The Rebirth of Vinyl

I'm a chatty kathy at the best of times. But I thought we could look at a technology that traces its history to really the nineteenth century, the late eighteen hundreds, and then evolved and grew gradually until it became a dominant technology that waned in the nineteen eighties, really hit its lowest point in the two thousands, and then starting around two thousand and six and continuing for seventeen years, has really made a comeback. So yeah, I am talking

about the vinyl record baby. Now. I love vinyl records. I have a very small collection of vinyl records myself. I know people who have huge libraries of vinyl I am not that person. I would love to have a huge library a vinyl but I just have a modest collection couple one hundred records. Now, nothing in my collection is rare, nothing is particularly special beyond the connection I feel to the recording itself and the musical artists that

are represented. So it's really just my own small library of records that I like to listen to on occasion. And there is a ritual to listening to a vinyl record because there's so many steps that are involved, physical steps that you must take to listen to vinyl records. And I truly believe that it's a combination of the technology and the steps you have to take to use that technology that create a very special situation that enhances

our connection to the music that's recorded on that medium. Now, don't get me wrong, I am not one of the true believer audio files out there who swears that a vinyl record produces better sound than say, high quality digital recording you would get on like a compact disc. There are too many factors involved to make that kind of sweeping declaration. There are those who will swear that analog formats are just by themselves superior to digital formats. I

think it gets way more complicated than that. There's everything from the quality of the recording master, of the type of stylists that your tabletop uses, the kind of motor setup that the turntable has that can all affect music quality all on its own. And that's before you even get to stuff like pre amps, amplifiers, speakers, cables, etc. Plus hearing and listening that involves psychology, right, That involves

the gray matter in our noggins. So it's not just technology, and that means that my experience is at least to some degree unique to me, and that someone else who is standing in the exact same spot where I stood and listening to the exact same recording on the exact same equipment is going to have a different experience than I did. Now, it might not be vastly different, it might not even be something that they can identify or communicate.

We might talk with each other and not find any differences. But the fact is they're sperience will be at least to some degree unique to them, and mine will be unique to me. So it's just like west Lee said in The Princess Bride, audio quality is subjective. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something I might have paraphrased that, So I am not here to say the vinyl records provide the superior acoustic experience. I don't believe they necessarily do.

I think they can, depending upon all the other factors that play here. But it's more complicated than just what format is the music in? Is it in, you know, analog versus digital? Is it on vinyl versus cassette versus compact disc versus MP three. However, the activity of listening on vinyl has other values beyond audio quality. So, for one thing, a long playing vinyl an LP or an

extended play vinyl EP. Those are big, you know. They can measure typically ten inches in diameter, that's twenty five centimeters, but they can be up to twelve inches that's thirty centimeters.

And that means these records, these discs of vinyl, have to fit into a sleeve and then a cover that's even larger than the disc is right, and this actually gives artists a fairly large canvas to work with when it comes to designing album cover art, which for a while ended up becinding kind of a forgotten art form. So part of the ritual of listening to vinyls, specifically to LPs and EPs is admiring that cover art. Now, some album cover art is, to put it, lightly bad.

Some of it is hilariously bad. So if you want to laugh, you can do a Google image search for the album Gary Getting down to Business. It's Gary gaar Y. So it features Gary Solim on the cover, striking a uh well, let's be kind. We'll call it a dramatic pose. And it most certainly is a product of the late nineteen seventies, and viewed through the modern lens, it will look funny to you. Maybe you would want to recreate it ironically, and maybe eventually it would become unironic and

that just becomes your thing. No judgment here. Maybe if you're a Simpsons fan and you happen to love that meme where Homer slowly walks backwards into some bushes in order to disappear, you should look at the entree Amigos by Camillo Sesto, because it sure does look like Camillo served as the inspiration for that particular moment in the Simpsons. He's standing halfway engulfed in a hedge, and I mean, you look at it, and if you've ever seen that

Simpsons mean. You immediately think this must be where they got that image. Anyway, other album art can be amazing. You could get into like the beef cake and cheesecake covers of Molly Hatchett albums because they look like an advertisement for like a cheeky Sword and Sorcery film or a Dungeons and Dragons expansion set, or you know, something like David Bowie's Aladdinsane album with the simple image of David Bowie from the shoulders up with that lightning bolt

makeup decorating his face. The art becomes part of the experience. It is augmenting what the entire album is about. But beyond that, you've got the actual physical actions you have to take. Right there is the action of removing the record itself. So maybe you pull the sleeve out of the cover and then you take the album out of the sleeve. Maybe you're a rebel and you just try to remove the album and leave the sleeve inside the cover.

