The Long Overdue Death of Retail Compact Disc (CD)

Memorializing the Compact Disc. Once upon a time, the CD was the ubiquitous music platform. Our story outlines how the disc-based music technology was adopted, loved and eventually abandoned by a generation that arrived a little too late to collect vinyl record albums. In its day, the CD weathered a storm of competitors that sought to usurp the audio throne by offering key improvements in storage capacity and audio resolution. But behind the inevitable fall of the CD is a story of how the music industry refused to read the writing on the wall.
All things considered, I was rather late to the compact disc game. Having been born to your typical middle-class family in the early 1980s, for much of my early childhood I made do with cassette tapes of my favorite acts, from the sweet, poppy sounds of Men Without Hats to a Canadian band with the (sadly for a pre-pubescent boy) very misleading name, Barenaked Ladies. Other great groups from the late 1980s and early 90s, like Guns N Roses, Nirvana, and Soundgarden, also managed to capture my attention despite some of the frustrating limitations of cassette technology - like having to fast forward and rewind just so I could listen to GNR's deliciously guttural rant "Get in the Ring" a few more times.

Compact Disc Firsts

• Optical digital data-storage was invented by Jim Russel who filed the first patents in 1966, later purchased by Sony and Philips to develop the CD

• Developed in collaboration by Sony and Philips, the Compact Disc launched in 1982
• The first CD was officially released on October 1, 1982, it was Billy Joel album 52nd Street. 
• The first CD player was the Sony CDP-101, also launched on October 1, 1982. It retailed for $730, a heavy price for the privilege of listening to 52nd Street by Billy Joel in pristine digital glory.

Soundtrack of Our Lives on CD

Ah, but that all changed in the winter of 1995, when my parents placed a Discman under the Christmas tree, along with my first three CDs: Collective Soul's incredible blue album, Soul Asylum's "Let Your Dim Light Shine," and Foo Fighters' self-titled debut. For the next few years, I rarely left the house without that clunky, BK Whopper-sized device, which I connected to an old stereo when I got home. And, while my collection of CDs was by no means large, or even particularly impressive, I rarely went more than a month or so without thinking about, pining for, and then finally pooling what little grass-cutting money I had together to buy the next big album.
For the rest of my teenage years, I gravitated towards the kind of music that had animated my imagination when I first got that Discman, with CDs from Green Day, Stone Temple Pilots, Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, and the Smashing Pumpkins. Then there were those bands that didn't quite pack stadiums and weren't everyone's cup of tea but, perhaps for those very reasons, garnered my love: Better Than Ezra, Toadies, The Verve Pipe, Spacehog, and Canadian acts like Moist, Limblifter, Econoline Crush, Finger Eleven, and, of course, my personal favourite, Our Lady Peace

US CD Sales Since 1982

 

Oh, those were the days. I'm guessing I'm not the only one who fondly remembers the smell -- of some weird, foreign and unhealthy chemicals, that gently emanated from the freshly opened case of a new compact disc. It was the good kind of miasma, the type that promised hours of enjoyment as I played video games, chatted about girls with pals, or drifted off to sleep. I can even remember how you had to pull a little harder to get the disc out the first time you used it -- the little 'squelch' sound the plastic made as the disc slid over the case's donut-hole plug for the first but hardly last time. Alas, these finer details of CD ownership are now little more than the footnotes in music history. By the early 2000s, a number of factors emerged that, within a rather shocking amount of time, signaled the end of the compact disc.
First and foremost for me, personally, it was remarkably hard to predict which discs would be winners. Sure, you could listen to the radio -- that's usually where I heard new music for the first time since my parents didn't have cable television and therefore no access to MTV or Canada's Much Music -- but for most bands that meant exposure to just one or two songs. In the end, this made the CD-buying experience a little like Russian roulette -- a slight overstatement, but less so when you consider, that through most of the 90s, each CD was about $20 and my job was cutting neighbors' lawns during the summer.

That meant I bought many, many duds -- usually, one-hit-wonder CDs where one fantastic song on the radio gave me hope the entire album would be amazing. Oh, I still remember the desperate, sinking feeling that washed over me as I frantically searched an album for a second or third decent track -- and then failing to land on one. It happened far too often for me, and as time went on I became less willing to gamble away the little cash I had. Eventually, even albums with two or three great songs seemed a waste, which complicated things further, since the early 2000s brought what I deemed fewer of the rock-solid albums of the 90s -- albums like Offspring's Smash, Green Day's Dookie, or Nirvana's Nevermind.
RIAA Recorded Music Sales

• CD sales surpassed cassette tape in 1991, its final year as the top format in music sales was 2015
• Music streaming subscription became the top selling music format for the first time ever in 2016
• Adjusted for inflation, 2016 vinyl sales hit highest levels since 1989

Digital Downloads Arrive

Right around the same time, friends and coworkers at the grocery store where I worked started talking about this new software that allowed you to download songs or even whole albums without paying anything at all! What was this fan-dangled technology, I wondered, and how can I get in on it?
Although Audioholics can't condone unlicensed digital downloads, it's safe to say it was a significant factor in the decline of the disc because nearly everyone who listened to music at the dawn of the new millennium at least experimented with digital downloads. Although I missed the Napster train, I was most definitely aboard for the Limewire bus. It had some serious drawbacks - it left all kinds of nasty junk on the family computer - but all of a sudden I had nearly a world of music at my fingertips. And so began the age of downloading tracks and burning them to discs. In its own way, it was thrilling: you could create the ultimate CD tailored to your own music interests and not those of some goofball studio exec. My ripped discs would go from Blink 182 to Deftones to Eiffel 65 and I could often pack more than 20 tracks on a single CD.
And it was cheap: other than having to buy packs of blank CDs and paying to get the spyware wiped from my chugging PC, the process was very affordable. So affordable, in fact, that I no longer felt the need to protect my CDs as if they were children; instead, they fell down the side of car seats and slid under my bed, where they sometimes stayed until scratched beyond use. But no biggie; I could just use the files I'd already downloaded to create a whole new CD in a few minutes.

Retailers and Car Manufacturers Sense the Stench of Death of the Compact Disc

Fast-forward a decade or so and the CD is finally, finally being phased out by the few retailers who still offer them. At Best Buy, one of the handful of companies that's so far (narrowly) survived the digital revolution, in recent years the compact disc section has shrunk down further and further, to the point where it's little more than a novelty; a place where your Dad can grab best-of albums from Led Zeppelin or The Who. From literally rows and rows of compact discs and several "listening stations," big retailers like Best Buy have in many cases shrunk their CD offerings to a small display at the end of a single aisle.
Now, even that meager offering is about to disappear, with reports indicating Best Buy will cease selling compact discs this July. Target, another brick-and-mortar retailer from the CD's heyday, is expected to follow suit shortly thereafter.


To add a final nail in the CD proverbial coffin, car manufacturers are phasing out CD players starting in 2018.  Instead, you will find at least one USB port, and Bluetooth capability for streaming music from your phone pretty standard fare.
In truth, this is long overdue. Even the Napster and Limewire age is a thing of the past, replaced in large part by streaming services like Apple Music, Google Play, Spotify, and countless others, which give you access to a great fount of music for less than what a single CD cost in the 90s. In fact, that's how I'm listening to 'ol Kurt sing about teenage angst right now.
Nevertheless, this seems like a good time for a heart-felt send-off to the compact disc and the many CD collections that are still out there, in basements, attics, storage lockers, boxes under stairways. Cheers and RIP. 
Now that the once dominant audio platform's days are behind us the question remains: Did you like CDs? Please share your thoughts in the related forum thread below.

