Physical Pros/Cons of musical media

LPs - gorgeous packaging of course, the look and feel of thick vinyl is unbeatable, the clunk of the needle and the tiny transition from silence-to-not when you first put the needle on the record (and the drumbeat goes like this...)

Tapes - walkmans are beautifully chunky things. The perfect medium for compilations, still: disposable but still an effort to make.

Never owned a Minidisc or an 8-Track.

MP3s - INSTANT GRATIFICATION NOW. Endearing random element - will it be what it's meant to be? Random playlist heaven.

CDs - handy, basically, but gank apart from that.

Tapes - great for compis. however, I get the impression minidiscs are better for compis and so I might have to move in that direction.

Seriously though, I don't understand why people get so down on CDs, they're inexpensive, shiny, harder to destroy than cassettes (which are horrible inventions), easy to put away, nice little things. I don't hear the horrible sound quality issues people claim exists - I mean I'm sure it does but it's not exactly such an issue that you will really notice it without careful comparison. Vinyl is lovely in theory but it scratches like a mofo and is unwieldly. I like the covers though, and obviously if you are DJing nothing will work like the vinyl.

CD: I really get annoyed at how difficult it can be to remove the booklets from the cases (and reinsert them). In fact sometimes it's impossible to do it without damaging the edges slightly. Bad design.

Tapes: Just horrible all round. Never liked them. Necessary evil.

Minidisks and DATs: Small and very satisfying. I particularly like the delicate 'clunk' sound my Minidisk player makes when you put a disk in and shut the lid.

cd: convenience. it's so easy to find the track you need... it's only a couple of clicks away. on the negative side, i don't think they are comfortable enough to carry around.

minidisc: i hate them, for some reason.

tapes: they are the absolute best. i love them... it must have something to with me growing up in the 80s. i still remember (and own) the first tapes i ever got. i love their shape, their scent, and i LOVE tape compilations. and i love walking around with tapes in my pockets and/or backpack. sure, they might sound awful after playing them many times... but they have some mysterious appeal that makes me love them. and i love double decker tape players. tapes and personal tape players are still the way to go for me.

Tapes are a pain in the arse but they're easy to make and very portable. But they often deteriorate too quickly and tape decks require a lot more maintenance than any other component.

Vinyl is lovely, but then you're dealing with potential pressing faults, distortion and eccentric rotation. Crackles and pops are the least of your worries.

CDs are the easiest to deal with, but again I find them too easily disposable. CDs are just somehow not as exciting as vinyl.

As much as I prefer the physical artefact of the LP, I don't tend to buy that many of them thesedays. I can't completely forgive them their imperfections and, jeez, they sure are a bastard to move around in any great quantity.

MDs are terrifically robust little fellas, and, with the canvas of the translucent caddy to play with, can actually have some kind of character. I'm currently buying lots of smoky golden Sonys. I have a whole lot less bother digitally recording to them than I do CD-Rs.

I used to have a little fetish for super-expensive and rare cassettes. The outrageous ceramic-shell Sony SMMST, the heavy-as- lead forest-green TDK MA-XG, the silkily exotic Maxell Vertex. Oh, how they'd let you punish them, overdriving them deep into the red without a hint of compression. Little minxes.

DATs have near-perfect dimensions: tiny, but with a little heft to them. Pam has a small stack in the wardrobe, but we've nothing to play them on. DATs are mysterious.

A 1/2" 1500ft spool of Quantegy Grand Master or BASF 911 reel-to-reel is perhaps the most satisfying thing of all to wave around, but their direct replacement in many studios - the multi-GB hard disk - is nice too. Chunky - almost like you're transcribing your music onto a solid billet of aluminium.

Oh, how they'd let you punish them, overdriving them deep into the red without a hint of compression. Little minxes.

This sentence gave me hot flushes...