Or maybe you're really living on the edge and you lost the sleeve years ago and now you just put a record directly into the unprotected cover. You do you, okay, I mean, if you want to, if you want to scratch up the vinyl. Oh okay, no, no, no, whatever you do is fine. So you carry this vinyl long playing album over to your turntable, and you gently place the vinyl so that the whole lines up with the spindle and settles down on the platform. You lift the tone

arm with the stylus on the end up. You position that stylus at the outer edge of the LP. You very softly and gently set it down, and you have it catch on the groove of the LP, and then you prepare to listen to some music. Depending on the album, you might be taken on a journey, one where the artists carefully planned out that sequence of songs, the order of the tracks, specifically intending to inspire particular moods or reactions.

Maybe it's even a concept album that tells a story, either one that is overtly obvious or one that's just

merely hinted. At halfway through your journey, you have to pause because the needle has reached the center of the album, having followed a groove that spirals inward until it gets to the end, and then you have to lift the tone arm up, move it out of the way, flip the vinyl record over, settle it back over onto the spindle again, move the tone arm with the stylus to the edge once more, and play side to and your journey continues. It's like getting a little intermission in the

middle of a play. Of course, some albums include more than one disc, right. That means you're not really halfway through when the stylust gets to the center. Maybe you're a quarter through or an eight through, so you'll be doing this a few times if you plan to listen to this album all the way through. But it's all part of that ritual. Now, there's no rule saying that you have to listen to an entire side of an album start to finish, or even the full album start beginning.

There's no rule saying you have to do that. However, it is a little more challenging to do something like go to a specific track on the album if it's not the first one on either side. You can do it, but it's not easy. There's also no easy way to skip or to go back and listen to the same

track again. It's not convenient, and unless you have one of the very few models that experimented with the idea, it's not portable either, So I think it's fair to say that vinyl doesn't lend itself to every type of listening situation. It is not convenient, it is not portable, it is not for every kind of listening environment, but for a specific kind of listening it's fantastic at least

of the album's good. Now, I've done several episodes on the history of recorded audio, so I'm not going to repeat everything I've talked about before, but I do want to give some context so that we understand why the Vinyl albums are the way they are, because that experience of sitting down to listen to a full album evolved over time. It didn't just magically manifest. The actual medium

would shape things like music and collections of music. For example, if you've ever wondered why most songs tend to be between three to four minutes long, the restrictions of technology helped determine that. Now, songs were already kind of naturally falling into that length that was just sort of a comfortable length for a song to be, but the medium itself would create restrictions that meant that you really had to conform to that length, and it kind of made

it a standard. The medium is why artists would create collections of songs to release at the same time, and why they typically do so in groups of ten or twelve songs, or if you're an artist like Meatloaf, six to eight songs, because your songs are all freakin' epics. Conversely, the Ramones first album had fourteen tracks, seven to a side. One of those tracks only lasted about a minute and a half, so your mileage may vary. But the medium shaped all of this and created the trends that we

see carried through to this day. I would say long after the medium itself had sort of faded away, we saw those trends continued. However, I can't say that it faded away because, as I mentioned at the top of this episode, for the last seventeen years, it's been making a serious comeback, all right. So let's get into a pretty simple early history lesson of the LP in particular. So, the precursor to flat discs recorded discs were wax cylinders.