Source: https://www.audioholics.com/editorials/the-long-overdue-death-of-retail-compact-disc

The MP3 Revolution

Our journey starts in New York City.
You know the place I’m talking about. If you’ve watched Seinfeld, it’s the diner Jerry and friends hole up in almost every episode, but that’s wasn’t why I was there. This was where Suzanne Vega wrote her song “Tom’s Diner” sometime in 1981. Now I’m not the biggest Suzanne Vega fan, but there’s a reason she’s considered the mother of MP3. “Tom’s Diner” was used extensively in the research that went into the creation of the MP3 format. And this diner is where it all began.

It’s a good song, but more importantly, it’s entirely a cappella—and recorded flawlessly. Audiophiles in the late 80s found that the smooth yet subtle performance Vega delivered in the original was perfect for tuning their hi-fi speaker systems. As it turns out, the human voice was a good way to test for clarity, and playing “Tom’s Diner” reveals minor tuning problems in a speaker.

But as most great things in life are, Tom’s Diner’s historical importance happened completely by chance. Karlheinz Brandenburg (the lead scientist working on the compression algorithm) was finishing up his post-doctorate working on digital music compression, when he heard “Tom’s Diner” playing on the radio down the hall. “This. This is the song that I will listen to countless times on my mission to create the best audio algorithm the world has ever seen!”, he thought to himself. And yes, I did make that part up but every hero (or villain) needs that eureka moment so I took some liberties here. Anyway, back to the story.

Brandenburg had been studying psychoacoustics, or how people perceive music, and used the concept of auditory masking as the baseline for what he wanted his algorithm to do. Without getting too scientific, auditory masking is when there is a loud sound that drowns out another smaller sound.

For whom the bell tolls

If I strike a bell in a quiet room, and then go outside and strike it again, listen to what happens.

The bell didn’t sound the same just then, did it? It was harder to hear, lost in the cacophony of the outside world. The ringing was shorter, wasn’t it? Also, was the bell quieter? It was.

No, the outside world didn’t make that bell sound any different, but rather, the way MP3 compresses audio did. But even if you tried this for yourself in the real world, the result would be similar. Our ears and brain didn’t evolve to hear the difference between two specific tones at 632Hz and 635Hz, they evolved to hear a growl. Or a yell. You know, sounds that might signal impending doom.
If a louder sound of similar frequency is present with a quieter one, your brain deletes it. This physiological response—auditory masking—is the entire basis of the psychoacoustic algorithm that defines MP3 compression. Any sound your brain would normally not be able to hear: the encoding deletes to save space. If it works as intended, you’ll have a much smaller file- and your ears would be none the wiser. This happens all the time in our everyday lives. Ever been in a bar that’s too loud to hear what your friend is saying? Same thing.

The MP3 is why we listen to songs on our phones today.

Brandenburg used this to his advantage, devising an algorithm that would find the sound data that humans couldn’t hear because of auditory masking, and just getting rid of it. He took “Tom’s Diner” and ran it through his compression algorithm…. and Vega’s vocals in “Tom’s Diner” sounded like a possessed demon fighting its way through his speakers. Clearly, the algorithm was doing something funky. So he tweaked it, and ran it again. And again. And again. Each time changing the algorithm slightly until, after what I’m sure was a great few months of listening to the same song constantly, the differences between the original and the end result were almost imperceptible. MP3 compression was finally ready for the big time.

When the MP3 was invented, it was still a long way off from becoming the dominant music format of the new millennium. It had to overcome technological limitations, a cartel-like recording industry, and it needed the internet to do it.
While MP3 was a great way to compress an audio file in 1990, consumer storage just wasn’t up to the task. While you could theoretically hold 700MB on a CD, hard drives of the time were typically no bigger than a few tens of megabytes at best. You couldn’t just copy 700MB of uncompressed WAV audio- there just wasn’t space. Piracy wasn’t really a viable option.

At the time, if you wanted digital audio, you had to go to record store… or sign up for one of those insane CD clubs. You couldn’t listen to songs before buying them without the radio. You couldn’t just go on YouTube, and you definitely couldn’t torrent anything on a dial-up modem. The music industry knew it had a monopoly on its market, and from 1995 through 2000, several companies banded together to artificially inflate the price of CDs by about $5 per album. Consumers knew they were getting gouged, but there wasn’t a clearly superior alternative until 1999. That year, all hell broke loose, and MP3 began its ascent to becoming the dominant music format.

Evolution

The world of 1999 was far different than the world of 1990. Hard drive storage had climbed orders of magnitude greater from 20MB into several Gigabytes of storage. 56k and cable modems were replacing the 24-baud models of the past, allowing just enough download speed to snag an MP3 in a few minutes, and just like that: the landscape was fertile for MP3’s technological revolution.
That revolution came in the form of Napster. Founded in the greater Boston area by brothers Shawn and John Fanning; along with Sean Parker, Napster offered its users a peer-to-peer networking solution to share their music online. For the first time ever, your average consumer could go online, search for anything they wanted, download it, and create a library of digital music without buying anything. CD-Rs allowed users to create their own CDs as well. Piracy wasn’t just an expression of rebellion, but a market response to an overpriced and inflexible commodity.

By early 2000, Napster had over 20 million users, downloading over a billion songs. By former employees’ own accounts, their software team could barely keep up with how fast the traffic expanded, even after attracting significant resources from venture capital firms to address the issue.
That was the first sign that file sharing wasn’t just a flash in the pan. It was here to stay. In fact, the number of P2P file sharers would continue to expand, with the NPD group estimated 15 million households used P2P networks in 2006, and 18.3% of all computers worldwide had Limewire (another popular P2P service) installed.

Almost 20 percent of the world's computers had Limewire. That's more than had macOS. Let that sink in.

After a 31% drop in industry CD sales that year, the Recording Industry Association of America, or RIAA panicked, and found an opportune punching bag in online music piracy. Though the MP3’s spread arguably increased demand for music, they tried to strangle it in the crib by suing Napster.
The future of the popular file sharing service became the hot-button issue of 2000, with musicians and record companies alike taking starkly diverging positions on the issue in a very public forum. Many people remember the outspoken Lars Ulrich of Metallica fame leading the RIAA’s crusade against Napster, but fewer people remember Public Enemy frontman Chuck D’s oddly prescient defense of free music sharing in a debate between the two musicians hosted by Charlie Rose.

Chuck’s position was that MP3 sharing was going to change the balance of power in favor of the content creator, instead of the record label holding all the power. While Lars claimed that it didn’t matter: MP3 sharing was (in his words) illegal, Chuck pointed out that most people across the globe didn’t have a way to “get found” and that distributing music for free online would increase demand.
History proved Chuck D right, but unfortunately for Napster, they lost their fight and shut down in July 2001. But the toothpaste was out of the tube. As soon as one P2P service was destroyed, another cropped up, and so on and so forth over the 2000s. When attacking P2P services didn’t stem the tide of MP3 sharing, he RIAA went after thousands of individuals by abusing the subpoena process, famously attempting to sue twelve-year-old children and the people who were literally incapable of stealing the music they were sued over. In most of the 17,587 people sued, the RIAA opted to take a cash settlement instead of pursuing cases to completion, but the industry’s image was tarnished forever as a result.
And MP3 sharing persisted.

