More listeners giving vinyl another spin
By Massiel Bobadilla
Sept. 22, 2007 9:04 p.m.
You know something’s trendy when Facebook devotes over 500 groups to the subject. Group names like “Death to iPod, Bring Back Vinyl!”, “Real DJs Spin Vinyl,” and the cleverly worded “Crackle Crackle Buzz … *sigh* Oh How I Love the Sound of Vinyl” all hint at a growing trend among modern music listeners.
Music has always been on the cusp of the popular mind-set as long as it has been widely manufactured and sold. From vinyl to 8-track, from tape to CD, and now with the onset of that convenient little powerhouse of the MP3, portable music has brought harmony to the masses and created bridges to the unfamiliar, the exotic, and the avant-garde. And to top it all off, music is just great to listen to.
There’s nothing like the feeling of cutting loose to your favorite dance mix, sobbing over the miseries of young love with the accompaniment of your emotional dirge of choice, slandering the name of a traitorous ex with a well-chosen and well-worded angry ballad, or swooning over love to the tune of a lyrical accompaniment that perfectly articulates everything you’re feeling but just can’t figure out how to say.
Today’s average music listener owes his eclectic music library to MP3 and the advent of the music download. This burgeoning back-to-vinyl trend, then, seems almost contradictory, as music technology reverts back to the old school days.
To the tune of that familiar crackle and hiss, more and more music listeners are finding that vinyl records provide the sound they crave. An April 2007 report by National Public Radio cited that sales of vinyl records in the United States had actually increased by 10 percent the previous year in spite of the fact that the sale of CDs continues to spiral downward.
“There’s a whole subset of music purchasers who will purchase only in vinyl,” said Bryan Mack, a DJ and assistant music director for UCLAradio.com. “I feel that, while CDs may fall by the wayside as MP3 takes over completely, there’s still going to be a rich market for vinyl.”
Mack, a fourth-year history student, said that vinyls have been a part of his life since he was a child, listening along to the records his father had and, once a year, visiting the traveling record fair in his home town of Bishop with an eye for cheap and rare vinyls.
“(It’s) listening to something intently rather than just having music on in the background,” Mack said. “You can’t take a vinyl record walking somewhere. You can’t play it in your car. You have to sit down and listen.”
The notion that listening to vinyl is more a musical experience than anything else is a singularly pervasive one throughout the music-listener world.
“When you buy a record that’s in good condition, and you have a good needle to listen to it, you have a better time enjoying it because you hear different sounds on a record that you don’t hear on CDs,” said Jose Guzman, a former Westwood resident who hosted popular all-vinyl parties before moving to San Francisco this past month.
“I’ve found that I have a better time listening to records with people than I did just plugging in an iPod. It’s a more pleasant experience.”
The experience of listening to a record differs drastically from the experience of bopping along with your iPod at the gym or blasting a CD in your car. A record demands your undivided attention. Once the music begins, the listener is required to devote uninterrupted blocks of time to hearing ““ really hearing ““ the music wafting from their record player. Sound boring? Think again.
“My roommate from New York bought me a Doors album,” Guzman said one afternoon, launching into a dreamy recollection of the album that turned him into a vinyl enthusiast. “The first time I heard [the album] was on a CD, but I was never really a fan of them until I heard this album (on vinyl). It just had a really different sound from CD. It was immediate. I was like “˜Wow! I can’t believe I’ve heard this album before and never really liked it, but now listening to it on vinyl, it sounds completely different.'”
Of course, this surge in vinyl popularity needs some kind of explanation, and it comes from someone who owes the origins of his job to the vinyl record: a DJ.
“There’s going to be a rebirth of people buying records. People are kind of bored with music nowadays,” said DJ Orator, a Long Beach based DJ and cohost for KPFK 90.7 FM’s Seditious Beats (aka Divine Forces Radio) in Los Angeles. Orator, spinning as a DJ for the better part of 10 years, stated that the rise in vinyl popularity could be attributed in part to the amount of sampling hip-hop artists are now engaging in.
“A lot of people are becoming fascinated with the music that they’re actually sampling,” Orator went on. “The more things that go into sampling, the more people are going to want to see vinyl. It’s going to make people more interested. I think record sales are actually going to go up in terms of vinyl, because people want to hear the original music also. People are fascinated with going vintage.”
Nostalgia aside, most music connoisseurs agree that vinyl, not CD or the ultra-modern MP3, offers the superior sound quality music lovers crave. In order to make the MP3 as versatile as it could be, some sacrifices had to be made in terms of sound quality. For the sake of the MP3’s biggest draw ““ portability ““ music files had to be made smaller in order to be able to jam an iPod full of as many songs as possible. In exchange, high-resolution sound was compromised.
Records made for the purpose of re-playing music have been around since the late 1890s, truly coming into their own as a musical must-have around the 1930s. Whether or not this tried-and-true musical medium will be able to survive into the 21st century has yet to be seen, but given the current trends, it seems the future of vinyl is a bright one.