There're also ten cylinders tin, but wax cylinders became kind of the standard. These could hold recorded audio, but they were not easy to store. The physical cylinders. You had to have like a box, and you had to be very gentle with them. They all would wear out relatively quickly because the wax would start to degrade. With each playback, the stylist being used would essentially be carving more into the groove, so each successive playback would be a little

worse than the one that came before it. In the late nineteenth century, an inventor named Emil Berliner came up with the idea of recording audio to a flat disc as opposed to a cylinder, and he figured that if he could devise a way to do that, it might be possible to create a means of mass production, which wasn't really possible with the cylinders of the time. See, cylinders were using devices that could both record and playback audio.

But if you could create a way of just recording audio to a blank, you know, a disc that has nothing on it, you could do that much more quickly than you would recording in real time to a wax cylinder, so that you could playback in real time later on. It would be something that would allow business to scale and become something more than just a curiosity for the wealthy.

So he got to work his first version used a disc made of zinc, coded in beeswax and gasoline, and then put through an etching process where an acidic compound etched away at a groove that was made in the disc. And I talk about this more in other shows that go into the detail of the history of vinyl and recorded audio, so I'm not gonna retread all of that. But these discs could only record to one side at first due to the process that Berliner was using at

the time, so there wasn't a double sighted album. He received a patent for his invention in eighteen eighty seven. Now, the zinc discs were not meant to be the final product. Instead, these served as a master recording. So Berlenner would then electroplate this disc to create a negative, so instead of there being grooves, you would get ridgids where the grooves had been and the could be used as a stamp and you could use it to stamp blanks to imprint

the grooves into the blanks. Now these blanks would need to be pliable for the stamping process, but then strong enough to withstand playback. Initially, Berliner tried celluloid, which could make a really good, you know recording, but it was far too delicate and it would wear out very very quickly, so that was out. Uh, there were some celluloid records produced. There are a few that still exist, but celluloid itself is a very delicate material and it can rot over time,

so there are very very few existing celluloid records today. Okay, we're just getting started. When we come back, i'll talk more about the development of the record disc all right. Back, we left off with Berlinner working with celluloid and deciding

that was not a very good material to use for records. Next, he tried hard rubber, and this would involve heating the rubber blanks to temperature so that they became soft enough to stamp, and at first he felt these were far superior to celluloid because they could hold up to a lot more abuse. They were almost unbreakable being made out

of hard rubber. But the trouble was quality controlled because sometimes the stamps didn't leave a perfect imprint, so you could end up with blank spots where there should be a groove, and that meant that once the stylus hit the blank spot, it could just slide across the record, and you know, it was no good it just wasn't reliable enough to be able to produce en mass without lots of potential problems. So Berlinner's solution was to work with a company called Duranoid, which made a shell ac

compound for coding electrical parts. Shell Ac is a resin and it comes from big so shell ack is actually it's extracted from the secretions made by a lack bug, and it's used for all sorts of stuff like including glaze on candies and pills. It also has insulator properties, so it made it great for coding electric components. You could insulate that so that you're not going to get shocked when you handle the things. And then there's the fact that it's really good at holding a shape, though

it can be brittle. So Berlinner felt that the shellac coded records were superior to the hard rubber ones. The stamping process was far more reliable, and so Berliner switched to shellac by the late nineteenth century. Right before the turn of the twentieth century, Berlinner and some investors were creating companies several over the years, all with the name

Gramophone incorporated in them. That was kind of the name of Berliner's technology, but while the medium had evolved, the equipment used to play the media was slower to change. So early machines used hand cranked systems, so that meant you had to sit there and you had to turn a crank in order to listen to your recorded album. The ideal sweet spot for speed would be to crank at a speed fast enough to get seventy to eighty revolutions per minute, because that's where the recorded audio on

shell act discs sounded the best. But if you crank too quickly, you get chipmunks. If you crank too slowly, everyone becomes a basso profundo singer like Patrick Page in Haities Town. And if you're unsteady then you get a real warblee playback, and it wasn't ideal. So there's an era of innovation then in creating a motorized turntable that is both strong enough to work with the heavy tone arms of the time, because back then the tone arms

