All Stocked Up and Nowhere To Play

My 21 year old daughter bought a couple records by one of her favorite artists a couple years back. She has an inexpensive player and I have several. She keeps them as collectors items but has never played them. She streams these all the time though on Spotify.

A framed album makes a very cost effective piece of wall art. I do that all the time. I’ve owned records for 50+ years and still play them so I can convert them to digital and stream. Assuming it’s some thing I must be able to listen to and it’s not on Qobuz.

In a sense it’s fortunate that many do not play their records. Records get damaged easily and most people are ill prepared to handle them properly. That has always been the case but in the past records were the way to be able to hear the music you wanted so it didn’t matter.

Now everything is available on streaming services. Much better! As long as what you must hear is provided by the service.

In defense of the tableless people who bought vinyl; 12 inch LP's also represent an artform that went away when CD's took over. Even though I mostly listen to CD's these days, it always depresses me a bit when I think about enjoying a nice gatefold album while listening to the music. My guess is that these people look forward to affording a turntable sometime down the road. The price tag of the new LP's will keep them in the poorhouse for a while however. 

Not too long ago an individual at a workplace had been informed that I was a user of vinyl and they approached me on the subject.

What did I learn, I now know there is a growing number of Vinyl Collectors who keep the LP in the Cellophane. They add the copies owned to Discography and track the Capitol Growth of their collection, this is a Tangible Property and is a equivalent to other currencies being invested in.

I have recently heard performers are getting the hard media interest to gain further momentum by signing copies of their merch'.

I once experienced something like this, I wanted to purchase a recently released Album and when going to pull the trigger, could not find it for sale. When it reappeared once more it was selling for £600. I'm lucky it wasn't a signed copy, who knows what the asking price would be.

I think we may be overthinking this just a bit when we communicate the benefits of vinyl to the uninitiated. 

For example, if we'd stop referring to record changers as "electro-mechanically engineeered record sequencer and retrieval systems"' and just refer to them as "record players" we might earn more Gen Z participation?