Vinyl records are coming back! CD sales are falling! I’ve read the articles and heard the stories, but sorry, vinyl isn’t coming back. Vinyl sales truly are way up, but it’s easy to double sales of a product when you’re hardly selling anything in the first place.
According to Alan Cross, who does the History of New Music on radio stations such as CFNY in Toronto, vinyl record sales have climbed from nothing to somewhere between 1 and 2 % of the market. Most people still download straight to their i-pods.
Fogel sent me this comment that she read on slashdot.org, in which the commenter claims:
“… It has become so easy to record a band’s music and to release it … that music has become so incredibly oversaturated. … With vinyl, it costs so much more and is such a bigger process that it almost weeds out much of the bullshit.”
Please! Weeds out much of the bullshit? I went to high school in the late 70s and endured the terrible canned music that was being pumped out on vinyl by the ton. KC and the Sunshine band? That’s the way, ah-huh ah-huh, I don’t like it. Ah-huh Ah-huh.
This myth that the record industry and publishing industry were saving us from garbage music and books is an old tired old fiction mostly promoted by the established industry hacks.
If the cost of production is such a filter of crap, how does Hollywood keep making junk year after year? Howard the Duck? Who thought that was a good script? George Lucas? That is one of the very few times I walked out on a movie. It was that bad, even with a monster budget.
Indy bands have come out of nowhere for years and produced great music that the record companies were more than happy to scoop up late when the band had already done the hard work of building a following.
There’s a growing market of indy writers like myself thanks to e-books. Some of us will never get out of the garage, others will get publishing contracts after they’ve done the hard work of building a following. The true filter is the writing. If it’s good you’ll have fans.
So for all you book lovers that hate e-books and think that the supposed vinyl comeback proves e-books are a fad: sorry. E-books are only going to increase in sales, and all those books made from dead trees will fade away with the boomers.