put a lot of pressure on discs. That's why they would wear out so quickly if they weren't made of durable material. And the stylus was made out of steel, so you really did have to have something that could withstand some damage and some torture in order to be a long lasting product. So the motorized movement need to be consistent and smooth and strong enough to provide good

audio quality, and that took a while. Now, another thing that helped shape both the medium itself and the music upon it was the rotational speed of these motors and the design of the albums themselves. So if you designed an album to be played at seventy eight rotations per minute, you would get superior sound quality, but the stylist would travel the groove pretty quickly, right, because it's rotating seventy

eight times every single minute. So things would sound good, but you could not store very much music per disc side because the groove for a piece being played back at seventy eight rpm would have to be longer than

one played at a slower speed. So if you designed the disc so that the recording was meant to be played back at a slower speed, like at forty five rotations per minute, or even thirty three and one third rotations per minute, you could store more audio on the side of a disc, but the quality of that audio would suffer. So even in the days of hand cranking, like I said, the ideal rotational speed was somewhere in the seventy to eighty rpm range. So how did the

music industry settle on the standard speeds? Well, seventy eight rpm is very convenient when you start looking at things like gear ratios. So the motors that they were using to drive the turntables had their own rotational speed thirty six hundred revolutions per minute. So by using a gear system you could create a gear ratio of say forty six to one and forty six to one ratio gear would convert that thirty six hundred revolutions per minute down

to seventy eight technically seventy eight point twenty six. So the turntable speed was set largely because of the actual limitations of the motor, the fact that it was an thirty six hundred revolutions per minute, and you know, creating a ratio that would allow you to step that down to a more manageable speed for the turntable itself meant that you could go down to seventy eight, which again was in that sweet spot between seventy and eighty rpm.

So sort of the stars aligned for this particular type of implementation, but other gear ratios could produce the speeds of forty five rpm or thirty three and a third rpm without having to change the type of motor that you were using to drive the whole darn thing. Now these days, you could have had a variable speed motor and you could completely change the technology of pressed records entirely. But now it's kind of a legacy system, so no one has really bothered. A couple people have tried, but

only small experiments. So the speed of the motor sort of determined everything else. So seventy eight rpm became the preferred format for early records, and even with a ten inch disc, that meant you could store about three minutes of audio per side. And again, while many songs already fell into that length restriction, the medium really helped cement it as the standard song length. It was a limit

of the medium. So if you wanted to sell a lot of records and have people go gaga over your music, you really wanted it to be high quality stuff, and you know, not sacrifice the sound quality the fidelity of your recording, but you would sacrifice how long your track could be because you were limited to about three minutes. And think about that, these ten inch discs were singles.

They could usually hold a single track per side, which is pretty big disc to hold one song is pretty wild, and it would dominate for decades, well into the nineteen fifties. So now we're going to do a quick jump ahead. So others at the time of Berliner were trying to come up with alternatives because they wanted to get into this market, but they didn't want to have to pay

Berliner for his technology. So like Edison was one of those, and they were trying to come up with alternatives to shell Act too and really to compete with the Gramophone Company. But the alternatives were often more expensive, so they had very little effect in breaking into the market. People didn't want to have to buy new equipment and spend even

more money to purchase the albums themselves. So even as early as the nineteen twenties you had people experimenting with plastic and by the nineteen thirties the technology was ready to go in some early implementations, but there were some problems. One was that companies were making boneheaded mistakes, but another was just that the economy in general was not good. Just like today, we were in a really bad time

of economic uncertainty. In the nineteen thirties, the US was in the Great Depression and the cost of a record player, and then on top of that the cost of records to play on the record player. That was a luxury that very few were willing to pursue. A radio set, while also being very expensive, at least had the advantage of providing the content for free, well sort of free, like my show, the content was sponsored by companies paying to have their products and services highlighted on the air,

so not really free, but free to the consumer. The plastic records were still a thing behind the scenes, however, DJs at radio stations were using them, but there wasn't much of a consumer market for vinyl or plastic records until the end of World War two. Partly that was because the war had put high demands on various materials and manufacturing facilities, which prioritized war efforts over stuff like, you know, civilian comforts and luxuries, which is understandable. But