New horizons

To meet the new demand for a way to listen to MP3 files, manufacturers started to release digital music players, capable of storing more music than the venerable compact disc in a package that was far more convenient. In 1998, the Recording Industry Association of America failed to win a judgement against Diamond for their MP3 player, thus opening the floodgates for more commercially-available portable music players. Now that there was no legal barrier anymore, any company could profit off of the explosive spread of the MP3.

The decision was a rare double-whammy, as it were. On top of creating a legal market for MP3 players, it also set the precedent for a legal market for MP3 downloads in the following years, which also paved the way for the long-term success of streaming services. But there is one product that would help drive the final nail in the CD coffin. In October 2001, Apple released the iPod.

After the MP3 was done turning the music industry on its head, the MP3 Player came along and changed everything we know about smartphones.

Hot on the heels of MP3’s rapid rise, many companies tried to create a pocketable MP3 player with mass appeal. Forget about sex appeal. SaeHan Information Systems released the first commercial personal music player in 1998: the MPMan F10, not to be confused with Diamond Multimedia’s Rio PMP300, which was released eight months later.

To no one’s surprise, rival companies tried to ride on the Rio’s coattails, but hard drive players were still cumbersome and a chore to navigate. Things were slow. You could cook a frozen pizza, eat it, and return to your computer only to see that it was on the brink of overloading from transferring a few CD’s-worth of songs. As you may expect, this created a demand for a more efficient, portable, and intuitive music experience. It wasn’t until the iPod that gold was struck.

The rise of the iPod

Prior to October 2001, we recognized Apple for their computers and as that thing that magically keeps the doctor away. But Apple hit the ground running by announcing the iPod. Its debut form looks embarrassingly archaic from a 2018 perspective. However, at the time it was a breakthrough for portable music and carefully negotiated consumer demands for an all-in-one media player with an unheard of storage capacity of 5GB. Not only that, but the 1st gen iPod provided 20 minutes of shock protection. It’s comical now, but users could exercise freely without worrying about damaging the hard drive. Sure, it wasn’t the first compact MP3 player to reside in the pockets of children and women’s jeans alike, but it was the one that consumers unanimously drooled over.
With the slogan, “1,000 songs in your pocket” and a well-timed release for the holiday season, the first iteration was a success, selling 125,000 units [3, 14]. Its spring 2002 update sealed the deal with Windows compatibility; users could easily operate within a well-oiled ecosystem unlike ever before. This provided a way to completely customize what music consumers bought, kept, and listened to without needing to carry a library of discs. Two years later, the 4th generation iPod received photo capabilities, foreshadowing the market for a multifunctional device.

A music player that takes photographs? What could possibly come next?

As our voracious appetite for convenient media consumption grew, Apple and others continued to innovate, keeping up with the exponential curve of demand. Video playback and basic gaming functionality were integrated. Meanwhile, single devices were granted increasing functionality while becoming evermore portable. Of course, competitors garnered followers for their portable media players too, such as the Sansa Clip, which had dirt-cheap affordability on its side. But their efforts couldn’t keep pace with Apple’s iPod hierarchy.
Following the iPod Classic’s success, the iPod Mini had large shoes to fill. As we know, size six feet will never fill a size 10 shoe. Thus, Apple quickly rebranded the Mini in favor the Nano in 2005, which celebrated eight generations of success. This year also included the Shuffle, the “first iPod under $100” A summer later, Apple made a successful push to attract athletes with the Nike + iPod partnership. While Apple continued to roll out improved iPod iterations, they were also working on what was intellectually conceived in as “Project Purple” and “N45,” known to us lay-people as the iPhone and iPod Touch, respectively.

The king is dead. Long live the king.

Though we may never know if the chicken or the egg came first, we do know that the iPhone preceded the iPod Touch. The latter of which was a sleeker, thinner, sexier iPhone… without the phone, that is. Released in 2007, the Touch made for a costly holiday gift that year and for years to come. It served as a middle ground for parents uncomfortable with allowing their children unrestricted access to something like the LG enV
Announced months earlier at MWC 2007, the iPhone made the buzz word. Passionate fanboys lead news outlets to refer to it as the “Jesus phone,” due to its cult-like following. The MP3 was now truly ubiquitous. We began to experience a decline in portable media player sales. Since having a separate device was too inconvenient for most people stopped using physical media in favor of their Swiss Army Knife of a smartphone.

Our phones shifted from a practical object to the extension of the self that we know today. Wherever we went and wherever we go, our music library follows. The iPhone release set the precedent for the next decade of smartphones. It allowed us to not only consolidate our devices but also to consolidate the control of our lives into a single apparatus. And to think, one of the first dominoes to fall was about a little diner on the corner of Broadway and 112th street.

Source: https://www.soundguys.com/podcast-the-mp3-revolution-17850/

How the MP3 Accidentally Destroyed the Music Industry

The MP3 holds a place in our collective imagination as the de facto medium for music listening on our computers and smartphones. Like Kleenex with tissues, the term MP3 is eponymous with digital music files. This is thanks in large part to the havoc that the MP3 wreaked on the music industry starting two decades ago.

The dust has settled and listening to music digitally is now the norm, with artists, labels, and listeners largely seeming to have accept streaming as the new industry model. It’s easy to take for granted what exactly we are listening to when we stream something on our laptops and on our phones. Chances are what you’re hearing isn’t even an MP3.

Weirdly enough, the MP3 is a proprietary encoding protocol protected by copyright. As such, Spotify by and large favors the open–source compression codec Ogg Vorbis. Apple has favored AAC since the original launch of iTunes. YouTube’s audio is compressed in AAC too.

What exactly is a codec and why are there so many of them? Codec is an abbreviation of coder–decoder. In the context of audio, it’s the procedure that turns audio into a digital file and back again.

MP3 is a standard for audio compression that shrinks the size of a music file without, ideally, any perceptible loss in sound quality. Think back to how little space computers must’ve had back in the late ‘80s, when development on the MP3 first began.

If the 300–plus GB hard drive on your computer is just about full now, you can imagine how crucial it must have been to compress digital audio files for easy storage and transfer back then.

One second of stereo music on a CD takes up about 1.4 megabits. MP3 encoding yields a file that’s 12 times smaller.
Birth of the MP3


Moving Picture Experts Group

In 1988, The Moving Picture Experts Group convened to develop standards for audio and video compression, including a way to get video onto CDs. MP3 would be one of the results of the committee’s work.

The MP3 protocol compresses audio using the principles of psychoacoustics, which is the science of sound perception. This sounds lofty but what it means is that MP3 encoding uses the quirks of human hearing to lop off or heavily approximate audio information we can’t really register anyway.

The idea for using psychoacoustics to guide digital audio compression had been kicked around for awhile, dating back to the late ‘70s. In fact back in the 1910s, studies sponsored by AT&T on human hearing and perception were used to figure out how to compress the signal of phone calls to increase phone line capacities.

Karlheinz Brandenburg, a professor at the Fraunhofer Institute who was one of the lead developers of the MP3 and a principal advocate for using psychoacoustics, thought that the group had locked down the algorithm for the MP3 by 1988.

But the human voice would act as a sticking point.

Brandenburg first tested the MP3 on Suzanne Vega’s acapella for “Tom’s Diner,” used by many audiophiles to test sound systems thanks to the warm recording of Vega’s voice. MP3 compression mangled that recording, leading to Brandenburg and AT&T researchers listening to the track something like 1,000 times to get the compression right.

