Living With Vinyl

living with records

Only two type of people miss vinyl:

1 – Audiophiles

And

2 – Nostalgists

Everyone else gets that while we no longer have arty art Speaking In Tongues album covers we gain just about everything else. Streaming is the best, most effective and fastest form of music distribution ever.

I know it, you know it, everybody except for Taylor Swift knows it. But we do lose one thing, and it is a big lose and that is personalization that comes with buying vinyl albums. To put it simply: the act of listening to vinyl makes your own personal art work. Any album you listen to long enough gains its own personality, favorite songs get played more, the sound becomes light, if you scratch it, it skips, if you leave it in the sun you might warp it a little, it’ll sound as though it is out of tune.

I’ve owned My Aim Is True many times but my fave one ws the first vinyl one, I had it so long it gained a personality apart from me and part from the music, it moved differently than the way it was built to move, the albums flaws gave it a human quality, the crackle and pop was part of something not charming but distinct to itself.

Just the amount of space it took up gave it a singularity. Streaming music takes up no space whatsoever, it is ethereal, even MP3s can live on the cloud, CDs were a quarter the size and tapes less than that. But vinyl: you had to share your live in space with albums: music became a roommate, in order to own music the only way to own music, was to co-exist with music, physically involve yourself with music.

So between the physicality of playing the music on a stereo and the physicality of living with music, over and above the recorded sound, there was a relationship with music that no longer exists.