after the war things would change. In nineteen forty eight, an invention from doctor Peter Goldmark would make a huge impact on the recording industry. So Goldmark devised a way to create microgrooves on vinyl, a type of of PVC plastic, and these microgrooves allowed for a couple of really big advantages. It was possible to create long playing or LP albums, and you could reduce the rotational speed to thirty three and one third rotations per minute without an appreciable dip

in audio quality. So that meant that a disc could hold way more than three to five minutes per side. Now it could hold more than twenty minutes per side, So you could put way more content on a single disc,

particularly a twelve inch disc, than you could in the past. Now, RCA Victor, which had attempted to introduce the thirty three and a third album more than a decade earlier that when I was talking about there being companies that made boneheaded decisions, I was referencing RCA Victor at the time. It was a massive flop when they tried to introduce it in the thirties. They decided in the late forties to challenge gold Mark and Columbia Records, which was the

comp that was making use of Goldmark's technology. So RCA introduced the seven inch record disc, designed to be played at forty five revolutions per minute, so the forty five can hold about as much music as the seventy eight ten inch discs could with the same level of fidelity, so they were arguing you're giving the maximum fidelity performance at a smaller form factor, so it's more convenient, which

was debatable. Both of those were debatable, but these two form factors, the thirty three and a third LP and the forty five seven inch disc were incompatible with one another, so obviously they required different speeds rotational speeds to play back the music appropriately, although if you've ever played a thirty three and a third record on the forty five setting or vice versa, you can get some pretty fun experiences out of that, like you can you can turn

a long playing album into a Chipmunk's album, or a forty five you can turn into something that's really creepy. The songs Staying Alive played on a forty five but at thirty three and a third RPMs becomes a horror

movie song. It's fantastic anyway. RCA Victor's album form also had a larger hole in the center and you had to use a thicker spindle or later an adapter, and this was probably a decision to make the two formats even more incompatible, like it was trying to make sure that the two could not be played on the same machine, and this set up a pretty cutthroat competition in the market for a couple of years, with like each company

trying to muscle the other one out. But by nineteen fifty, RCA grudgingly began to license Colombia's system and began to produce its own thirty three and a third albums because the forty fives were really only good for singles that you couldn't sell a full album on forty fives. You would have to sell you know, five or six forty fives per album because they just couldn't hold that much

music per side. Columbia, for its part, began to produce forty five albums in order to push out singles because again, that form factor was great for singles and B sides, but not so great if you wanted to do an LP. So both companies, essentially, after fighting each other fiercely for a couple of years, begrudgingly adopted the other companies formats. Now, if you have an older turntable or perhaps one of

the boutique kinds made for audio files. You may actually have three settings for rotation speeds, the thirty three and a third, the forty five, and the seventy eight, but a lot of tables ditched seventy eight entirely because the industry pretty much did the same thing back in nineteen fifty. Most of the records produced after nineteen fifty were firmly either in the thirty three in a third LP camp

or the forty five single and B side camp. The world began to embrace vinyl, and sales figures climbed year over year, and according to the RIAA AKA the Recording Industry Association of America, which in other episodes of tech Stuff serves as the villain of the piece, vinyl sales in the United States peaked in nineteen seventy eight, So that year people bought more than three hundred and forty million LPs or EPs so long playing albums or extended

playing albums in the United States. These made up nearly half of all music format sales across every format, and they were the dominant format of the time. Now, I was born in the seventies, and that might explain why I have such a fondness for the vinyl format. Some of my earliest memories involved listening to records with my family. My parents had tons of vinyl record albums. I remember listening to the Beatles and John Denver and Linda Ronstat.