By 1992, the MP3 was functioning. In hindsight, it’s clear the video CD format was never going anywhere. A few years later, however, the group that developed the MP3 earmarked the relatively new–fangled internet as the ideal forum for the use of the MP3.

If this seems like an excellent bit of foresight, you’d be half–right. Most likely, nobody guessed what communities of internet denizens with ample time on their hands and technical knowhow were capable of.

The MP3 was and still is a proprietary format. The initial business model anticipated for the MP3 worked like this: encoding tools for turning an audio file into MP3 would require expensive licensing fees and would be used by large companies.

Decoding tools, which would turn MP3 back into audio you could listen to, would be widely available and cheap. This isn’t the case any more, obviously. The MP3 unleashed a torrent of easily pirated music. The same force that would spearhead the rise of Napster and file sharing would also undo the MP3’s own business model.
Hackers Find the MP3

By the mid ‘90s, the Warez Scene – an online community of computer wizards who took pleasure in cracking and distributing copyrighted material – was already mature and thriving. It only took until 1997 before the ability to encode MP3 was freed from its expensive software license.

In what amounts to the kind of rapid–fire, intercontinental travelogue only the internet could foster, an Australian student bought encoding software from Germany with a stolen credit card from Taiwan. He then cracked the software, uploaded it to a server in Sweden and began distributing it to U.S. universities via an FTP site.

That FTP contained a read–me referring to the program as freeware “thanks to Fraunhofer,” referring to the Fraunhofer Institute where the protocol was developed.

One of the first MP3 piracy groups, Compress ‘Da Audio distributed their first pirated MP3 that summer via IRC, a chat room system. The track was “Until It Sleeps,” by Metallica.

There was a dogged determination among these pirating crews. They built elaborate networks and competed with each other to leak big albums, which were then uploaded to topsites — high-speed secret servers — that other members of the Warez Scene could access.

With a few exceptions, this community wasn't interested in profiting from the file sharing. As described in a fascinating New Yorker article about this wave of piracy, members of the Warez Scene often drew moral distinctions between sharing files on topsites and selling bootlegged copies.

It was a culture that sustained itself on friendly competition and the thrill of leaking.


TLC - Fan Mail

Crews like Rabid Neurosis, or RNS, became especially notorious for their ability to leak marquee records from artist like Eminem and TLC weeks before their release.

Brandenburg and the Fraunhofer Institute tried to do damage control, but Pandora’s box had been opened wide. They lowered the cost of encoders, and soon services were popping up allowing users to rip MP3s off their CDs, but this did nothing to tide the flood.

The stage was set for distributing MP3s freely throughout the web, in the process making MP3 the most widely available and used format for music. By 1997, Brandenburg notes, “I got the impression that the avalanche was rolling and no one could stop it anymore.”
The Digital Plague Spreads

While the stage was being set for the rise of the MP3 and file sharing, the record industry was in the midst of some of its loftiest sales ever years. In the ‘90s and early ‘00s, blockbuster releases sold in the neighborhood of 10 million copies. By the end of the ‘90s, Garth Brooks had enjoyed five separate albums going diamond.

Between 1995 and 2004, there is a nearly unbroken stretch of the year’s top selling records moving more than 5 million copies. The seven top–selling records of 2000 can claim this distinction, too.
Unless you’re Adele, these kind of sales are just not replicable these days."

Unless you’re Adele, whose last album 25 beat the long–standing record for strongest first week sales held by NSYNC’s No Strings Attached, these kind of sales are just not replicable these days.

The turn–of–the–millennium boom years for the record industry were accompanied by mergers and acquisitions among the major labels. This meant that CD printing was consolidated, with fewer physical plants producing them.

Ironically, that consolidating move made leaks ever more common. Fewer facilities meant that the file sharing community needed fewer contacts in order to secure their leaks

The network of IRC and topsites used by the Warez Scene were ultimately inefficient, inaccessible, and for legal reasons, carefully guarded. This kept leaked releases relatively contained.

Napster would light the match that set fire to fuel spilled by the MP3 and networks of dedicated leakers.

Napster was invented in 1999 by an 18–year old college dropout and Warez enthusiast named Shawn Fanning. With Napster, Fanning pioneered the peer–to–peer file–sharing platform, allowing users to exchange files directly with each other. At its peak, Napster had 80 million registered users.





Napster's barebones approach to filesharing

We’re all familiar what follows. There were the subsequent lawsuits spearheaded by devastatingly rich rock stars like Lars Ulrich, major label hand–wringing, and heavy–handed litigation by the RIAA.

We have the benefit of hindsight for criticizing the industry’s supposed shortsightedness. But it’s illuminating regardless to revisit the way the MP3 revolution was spoken about in 2000, at once a banner year for the music industry as well as the year of Napster.
The Already-Shifting Music Industry

Research groups were already anticipating the death of record stores and the coming ability for listeners around the world to tap into what Charles C. Mann, in an article for The Atlantic, was already describing as “a vast cloud of music” via the internet.

Even industry leaders like Edgar Bronfman Jr., then head of Universal, was anticipating the rise of what some starry–eyed commenters called the heavenly jukebox.

“Soon,” he declared in a speech that May, “a few clicks of your mouse will make it possible for you to summon every book ever written in any language, every movie ever made, every television show ever produced, and every piece of music ever recorded.”

How this would happen in a way that preserved the economic interests of media companies in general and record labels in particular was still unclear.

A Berkeley economist had the somewhat prescient vision of corporate patronage which sidestepped the traditional industry entirely. Why can’t Coca-Cola, which then had higher annual revenues than the entire music industry, market music as an advertising campaign?

Instead, the industry opted for draconian legal responses and numerous failed attempts to shift towards secured, copy–protected music. These approaches proved ineffective.

Brandenburg, for his part, insisted that any secured format for distributing music on the internet would have would not be compatible with all of the platforms and audio players hitting the market.
Ultimately, it’s the industry’s stunning lack of vision on this front that made the rise of the MP3 so devastating."

But the MP3 solved that problem too well. It was compact, of adequately high sound quality, accessible across platforms, and incredibly easy to reproduce and share.

Ultimately, it’s the industry’s stunning lack of vision on this front that made the rise of the MP3 so devastating.

Again in hindsight, it’s ironic that the new industry standard of streaming (with our Spotifys and YouTubes) was engineered by the same type of plucky tech start–up types who unleashed Napster on the world.

Not that we should get too comfortable with the streaming service landscape we see now. Rdio, Grooveshark, Songza, have all gone to the grave of failed streaming services.

Soundcloud, itself dogged by IP lawsuits, has found itself floundering in its attempts to monetize and compete more directly with Spotify and Apple Music.

Most other services are in bad shape. “Napster” – which is really Rhapsody wearing the necrotized remains of the Napster brand like a Silence of the Lambs-style face mask – has struggled to keep pace with paying subscribers.





Rhapsody's Version Napster


Tidal has been wracked by lawsuits, leadership shuffles, and late payments. Even Spotify, which has the biggest user base, has yet to demonstrate whether the streaming model can sustain itself. Spotify has not turned a profit, while analogues in TV and film, like Netflix, are already profitable.

Competitors like Apple Music or Amazon Music Unlimited or Google Play Music are backed with so much capital that they don’t even have to make money to be sustainable—a relationship not unlike that of the Coca-Cola patronage envisioned more than fifteen years ago.

Even if the MP3 is no longer the principle format we use to listen to music digitally, it's not yet clear that the industry has achieved an equilibrium in the face of the precedent it unleashed.

