preaching a message of commercialism to a group of fans who appreciated the format for other reasons. To those who hoped that used, thrift store 8-track tapes would always remain cheap and plentiful, Bucks proudly boasted that he had already sold a rare cartridge (the Sex Pistol’s God Save The Queen) for what seemed an unimaginably high price of $100 in 1992. At that time, Burnett stocked about 200 8-track tapes in a special section of his record store, and claimed that he sold about three per week.

 

KERA story on Bucks Burnett.

Facebook tribute page for Bucks Burnett.

December 6, 2022

Wired Attempts to Explain Cassettes

Wired magazine jumped on the cassette culture bandwagon with a “how to” article on getting started with cassettes. I predict that this marks the beginning of the end for the cassette. Again.

Bel Canto RCA cartridge

Not a cassette

May 10, 2022

The Last Ipod

This just in: Apple has discontinued the iPod. This is the worst news since Microsoft discontinued the Zune in 2012.

Apple still makes iPods? Who knew. They will be selling the remaining ones until supplies run out.

2024 Update: If you wanted to try to be the last person to buy a new iPod, you are too late. , refurbished 5th generation iPods are still available on Amazon.com. The 32 gigabyte model will set you back about $105, while a refurbished 7th generation model cost upwards of $220.
Ipod ad

February 4, 2021

Technics SL-1200 Dust Cover and Hinge Installation

[Copyright 2007-2021 by David Morton, image courtesy Panasonic Corp.]

Ok, this isn’t really sound recording history, but once upon a time I published a how-to article on installing the dust cover and hinges on a Technics SL-1200 turntable. The SL-1200 is a legendary turntable first manufactured in 1972 that became a favorite of DJs in the 80s and later. While it superficially resembles other consumer turntables of the Technics line, it’s a much heavier, beefier version.  The dust cover and hinges were optional at that time, and it turns out that it’s not simple to install them. When Technics discontinued the series in 2010, I unpublished the article. But it came back in 2016, and I’ve been getting the occasional email about the article ever since. So here it is again with a few updates.

 

 

Read More …

January 21, 2021

Adapt or Die! When Audio Formats Must Co-Exist

This post originally appeared on the earliest version of this site, back in 2001, when it was hosted at Rutgers University (the old url was www.rci.rutgers.edu/~dmorton). Some body actually asked me about it recently (I dropped it years ago), so here it is, with updates. 

Why have there been so many different, incompatible audio technologies?  Why can’t manufacturers settle on one standard?  I mean, what if every railroad had its own ideas about how far apart to put the rails? What if city planners couldn’t get together and agree about which side of the road we should drive on? Then what would we do?

Well, such confusion has been the norm for over a century in the audio-equipment business.  There have been products that virtually (but never quite completely) dominated the market, such as the 78-rpm disk, the LP record, and the compact disc.   But inventors and manufacturers have repeatedly introduced new formats to compete with them.  Very often, that competition resulted in a sort of temporary cooperation, a melding of technologies.  And while these two-headed hybrids rarely lasted very long, they made for some interesting listening. This page is devoted to these “fish with feet,” so to speak, these “missing links,” in evolutionary lingo.

Cylinder to disk adapterCylinder to disc:  The early days of the phonograph were marked by radically different ideas about the ‘best’ way to record and reproduce sounds.  The technology was also being continuously improved, and inventors were struggling to find ways to avoid each other’s patented innovations.  The results were numerous incompatible formats.   Cylinders and disks came in different sizes, grooves were cut vertically (hill-and-dale) or horizontally, and there was no agreement about speeds.  Some companies tried to accommodate the various standards by offering home players that were not tied to a particular brand of record.  One example was the Deuxphone, a player for both cylinder and disc records.

Read More …

September 21, 2020

Another Take on the Recording Industry

This one from reddit. A few thoughts: LP records (“vinyl” in the parlance of the young) look to be about as commercially significant as they were in the early 1990s, which is to say not all that important. LPs aren’t so much the comeback kid as a significant niche product with stead sales that hasn’t shown a lot of growth in years. The really important story is obviously  streaming music. Also, I guess it’s safe to say that ringtones are commercially dead.

October 17, 2019

The Alleged Return of the Cassette

This Maxell cassette tape ad was famous in the 1980s

It sort of happened with the LP (“vinyl” if you’re under 40). It sort of happened with the 8-track tape. Now it’s sort of happening with the cassette. Old sound recording formats never truly disappear (even cylinder phonographs are still occasionally manufactured and recorded upon), but it’s rare for one to make a partial comeback. The early 90s saw a surprising rise in the number of LP records (you know, those 12″ diameter vinyl records), and I for one was skeptical that the fad would last. But it did, and sales really took off around 2007, rising from about a million records sold that year to almost 17 million in 2018. [Update: 18.4 million in 2019*] That’s about two million units less than CD sales (these figures are for the U.S. only, and historically, sales by format in non-U.S. can be significantly different). But most music (and when we’re talking about sales of audio recordings, we’re mainly talking about music sales) is sold today via streaming audio service subscriptions, and it’s difficult to make an “apples to apples” comparison between LP or CD sales and the total market. However, the Recording Industry Association of America estimates that LP and EP* sales constitute just 4.3% of the total market. CDs are not faring much better, holding on to just 7.1% of total sales. So where do cassettes fit in? According to The Guardian newspaper, “it’s cool to spool again” [protip: it’s not] and “sales are soaring.” The reality is that they have “soared” to about 50,000 units in the UK (the RIAA doesn’t rank them at all for the US market). Things could go the way of the vinyl LP, where for many years sales remained low but steady, or this might just be a short-lived fad. The cassette format was certainly appealing in its day, and as a DIY format it offers a flexibility that the LP never did. But the sound quality that LP fans tout is really just not there. Still, there are budget priced recorder/players still out there on the market; Pyle audio still offers a cassette deck that probably sounds about as good as the mid-priced gear we had back in the 80s. And new cassettes are still available, although if you want the highest quality sound, you will probably have to resort to buying new old stock Cr02 or “metal” tapes on Ebay. Further, some labels and groups are issuing releases on cassette in small batches. Is the cassette comeback going to be as big as the return of vinyl? Doubtful.

*EP = “extended play singles,” usually defined as 12″ or 10″ vinyl phonograph records with one or a few songs per side.

March 22, 2018

Is the CD Dead Yet?

Reports of the impending demise of the compact disk have been frequent over the past several years (this article in Business Insider is the source for the chart), especially since early 2018 when retailer Best Buy announced it would drop CDs from its offerings. In fact, sales of CDs peaked right about the time I wrote my first book on the history of sound recording. My editor asked me to add a section on the future of recording media, not realizing that historians are terrible at predicting the future, although I tried my best.