I also remember listening to comedy record records from groups like Beyond the Fringe, The Fire Signed Theater, and Monty Python, and those experiences were great. But something was about to happen that would be another massive change to the music industry. I'll explain more after we come back from this quick break. All right, we're back. So what happened? Why did we go from nineteen seventy eight to a record breaking sales

figure for vinyl to the decline of the format. Well, in nineteen seventy nine, Sony introduced a technology that would create a sea change in the music industry. That technology was the Humble Walkman, a portable cassette player. So music cassettes had been around for more than a decade. In fact, they first hit the scene in the nineteen sixties, but for many years cassette played were these really big stereo

components that you would buy. They were expensive, they were bulky, and they took up a lot of space and you had to connect them to other components in your stereo system, and if you already had a record player, you might feel like there's not much point getting a cassette player. Some cassette formats, like the infamous eight track, saw a brief spotlight moment due to being incorporated into vehicle audio systems, so then you could take your music on the go

with you. But the humble audio cassette would really grab the baton in the late seventies and truly take off in the nineteen eighties. So the cassette and the Walkman and later stuff like in dash entertainment systems and cars offered up portability, which was something that vinyl couldn't really do, despite a few efforts that aren't really noteworthy enough to

dwell on. And as we would see again and again, things like accessibility, portability, and convenience can matter just as much or perhaps even more than something like audio quality. So while you might get an irritating hiss in the background of your music that's on cassette, particularly if you're using something like really cheap headphones, well you could still listen on the go, so that was an advantage. It still wasn't super easy to navigate to a specific track.

I'm reminded of all the times where as a kid, I was writing those rewind and fast forward buttons like a maniac, trying to get to the beginning of a specific song in the middle of one side of a cassette. But the fact that you could take your music on the go changed everything. It only took a few years for cassette sales to not only make a dent in Vinyl's figures, but to actually out sell vinyl itself. So depending upon your source, cassettes overtook vinyl sales somewhere around

nineteen eighty three or nineteen eighty four. I've seen different citations for that. So the music industry was actually really worried about cassettes at first because they opened up the possibility for piracy, something that you didn't have to really worry about with vinyl. But cassettes were different, and the industry would remain worried about piracy for the foreseeable future because every time there's a media shift that becomes one

of the big concerns. In fact, there are a lot of times where the music industry resists change, and that makes adoption much slower because of this fear of piracy. However, the industry eventually came around to cassettes because they realized they could do something that they couldn't do before, which was they had the chance to sell the exact same album on two different formats, potentially to the same customer.

Sometimes they would include exclusive content on one format or the other or both, where you could buy the album on vinyl and you'll get one track, you buy it on cassette and you get a different track, And so for some people were super fans, they would end up buying both formats because they wanted to be a completionist. So there were ways for the music industry to make even more money by introducing this new format. But another big blow to vinyl sales was right around the corner.

So cassettes dominated most of the eighties, but the technology of the compact disc, which actually traces its history to the seventies, would leave both cassettes and vinyl behind, so vinyl sales took another blow. Cassettes would be hit even harder considering how far they had to fall because vinyl had already fallen due to cassettes, but vinyl was able to hang on it increasingly took a smaller part, especially for the consumer side of media, but it didn't die.

Remember when I said that vinyl LPs hit their sales peak in nineteen seventy eight, that was specifically for America. If we look at global sales figures, the peak actually happened a little bit later. And we have to turn to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, which tracks that kind of stuff, and it says the peak of vinyl LP sales globally was in nineteen eighty one, and

that was one point one billion units sold worldwide. Now, that same group says that the lowest point for vinyl sales worldwide was two thousand and six. That's when just three million LPs were sold globally. So think about that. A peak of one point one billion units and a

low of three million. That's a huge drop. However, since two thousand and six, the vinyl industry has been on an upward climb, and CD sales, while you know they were the dominant format for the two thousands, really have been taking a hit, partly because of a new means of music consumption streaming. Once that rose to prominence, that really to take a bite out of CD sales, and two years ago, in twenty twenty one, something really interesting happened.

For the first time since the CD took the crown. Vinyl sales ended up outpacing CD sales. Yeah, in twenty twenty one, more people bought albums on vinyl than they did on CD, and that remained true last year in twenty twenty two. So for two years vinyl has been out selling CDs. So last year the number of vinyl albums sold in the United States was around forty three point four to six million units, So forty three point four to six million in the US alone compared to

three million units sold globally in two thousand and six. Now, I wouldn't say vinyl is dominating, but it's definitely not dead. It's not nearly as dead as folks thought it was back in the mid two thousands. But then, you know, maybe I should say that it is dominating because according to Illuminate, forty three point four percent of all albums purchased in the US last year were on vinyl. Now that includes not just physical media, it also includes digital formats.