Source: 2017
https://reverb.com/news/how-the-mp3-accidentally-destroyed-the-music-industry

How Film Restoration Works by Chris Opfer from Howstuffworks

How Film Restoration Works by Chris Opfer from Howstuffworks

Some movies shouldn't be revisited. Johnny Depp fans and other poor, unfortunate souls who sat through "Mortdecai" will never get those 107 minutes of their lives back. The best thing they can do is embark on a Paul Revere-esque mission to warn the moviegoing masses off from the depraved beast marching through their towns from theater to theater. Sure, there are certain flicks that are so bad that some might actually get a kick out of them. Why else would so many frat bros still have "Boondock Saints" posters tacked up on their dorm room walls?

On the other end of the spectrum are films that advance the art form and tell the story of the world in which we live. These are the "Citizen Kanes," the "Casablancas," the "Godfathers" and the "Graduates" of the film industry. When aliens descend on what's left of planet Earth thousands of years from now, these are the movies that we should want them to find. That's not to mention a whole slew of flicks that are worth hanging on to because they inform us about the world, are entertaining or are just plain fun. I don't know about you, but I certainly wouldn't have realized that there's no basement in the Alamo if it wasn't for "Pee Wee's Big Adventure."

Unfortunately, many films have been left by the wayside over the passage of time. According to the U.S. Library of Congress, less than 20 percent of American feature films from the silent era remain intact. Meanwhile, half of the movies produced in the U.S. before 1950 have already been lost.

The good news is that researchers and film buffs are working to restore and preserve the movies that we still have.



Film vs. Digital

Until a couple decades ago, moving images were captured exclusively using photochemical film. You know, the stuff that comes in those big reels and that you have to hand-feed through a projector to get on the big screen. These days, however, more filmmakers are turning digital production techniques to shoot and screen their pictures. While the differences in the final product may be subtle to the untrained eye, the two techniques vary widely.

The film used to capture moving picture images has two components: A light-sensitive emulsion and a plastic base. Here's how Kodak explains it:
An easy way to think of film is to compare it with bread and butter. Think of the bread as the base, the butter as the emulsion. When you hold this combination in your hand, what you feel and see is mostly bread, the base -- not butter, the emulsion. The base (bread) holds and supports the emulsion (butter), the active part of the film.

The emulsion is a type of gelatin composed of silver halide crystals. A camera records images by transferring photons of light onto the film as it rotates behind the lens. The crystals turn into silver metal when exposed to the light and form a photo image during the film development process. The series of photos captured on the film can be seen individually once it's developed and create a moving picture when the film is run through a projector [sources: Kodak, Side by Side].

Digital recording, on the other hand, uses an electronic sensor to capture an image, rather than a chemical process. The light that travels through the camera hits the sensor's pixels, creating a number of individual electronic charges that together create an image. The images are stored as data, which can be transmitted via discs, flash drives and the like [sources: JISC Digital Media, Side by Side].

The film vs. digital debate is currently raging on just about every movie studio lot from New York to LA. Film purists often say that they like the gritty, granular feel that comes with the old-fashioned method. Academy Award-winning cinematographer Wally Pfsiter called switching from film to digital "trading oil paints for a set of crayons." Those who have embraced the technology, meanwhile, tout the immediacy of the process. Instead of shooting a scene and waiting to see what it looks like once the film is developed, directors and actors can see what they have right away. Director Robert Rodriguez has compared digital to film by calling the latter technique "painting with the lights off" [sources: JISC Digital Media, Side by Side].
Size Matters

Cinematographers typically use four different types of film – 65 mm, 35 mm, 16 mm and Super 8. The names refer to the films' "gauge," or width in millimeters. Thirty-five mm is the most commonly used type of film for movies because the size of the photos transfers most easily to the big screen. Sixteen mm is used primarily for lower-budget pictures that are later blown up to 35 mm and for TV. Images shot on 65 mm are usually printed on 70 mm film to get the widescreen feel used in IMAX movies. Cinematographers often turn to Super 8 (8 mm) for a vintage, old, home-movie feel [source: Kodak].



How Film Deteriorates

While the choice between digital film moviemaking may be one of personal preference, what we do know for sure is that film reels have a much higher risk of being damaged or destroyed over time than their video counterparts.

As the plastic and emulsions age and are exposed to elements like light and temperature, colors fade and images may denigrate. The culprit is often something called nitrate deterioration. Until the early 1950s, most American movies were recorded on cellulose nitrate film. When the nitrate deteriorates, film often shrinks and begins to give off various acids that separate the emulsion from the base, yellow the individual still photos and make the film so brittle that it eventually crumbles and turns into dust. High temperatures and humidity can speed this process. While the acetate film versions that followed are also subject to decay, modern polyester film is believed to have a shelf life of hundreds of years [sources: Library of Congress, Kodak].

It's not necessarily the Hollywood classics at risk of being destroyed because many of these films have already been restored and transferred to digital formats. Instead, it's the lesser known independent and avant-garde works, along with old newsreels, documentaries and silent era flicks that have been scattered across the country over the years. Experts say these "orphan films," which were outside the scope of previous restoration and preservation projects, are important because they provide insight into what life was like in the days they were shot and recorded [source: National Film Preservation Foundation].


Restoring Film


The actual restoration work is a treasure hunt of sorts in which film archivists go searching for the early versions of the film that they want to bring back to life. The goal is to create what's called a "pre-print" copy of the original film: a master copy of the film as it once was [sources: UCLA, The Picture Show Man].

That means first locating the cleanest copy of the film that's still available. Under ideal circumstances, that would be the original negative version. That's the film that was actually reeled through the camera and used to capture the images. It's called a negative because the original film captures the image in a backward form that includes only shades of the true colors. It's later used to create a "positive" version that ends up on the screen. You need a negative to make a positive print and a positive to make a negative print. Every duplication means a loss of quality.

For many films, there are various trial, correction and distribution copies that may be floating around and could be used for restoration. More obscure pictures – those with just one or a few copies – are often more difficult to restore because there are simply fewer versions of the film from which to choose. On the other hand, more popular films raise their own hurdles to restoration because of the wear and tear endured by the negative as a result of heavy copying.

Once the various versions of the film are located, the restorer may physically cut and paste them to create a full-length master. Wearing white gloves, he'll open the film can and gently wipe off any mold. Then he'll unwind the film slowly, flattening out any curl. Using special equipment and splicing tape or film cement, he'll join pieces of film together as needed. He'll also repair any broken sprocket holes [sources: NFPF]. The idea is to remove wear and tear so that viewers can enjoy the film in its original form rather than an enhanced version.

For a big-budget movie restoration, the film may go through a device called a wetgate scanner – a scanner that runs the film through a chemical bath that fills in any scratches on the negative. Then the film is converted to a digital image. High-end graphic and editing computers can adjust the pixels so faded color becomes rich; they can also remove damaged frames of film or scratches and dirt on individual frames. This is painstaking work. It may take three or four hours to fix one frame [source: Popular Mechanics].

The audio track may also be enhanced. In the case of the "Jaws" restoration, the mono track was upgraded to include two additional rear speakers, creating a surround sound atmosphere for home viewers [source: Popular Mechanics].