That said, anything digital is the shit for being reproducible without any loss of quality. My CD collection has exploded since getting a CD burner and no longer actually having to pay for the damn things. I go out more, get my haircut more than once every six months, my cat gets better food, etc etc.

didn't want to make a new thread for this so I figured I'd bump this 20 year old one. does anyone else think the decline of physical media is going to do weird things to our cultural memory, 20 more years down the line? I think part of the reason the big selling artists of the 60's, 70's, and 80's are still well known today is because all that physical media is still out there, if you ever visit a record store it's lined with these cultural artifacts which keep them alive in some sense. my basement is just littered with records which keeps all this music on my mind. I still listen to it periodically because I see the record and think "ah, haven't heard that in a while, I paid money for it and am storing it in my basement so I might as well give it another listen..."

now, here's another thing that happened recently - I discovered an old playlist of favorite songs, it was like 3000 tracks encompassing everything I liked. it's pretty much every song I ever wanted to hear more than once. half of those tracks are songs I still listen to but every now and then I find something on there that I totally forgot about. if I hadn't found this playlist I maybe would never have heard these songs again. I kinda wonder if it's gonna be that way, collectively, with the stuff that's popular now.

Feeling this

Reminds me of friend who told me he printed out the covers of everything on his kindle so he could remember what was on it.

I mean, absolutely. I think the only thing creating associations with artists for kids now is social media presence. A teenager I know has huge playlists but doesn't know anything about the artists or remember their names, ie the classic "No, I've never heard Nirvana...oh, that song? Yeah I know that song, I have it on a playlist somewhere."

But someone like Billie Eilish is a huge presence because of discussion, videos, etc. Maybe that's a bad example because she's a huge star, but there have to be smaller examples that I wouldn't know about.

I think it's less the decline of physical media and more of the internet being monetized on NEW/IMMEDIATE/NOW, etc

target will sell t-shirts with screengrabs of tiktok videos in thirty years.

small sample size but at my kid's middle school, the most popular t-shirts seem to be nirvana, def leppard, iron maiden, metallica, bowie...maybe it's all about having a good logo.

Yeah I think those shirts are wholly divorced from the music.

I think it's less the decline of physical media and more of the internet being monetized on NEW/IMMEDIATE/NOW, etc

True, although in my world of 1 young person there is plenty of new music too that he likes but doesn't know the name of or anything about, and why would he. If it comes via the algorithm will get liked or saved to a playlist if you're lucky, but that's the extent of it if it's just audio. Looking deeper into an artist's discography or remembering their name seems increasingly like old school music nerd habits?

Eh, there's always a divide between those for whom music is fairly disposable, and those who make it a passion and dig deep. Are the algorithms really that different than listening to radio back in the day? It's still someone else deciding what you might like and pushing it on you.

I guess it's different in that radio 'back in the day' had some kind of a regional aspect to it, you still had DJs and tastemakers which is why the radio in Chicago would sound different than the radio in Tulsa or Dallas or Boston, etc. nowadays the number of tastemakers are limited and the ones that exist are intensely focus grouped. not to mention the bizarre entropy of the YouTube algorithm will randomly make something like "Plastic Love" very popular and suddenly physical record stores are carrying entire sections of City Pop. but more to the point, even the people who considered music "disposable" still owned records and CDs, right?

kids these days are listening to music all wrong in my day we'd save up for months for a bit of plastic with a couple of good tracks on it and we had to endlessly obsess over the minutiae justify our purchase. now the kids just turn on the content hose and let it wash over them indifferently it's like they don't even care man

^otm

the endless amounts of music online vs the limited physical collection in anyone's home back in the '60s/'70s/'80s/'90s means less focused listening on a small group of albums, which were most frequently ones widely available + popular that a lot of people had access to wherever they lived. it prob is gonna be tough to remember certain artists down the road, digging on Spotify is different than digging in a crate.

we need to minimize the human element, hopefully soon we can just press a button to have a computer generate convincing fake The Killers songs or something

from a millennial POV the most impressive and enviable thing about zoomers and music is how they seem to be able to enjoy multiple things that for bullshit ideological reasons we had to learn to reject or choose between or listen to in secret shame or deploy irony or eclecticism or overwrought music-critical theoretical frameworks to justify enjoying

it's true, young people appear to have no shame whatsoever about having terrible taste in almost everything

k boomer