So this includes everything from MP three's to compact discs, to cassettes to I don't know, wax cylinders. Forty three point four percent of all sales were on vinyl. When you look at just the physical formats, well, vinyl made up fifty four point four percent of all albums sales last year. They really did dominate. But these figures aren't

really the ones that truly blow my mind. I mean, yes, they are impressive, and the fact that vinyl has made such a comeback is amazing, especially for someone who was, you know, alive when Vinyl hit its peak and then also alive when Vinyl hit its low. It's amazing to see it have a comeback. But no, the thing that really shocked me was that Illuminate found another interesting statistic here. Maybe y'all won't find it shocking at all, maybe it's not surprising at all to you, but it was to me.

So here we go. According to Luminate, about fifty percent of the folks out there who are buying vinyl don't have a record player. Now, granted, this was discovered in a survey that had a fairly small sample fewer than four thousand respondents. Around three thy nine hundred and ninety or so responded to the survey, and about half of them said that they had bought a vinyl album but

did not own a record player. Maybe when you expand that out to the general music audience, that percentage won't hold. Maybe you won't see it be like a fifty to fifty. But even for a small survey, fifty percent having no means to play back the media that they have bought, that's banana to me. Now, I suppose some of the explanation here goes back to what I was talking about at the top of the show about the ritual of playing vinyl. So, yeah, you can't actually play the vinyl

if you don't have a record player. That arguably key component of the process is not accessible to you. However, you do end up having a physical object that represents the thing you love, the music you love, the artist you love. You have something that is tactile, It is real. So it's not this ephemeral file that only exists in digital zeros and ones. It's something that you can hold in your hands and you can look at it. You

can admire the album art. A lot of modern vinyl albums come with incredible liner notes that give thoughts about how the songs came to be and what the artists were doing when they were creating the music. Some of them come with other supplemental material like artwork and photography and all sorts of stuff. The vinyl itself might be

a work of art. We've left the days of generic black vinyl discs behind, and it's no surprise these days to pull out a vinyl album that's bubblegum pink or Da Glow Blue or even Glow in the Dark or Tie Die in all sorts of colors. The vinyl is a collectible and a physical object that connects the audience to the music, even I guess if they can't actually play the music that's on that disc. And I do get that music is capable of encouraging strong emotional bonds.

There are certain songs I listen to when I'm in a particular mood because the music emphasizes feelings. Sometimes that might not even be the feeling that the artist was intending to impart, but that's okay. The way the audience consumes art and what the artists intended don't always align, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing. And owning something physical seems to make it more real, like there really is something going on more than just listening

to some music. Now, if you go down that path too far, you start to stray into dangerous parasocial territory. But I do think that celebrating a connection to art is fine, just you know, don't project that into a situation where you and the artist or artists are magically besties in your mind and imagination or something that's not healthy. Now, I guess I'm not quite old enough to just shake my head in confusion at hearing that, you know, half the people who are buying vinyl don't have a way

of playing it. I do get it. I mean, I do have collectibles that don't really have any other purpose other than to be collectible. Right. I've got things like action figures. I don't play with them. They're connections to things. I even have things like Funko pops that really can't play with at all. You just look at them. So I do understand collecting things that give you a connection

to something you love. I also think that listening to vinyl albums is a really cool celebration of technology, of music, of art, and of your own emotional experience to that art. I highly recommend it if you haven't experienced it. Like. I'm not saying go out there and buy a turntable and a bunch of albums, but if you have access to one, I do recommend just sitting down to experience it.