And one last thing after the restoration project is complete: Another negative is created so the film will be properly preserved for posterity.
Author's Note: How Film Restoration Works

Everything I know about film, I owe to Keanu Reeves. That's right: Mr. Whoa. Dude. Bro. Yes, Reeves has left an indelible mark on the history of cinema with roles like the stoned space cadet who travels through time to visit other civilizations and ace his history project in "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure," an older, jock version of the same guy in "Point Break" and an older, hacker version of the same guy in the "Matrix" trilogy. But I'm referring to "Side By Side," the 2012 documentary Reeves produced and narrated about the move away from film moviemaking and the artists on each side of the film-digital debate. This is the type of flick that humble-braggers who like movies would label for "film nerds." They are wrong: I enjoyed it, and I'm one of the coolest people whom I know.
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Sources

    JISC Digital Media. "Introduction to Digital Video." (Jan. 24, 2015) http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/guide/introduction-to-digital-video#v08
    Kodak. "Film Types and Formats." (Jan. 24, 2015) http://motion.kodak.com/motion/uploadedFiles/US_plugins_acrobat_en_motion_newsletters_filmEss_05_Film_Types_and_Formats.pdf
    Kodak. "Understanding Film....The Basics." (Jan. 24, 2015) http://www.kodak.com/global/en/consumer/education/lessonPlans/lessonPlan152.shtml
    Library of Congress. "Preservation Research." (Jan. 23, 2015) http://www.loc.gov/programs/national-film-preservation-board/preservation-research
    Library of Congress. "Preservation Plan." (Jan. 24, 2015) http://www.loc.gov/programs/national-film-preservation-board/preservation-research/film-preservation-plan/
    National Film Preservation Foundation. "Why the NFPF was Created." (Jan. 24, 2014) http://www.filmpreservation.org/about/why-the-nfpf-was-created
    "Side By Side." Directed by Chris Kenneally. Company Films, 2012 (Jan. 24, 2015)
    The Picture Show Man. "Restoration and Preservation." (Jan. 24, 2015) http://www.pictureshowman.com/articles_restprev_negsprints.cfm
    UCLA Film & Television Archive. "About Restoration." (Jan. 24, 2015) https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/restoration/about-restoration
    UCLA Film & Television Archive. "An Interview with Bob Gitt (2006)." (Jan. 24, 2015) https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/restoration/interview-bob-gitt-2006
    UCLA Film & Television Archive. "UCLA Film & Television Archive on Turner Classic Movies." (Jan. 24, 2015) https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/restoration/ucla-film-television-archive-turner-classic-movies

Source: https://entertainment.howstuffworks.com/film-restoration.htm

CDs are still better than vinyl

Happy Record Store Day! There are plenty of business-related grievances to be filed against the annual vinyl celebration, but it's hard to argue with the spirit of a day encouraging people to explore and buy new music. Moreover, vinyl's just more fun as a format than MP3s or CDs; there's something viscerally satisfying about dropping the needle, and physically spinning the record back to rewind. And in a world where people feel all too welcome to hijack the playlist at parties they attend, it's nice to have a harder-to-commandeer format on offer.

Let's not fool ourselves, though. Vinyl is great, but the idea that its sound quality is superior to that of uncompressed digital recordings is preposterous. They sound different, and that's exactly the point.

What vinyl can't do

On a theoretical level, there's just no reason it should be the case that vinyl sounds better. There are built-in problems with using vinyl as a data encoding mechanisms that have no CD equivalent. Vinyl is physically limited by the fact that records have to be capable of being played without skipping or causing distortion. That both limits the dynamic range — the difference between the loudest and softest note — and the range of pitches (or "frequencies") you can hear.

If notes get too low in pitch, that means less audio can fit in a given amount of vinyl. If notes are too high, the stylus has difficulty tracking them, causing distortion. So engineers mastering for vinyl often cut back on extreme high or low ends, using a variety of methods, all of which alter the music.

For example, one common cause of high pitches in recordings is "sibilance," or the hiss-y sound produced by pronouncing certain consonants, notably "s" or "z"s, in a quick, sharp way (ex.: "zip," "shack," "sap"). This creates enough problems for engineers working in vinyl that they often have to "de-ess" recordings, either by making the pronunciation less sibilant through editing or by straight-up asking vocalists to pronounce lyrics differently.

De-essing is a common technique outside vinyl too, but then it's an artistic choice; vinyl forces de-essing upon you. If you want to keep aggressive sibilance in for aesthetic reasons, and want to press to vinyl, you're out of luck. And when de-essing is achieved through re-recording vocals, it can alter the music in subtler ways, making vocalists deliver lyrics less intensely and lose a degree of artistic expression in the process.

What CDs can do

Since CDs rely on sampling an original analog signal being recorded, they do have some frequency limitations. While vinyl records, in theory, directly encode a smooth audio wave, CDs sample that audio wave at various points and then collate those samples. "No matter how high a sampling rate is," Wired's Eliot Van Buskirk once wrote, "it can never contain all of the data present in an analog groove."

That's true. CDs work by taking a bunch of samples from a source audio wave and stringing them together. But this criticism is misleading on two counts. For one thing, vinyl pressing is not error-free, and the analog groove of a given record is not a precise replication of the audio wave recorded in the master, not least due to extreme high and low frequency limitations. It's true that CDs can't exactly replicate the whole audio wave in a master, in every case (update: in many cases, the Nyquist-Shannon theorem means it can) — but neither can vinyl records.

More importantly, the volume of sampling that CDs do should be enough to get a replica of the original recording that sounds identical to the human ear. The sampling rate for CDs is 44.1kHz, meaning that CD recordings sample the master recording 44,100 times a second, and can capture frequencies as high as 20 kHz. That is about the limit of what humans can hear; at least one experiment has confirmed that listeners in blind tests can't tell the difference between recordings that include frequencies above 21k and ones that don't. You may think you can hear more than CDs are giving you. But you probably can't.

And over time, engineers have come to make better use of those 44.1kHz. Scott Metcalfe, director of recording arts and sciences at Johns Hopkins's Peabody Institute, explains that engineers have taken to "oversampling," making digital files that use a much higher rate than 44.1kHz, and then compressing that back down to 44.1kHz for the actual CD. "It captures the signal at a much much higher sample rate and then mathematically takes it down to 44.1kHz," Metcalfe says. "It does a really good job of preserving information."

Metcalfe brings up another problem with this line of CD criticism. Even if an actual recording method can hold frequencies above 20kHz, that doesn't matter if there isn't a microphone capable of capturing them in the first place, or a speaker capable of playing them back. And most studios don't have microphones that record above 20kHz, and it's very rare for speakers to play frequencies above that. Indeed, most playback systems feature low-pass filters, which specifically cut off anything above that marker.

The fact of the matter is that CDs can create closer facsimiles than vinyl can.

What do people actually prefer?
There is, sadly, no Pepsi challenge for CDs and vinyl. Image courtesy of Pepsi.

Simply as a matter revealed preferences, the fact that Americans buy digital copies of songs at a much greater rate than alternatives suggests that they'd rather listen to digital music or CDs than vinyl. Taking both actual albums and track sales into account, the equivalent of 243.5 million digital albums were sold last year, compared to 165.4 million CDs and 6.1 million vinyl records. Given that compressed digital audio is considerably lower in quality than either CDs or vinyl, consumer certainly seem to care a lot less about audio quality than convenience.

But that's kind of an unfair comparison, given exactly that convenience differential. You can't fit thousands of tracks' worth of vinyl in your pocket and listen to it while jogging. So what happens if you set all else equal, and have people compare digital and analog audio in a controlled setting?

Unfortunately, no one appears to have done a double blind listener test comparing vinyl to CDs, but there is a good study from Florida State's John Geringer and Patrick Dunnigan doing that with CDs and high-quality cassette recordings. While cassettes sold to consumers often featured lower audio quality than vinyl records, there's nothing inherent to magnetic tape requiring that, and the format doesn't suffer from the frequency limits imposed by the risk of vinyl skipping. It's not a perfect test for our purposes, but knowing how people feel about high-quality analog stacked up to high-quality digital should tell us something about comparing vinyl to CDs.


Geringer and Dunnigan used identical microphone and mixing board setups to record four different concerts, each time using both a digital record and a high-quality analog cassette recorder (the MR-3 from audiophile favorite brand Nakamichi). They then had 40 music majors listen to the recordings, either with loudspeakers or headphones, while letting them switch between each recording at will. The test subjects were not aware of which was the digital recording, and which was the analog one. They were then asked to record their preferences.

It turns out that the music majors had a significant preferences for digital. "Participants gave significantly higher ratings to the digital presentations in bass, treble, and overall quality," Geringer and Dunnigan write. The results were weaker on some points than others (recordings of string orchestras were a particularly close call) but in no case was the average rating of the analog version higher than the average rating of the digital one. The most analog-generous thing to be taken away from the study is that there are some types of music for which people have no preference. But there were several where people had a real, noticeable preference for digital.
So why do people love vinyl?

Record enthusiasts rapidly search through boxes of vinyl records on the opening day of the annual WFMU's Record Fair, which benefits that noncommercial radio station based in Jersey City, on November 22, 2013 in New York City. Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images.

Perhaps the best audio-based case for vinyl is actually precisely the fact that it does mess up the original recording. A lot of vinyl fans talk about the "warmth" of records, particularly of the low-end. But, as Pitchfork's Mark Richardson puts it, "the 'warmth' that many people associate with LPs can generally be described as a bass sound that is less accurate." The difficulty of accurately translating bass lines to vinyl without making grooves too big means that engineers have to do a lot of processing to get it to work, which changes the tone of the bass in a way that, apparently, many people find aesthetically pleasing.

"Warmth" also comes from flaws in record players. As the University of Waterloo's Stanley Lipshitz once explained to Popular Science, speaker sound and the needle's height fluctuations can cause the record to vibrate, which the needle in turn picks up and translates into a "warmer" seeming sound.

Is it wrong to prefer that "warmer" sound? Of course not! It would be as preposterous to rule that out as a legitimate source of aesthetic appreciation as it would be to discount distorted guitar lines for being "less faithful" to the original guitar sound. Audio distortion can be beautiful and there's nothing wrong with liking it. But there's also something to be said for listening to music as its creators meant it to be heard, and precisely because of their "warmth" vinyl recordings sound rather different from what artists hear in the studio.

"As a recording engineer, when I go to a digital recording, what I did is exactly what I get back," Metcalfe explains. "When you record in the analog domain, what you're hearing there is different from what you sent in."

Should I stop listening to vinyl?
Jack Black has strong opinions on the virtues of vinyl. Clip from Touchstone Pictures.

No! For heaven's sake, no. Each format has its charms, and their overall differences in quality are often overwhelmed by differences in the quality of initial recording equipment, in mastering approaches, and in playback setup. But if you're a vinyl collector, you also shouldn't go around telling your friends how much purer your audio is. First off, that's generally dickish behavior, but more to the point it's false. Digital recording just is more accurate. That's not the only thing worth considering by any means, but it does make the puritanism of some vinyl true believers look rather ridiculous.

Thanks to Paul Gold of Salt Mastering for help in researching this piece

Source: https://www.vox.com/2014/4/19/5626058/vinyls-great-but-its-not-better-than-cds

McIntosh MAC7200 Receiver - $7,500

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The Comeback of Vinyl Records

The Tables Have Turned: A Documentary About Vinyl Records

Is Vinyl’s Comeback Here to Stay?

In 2018, the once-forgotten format feels closer to the mainstream than it has in decades.

It was extinct. It was a fad. It was a bubble about to burst. Vinyl has been consigned to the garbage heap of history more than once. Yet it’s still here—and still growing.

But as 2018 begins, the business and culture of vinyl stand at an unlikely juncture. After more than a decade of increasing American sales, vinyl’s comeback is no longer a quirky, look-at-those-hipsters novelty. Instead, the bustling ecosystem of turntables and records is surprisingly close to being mainstream. Last year, vinyl was featured in commercials for insurance companies and arthritis pills. It was on “The Price Is Right.” In November, Jack White was able to describesuch once-unlikely crossovers during the millennium’s first vinyl manufacturing conference. At the same time, though, vinyl still represents an infinitesimal slice of the $16 billion global recording industry. Even within the shrinking realm of physical media, only one in 10 new albums sold last year was on vinyl according to one industry report—aside from a negligible smattering of cassettes, the other nine were CDs.

Yet the numbers—and observations from industry insiders—suggest that physical records will probably continue to remain a meaningful and lasting presence in many music lovers’ lives. In the years ahead, vinyl will likely maintain its status as a complement to the impersonality of streaming, a scruffy anachronism consistently hanging out at the margins. As of now, here are the big trends from the world of spinning wax.





Vinyl Sales Keep Rising—But It’s Complicated

In 2017, vinyl sales in the U.S. rose for the 12th straight year, according to Nielsen Music. What the latest gains mean has spurred some discussion, though: In an era of data overload, when streaming analytics can break down a song’s popularity to the most minute detail, vinyl metrics can still be pretty murky. Who’s truly tallying up what we buy at some grimy venue’s merch table? Plus, fledgling one-person labels typically don’t report their sales to data trackers. Even Jack White’s Third Man Records doesn’t report most of its sales, either, according to co-founder Ben Blackwell. Captured Tracks owner Mike Sniper, who was a buyer at New York City’s Academy Records in the mid-2000s, at the start of the vinyl resurgence, remembers certain indie records selling “hand over fist” before the numbers reflected it. So, as with so many vinyl records themselves, the official figures are embedded with imperfections.

That said, according to Nielsen, vinyl LP sales climbed by 9 percent last year to a record-high 14.3 million albums. That pace of growth was down from previous years’ double-digit gains, leading some to declare an end to the vinyl boom. But a newer data tracker, BuzzAngle Music, tabulated vinyl sales as up by 20 percent—but only totalling 8.6 million. (The two services have slightly different methodologies and have at times conflicted.) Meanwhile, both eBayand online vinyl marketplace Discogs showed double-digit vinyl gains as well. Elsewhere, vinyl sales soared 27 percent in the UK and 22 percent in Canada. If there’s a downturn looming, it’s not here yet.
More Pressing Plants Are Now Churning Out Vinyl

Not long ago, supply problems looked like they might end up hobbling the vinyl resurgence despite fervent demand. Around 2015, backlogs at pressing plants could routinely take six months or more. For smaller labels, that was a long time with their payment locked up and no product to show for it. As recently as 2016, Billboard reported that “no one makes” vinyl presses anymore.

Over the past couple of years, though, a handful of enterprising companies—Newbilt, Viryl Technologies, and Pheenix Alpha—have indeed begun manufacturing new vinyl presses. Most prominently, Newbilt’s machines have been called into action at Third Man’s recently opened Detroit pressing plant. Alex DesRoches, head of marketing for Viryl, tells Pitchfork that Independent Record Pressing, a plant opened in New Jersey by the indie label family Secretly Group and an exec from the long-running alternative label Epitaph in 2015, has fully switched over to its brand-new presses, which are billed as faster and less prone to error. More generally, vinyl pressing plants are opening up all over. One that’s expected to start operations early this year in Northern Virginia would reportedly add 9 million records a year to the current annual U.S. production capacity of 50 million.