It might take a little practice to experience music this way, because we have trained ourselves to be more impatient and more demanding. You know, we have expectations for being able to experience music on our terms, not the artist's terms. And there's nothing necessarily wrong with that. It's just different, you know. We hit that skip button so quickly, and I ain't gonna lie. A lot of albums have at least one real clunker of a song that screams, hey, this is a good chance for you to go to

a bio break. You don't really need to listen to this one. That happens a lot, at least for me. But with some albums, you might find that listening in this way, where you are sitting down and deliberately listening track to track and having that intermission and having to turn a record over and start it up again, you might find that that experience creates a whole new way to appreciate music that you like. But be warned it could make it harder for you to listen to tracks

and isolation in the future. There's certain songs where I feel it's incomplete if I haven't heard the track that plays before it, because the artist made such a clever way of one track leading into the next that I feel that it's not really the right experience if I just listened to that one track completely isolated from everything else. Also, before I conclude, there are a couple of other tidbits

from that Illuminate study that I thought were interesting. So, out of all the music genres out there, vinyl sales were most popular in the rock genre. Rock albums made up more than fifty percent of all vinyl sales, so this is not something that is represented across every genre. Rock really dominates. Second place was R and B and hip hop, which also includes rap albums as well, so a pretty big umbrella, and that made up around eighteen

percent a little less than eighteen percent of all sales. Also, nearly half of all vinyl sales were made in independent record stores, which is freaking awesome. I highly recommend seeking out a local record shop in your area. You could find all sorts of gems. There a lot of independent shops sell both new and used vinyl, and sometimes you'll find stuff that you didn't even know existed that will

delight you. Some of the records you come across might be quirky, Some of them could be really funny when viewed through a modern lens. Some come across as really corny or square or whatever other adjective you'd like to use for not very cool. You know, lame would probably fit for a lot of these albums. But I promise you, even in those categories, you can find stuff that has

a sleeper or two in it. In fact, that's why I think soundtracks for films like Quentin Tarantino's movies, or like James Gunn's films, specifically the Guardans of the Galaxy movies, those soundtracks end up being huge hits because they contain tracks that are seriously awesome but were largely overlooked. And of course, there's new vinyl being pressed every year. It's not all just old vinyl. There's lots of new stuff. Bands that are active right now that are pressing albums

in vinyl, and indie stores carry that stuff too. So if you do have an independent record shop near you, take a trip and check it out. Look at some of those albums, laugh at the cheesy album RT and ooh and a the really cool ones. You know, maybe pick up a couple of albums, particularly if you have a record player at home, though I won't judge you if you don't. And I just want to give a quick shout out to a couple of independent record stores

that I love. Back in Athens, Georgia, where I went to college, there's a shop called wax In Facts, which still exists, I'm happy to say. When I was in school, they actually had a room of used vinyl where they sold records by the pound. You paid one dollar per pound of records. It didn't matter what albums you picked, so if you came across a rare pressing, just by flipping through all the albums, you could get an insane bargain.

So a big shout out to my buddy John who scored a pressing of meat Loafs Bat out of Hell album on red vinyl that was really cool. And then, not too far from where I live today, there's a record store called Criminal Records. It's in a little five Points area in Atlanta, Georgia. It's another great spot to buy music. And comic books, and it's one of the busiest shops in that little neighborhood, and it attracts a wide variety of music fans. That's another cool thing about

Vinyl and these independent record shops. They have a broad audience. And when you go to these physical locations, you run into really interesting people. I mean, these are sometimes people who are extremely different from yourself, but you'll find you'll get caught up in conversations about music and art and collections and things that you thought were really interesting and maybe some lost gems. And it's just a great place to connect with people as well as to the music itself.

And all of that is thanks to this technology. So I wanted to do this episode not just to talk about the tech, but to talk about its impact in culture and society, because I find that to be the really fascinating piece of technology. I think all of tech is really cool, but seeing how it interacts with us is really where the magic is for me. And yeah, just thought it'd be fun to talk about this. Also, just big shout out to Vinyl like continuing to climb

year over year. The most recent increases have been more modest, but it's still been on the upward track, so I hope to see that continue, and I hope I can go shopping for some new vinyl pretty soon. Hope you're all well, and I will talk to you again really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.