Though presses are still notoriously tied up every year before Record Store Day in April, the benefits from all this new supply are evident even beyond the labels big enough to open their own factories. Jessi Frick, who co-runs indie-rock imprint Father/Daughter from her home, tells Pitchfork she’s seen turnaround times improve. “It doesn’t feel as much of a pain in the ass as it used to be,” she says.

As Vinyl Goes Mainstream, So Have Its Best Sellers

Every year, a number of newly pressed versions of classic albums are virtually guaranteed to end up in the list of the best-selling vinyl albums. Wherever there are college freshmen, there will always be someone discovering Bob Marley’s Legend or the Beatles’ Abbey Road. But among the time-tested dorm wall fodder, each year’s most-purchased LPs have also typically shown a tilt toward new indie rock. In keeping with streaming trends, which have benefited viral hits with global scale, that wasn’t the case last year.

According to BuzzAngle, all of 2017’s Top 25 vinyl sellers were released on major labels (except for the Lumineers’ 2012 self-titled album, at No. 22, out on the independent Dualtone). Nielsen’s top list was similar. And no, major-label vinyl albums from longtime indie darlings like Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, Grizzly Bear, and the War on Drugs didn’t make the cut, either. Instead, the leaders among albums that actually came out last year included Ed Sheeran’s latest and Harry Styles’ solo debut.

This was a long way from 2015 (when Arctic Monkeys’ AM, Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell, and Alabama Shakes’ Sound & Color were at least in the Top 10), 2014 (Jack White’s Lazaretto at No. 1), 2013(Vampire Weekend, Arcade Fire, Bon Iver, the National), or 2012 (Beach House’s Bloom at No. 6). Perhaps, as vinyl continues to appeal to more and more people, the format’s common denominators have come to more closely mirror pop culture’s as a whole.
More Records Keep Getting Released on Vinyl

Though not a factor in the year-end charts, pop and R&B albums that wouldn’t have bothered with the format not so long ago are ending up getting lavish vinyl releases now. In 2013, buying Frank Ocean’s channel ORANGE on vinyl involved ordering a bootleg; the same originally went for Beyoncé’s Beyoncé. Last year, following 2016’s Blonde vinyl pressing, Ocean sold a vinyl edition of his visual album Endless on Cyber Monday. In December, Lorde announced a vinyl release for her sophomore release, Melodrama. Greta Gerwig’s acclaimed film Lady Bird takes place in 2002, when vinyl sales were deep in the doldrums; its soundtrack, of course, is currently available on vinyl.

The reissue and box-set machines also continued to churn out vinyl. If you wanted to spin Britney Spears’ ...Baby One More Time or the Predator soundtrack on wax, 2017 was your year. The Velvet Underground, Johnny Cash, and George Harrison all got new vinyl box sets, among many others. These types of massive and costly releases, often including material that’s already available, help explain why it’s still so easy for many to question the sustainability of the vinyl recovery after all this time. According to the latest U.S. record industry figures, vinyl averaged $24.98 at retail in 2016, up more than 20 percent from a decade earlier, adjusted for inflation. As today’s record buyers load up on canonical acts, ubiquitous hits, and novelty soundtracks, they may not have enough money left over to support up-and-coming artists.

As Iconic Record Shops Close, More New Ones Are Opening

For all the ease of online shopping, the human interaction that’s involved with actually stepping into a brick-and-mortar record storeis still a big part of vinyl’s appeal. Any metropolitan vinyl aficionado can rattle off a list of beloved institutions that have closed their doors in recent years. But nearly 400 record stores opened nationwide from 2012 to 2017, according to industry officials.

“Almost every week I get an email from someone, saying, ‘Hey, I’m opening a store in a couple of months,’” says Carrie Colliton, a co-founder of Record Store Day. If vinyl attains more mainstream popularity, and city rents go on rising, existing indie retailers—with their amassed knowledge of records and their customers—are sure to face pressures. But overall, the landscape isn’t shrinking so much as being reconfigured.
No Longer Unusual, Vinyl Is Still a Tiny Niche

Vinyl sales may be rising, but they started from an incredibly low base. Those 8.6 million or so vinyl albums sold in America last year compared with 74.5 million CDs, 64.9 million album downloads, and 377 billion streams, according to BuzzAngle. The only smaller category was the cassette format, which stretched out another improbable ascent, jumping 136.1 percent to 99,400 units sold. If vinyl eventually prices out cognoscenti or becomes utterly passé, cheap and convenient tapes and CDs look poised to last long after whenever Apple phases out the iTunes store. But as a physical medium for obsessive music appreciation, neither seems likely to displace the venerable LP anytime soon.

Source: https://pitchfork.com/features/article/is-vinyls-comeback-here-to-stay/

Music Documentaries Available on the Roku FilmRise Channel

If you love music documentaries as I do, be sure to check out the Roku FilmRise channel. They have dozens there as well as on YouTube. Below is how you can add this Roku channel.




Among many other music movies they have under the category "Classic Albums":
Paul McCartney & Wings Concert - RockShow
The Making of Fleetwood Mac Rumours
The Making of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John
The Making of Plastic Ono Band by John Lennon
The Making of Aja by Steeley Dan
The Making of Stripped by the Rolling Stones

They also have a "Live Concerts" category for music fans.

Filmrise is the latest channel to bring you hassle-free movies, documentaries, and television shows with no subscriptions or linking to your Roku. The channel offers the standard "B" movies that can be found on other channels like Watch Free Flix or Popcorn Flix, as well as the commercials.

The movies are offered in the following categories:
Popular - 24 videos available
Featured - 23 videos available
Comedy - 35 videos available
Horror - 21 videos available
Romance - 20 videos available
Action & Thriller - 28 videos available
Drama - 31 videos available
TV Shows - 8 videos available
Indie Films - 20 videos available
Family & Kids - 13 videos available
Documentaries - 28 videos available
World Cinema - 92 videos available

There is a fair amount of overlap between the categories, and the movies are ad-supported.

FilmRise delivers unlimited FREE instant streaming of popular movies and hit TV shows. Choose from our extensive collection of movies and TV spanning all genres – available absolutely free with no subscription.

Watch hit television shows like Forensic Files, Women Behind Bars and Urban Legends. Popular kids’ shows include PBS’ Emmy award winning The Big Comfy Couch, Discovery Kids’ Popular Mechanics for Kids and the BBC's Young Dracula.

FilmRise also offers film favorites like the action-packed thriller, Red Scorpion, as well as great comedies, romances, dramas, horror films, documentaries, award-winning foreign language films and independent cinema.

All FilmRise movies and TV shows are available instantly. No subscription needed. Available on any Roku ready device, FilmRise is the premiere Roku channel for absolutely FREE movies and TV!



For more information and high quality film and TV entertainment, please visit FilmRise.com.

-- Information is current as of October 3, 2014

Developer's Channel Description: FilmRise offers the best selection of movie and TV entertainment, all available for unlimited FREE instant streaming. Enjoy hit TV shows, popular movies, riveting documentaries, kids shows, world cinema and much more. No subscription. No waiting. Absolutely FREE!

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Source: https://channelstore.roku.com/details/45437/filmrise