Ever since I can remember, I’ve been collecting music. My father was a music fanatic and I picked up the habit from him. He’d take my brother and I to the record store, sometimes twice a week, indulging our burgeoning interest in music by buying KISS, Danny Gatton (I still listen frequently to his seminal release Redneck Jazz) and Joe Walsh records for us, while he consumed everything from Japanese Court music and Stravinsky symphonies to Bob Dylan’s dubious descent into Christianity (Christ, that bummed him out) and traditional Irish folk. Because of this habit, our house was filled with records. We’d trade in the odd stinker on occasion (my prepubescent purchase of Angel’s White Heat was almost immediately vanquished from our house, until my brother bought it again as a gag birthday present for me a couple years ago) and many got lost over the ensuing decades, but for the most part, everything the three of us bought during those trips still resides in my collection today.
To put my collection in perspective, those adventures took place over three decades ago. Since then, I’ve bought a record, CD or tape on average twice a week (if not more) since then.
In other words, my house is filled with music.
The golden age of record buying was when CDs were introduced to the marketplace. Virtually overnight, vinyl was rendered useless by the new and supposedly superior medium. Man, was that awesome. Traditional music outlets treated vinyl records as if they didn’t work anymore--slashing prices to clear out their stockpiles to make way for the CD age. The used bins were overflowing with priceless gems from collectors who traded in perfectly good albums to buy the exact same recordings on compact disc. I remember buying many hard-to-find, once prohibitively expensive records for a fraction of their initial cost. Not only could you find great deals on albums and singles in the record stores, but thrift stores, once the last consumer resting places for the likes of Supertramp’s Breakfast In America” and Glass Houses by Billy Joel, were transformed into treasure troves for finding low priced vinyl gems. While I did buy thousands of CDs, I never once considered doing away with my vinyl or my turntable. I’m not an idiot.
As with all things, the good times didn’t last. The rise of the Internet and the mp3 exposed the ridiculous cost of buying CD hard copies of music as the sham that it is. Initially sold to the public as indestructible, the mortality of CDs became painfully evident due to the ease with which they acquired scratches, and their annoying penchant for oxidizing over a relatively short period of time. Today, there are no ands, ifs or buts about it, CDs are an inferior format for music replication, sold to the public at inflated prices for the eternally greedy music industry’s insatiable gain. Back in the day, record labels used to put stickers on records claiming that home taping was killing the music industry, but in reality it’s the industry’s all-consuming desire to maximize profits through artificial inflation of the cost of music that has solidified their demise. I mean, why pay 20-plus dollars for what you can easily download for free? It’s a no-brainer. The industry argument against downloading is that you are stealing money from the artists and bands when you do it. However, the truth is that groups very rarely, if ever, make money off their releases, and the main reason for that is the record companies themselves. They’ve been screwing musicians and consumers since the first record was sold. The new technological advances have leveled the marketplace. Before the Internet, you had to pay top dollar to record your music, save every penny to have the recording pressed, and hope that the record stores would carry your release--if it ever saw the light of day, or if they had space to spare next to the thousand Madonna records they were selling. With the development of the Internet, you can make a decent-quality recording of your music at home, have it available to anyone in the world with Internet access, and bypass the tyranny of brick and mortar commerce completely. Best of all, your chances for actually making money off your music have increased exponentially.
For both the consumer and the musician, the Internet has been a revolution. Only the music industry has suffered. That’s what I call progress.
And now we have come full circle. Vinyl is cool again. A generation that had no firsthand knowledge of records is suddenly enthralled with the medium. Record labels are pressing vinyl not only because, unlike a CD, there is no easily obtained technology with which you can upload an album (give it time); more importantly, vinyl appeals to the consumer desire to buy something you can hold in your hands. Locally, it is easier now to find a new record than it is to find a new CD. Record shops such as Vinyl Conflict, Deep Groove, and the recently opened Steady Sounds compete with long-time stalwarts Plan 9 and BK Music for your musical dollar, offering a myriad of new and used vinyl offerings, in contrast with their dwindling (or absent) CD selections. Audiophiles have long proclaimed the superiority of vinyl over CD and digital formats. While that may be true, there’s a fetishistic cult around vinyl’s resurgence that makes me a little queasy. It reminds me of collector scum I used to (and still) know that buy records more for bragging rights than actual musical enjoyment.
As someone who has spent a lifetime collecting music, I don’t really care what format I hear music on as long as I can hear it. People like to romanticize vinyl, but really, vinyl sucks too. I know it isn’t a popular argument to make, but it scratches, warps and degrades over time, just like CDs. Worst of all, given its current resurgence, records are getting just as pricy as CDs. Personally, I find all the arguments about vinyl’s superiority of dynamic range and the purity of analog music replication more than a little tiresome. I don’t listen to music for the fidelity; I listen to music for the music. I’ve gotten far more satisfying goose bumps listening to crappy, hiss-laden tapes on beat up, barely functioning boom boxes than from music played on $10,000 stereos.
Don’t get me wrong, I love vinyl. Always have, always will. But again, I love music more than the format I hear it on.
My favorite format lately for listening to music is the mp3. With no covers to look at or pricy equipment required to play it, the mp3 puts the emphasis where it should be--squarely on the music. I’ve spent hundreds of hours looking for a particular record or CD to play, while it takes a fraction of that time to simply type the song or artist into my computer. Also, the Library Of Congress can fit on a compact and easily moveable hard drive, whereas the same music in its physical form would require far more physical storage space. Still, mp3s suck too. The shoddy fidelity of lower-quality mp3s can render otherwise brilliant music unbearable. Hard drives crash, and mp3s wither and degrade much quicker than either CD’s or records. I really just like how easy they are.
Debate the merits of the different formats all you want, but in the end, all that really matters is the music.
Chris Bopst has been a fixture on the Richmond music scene for over two decades, playing in GWAR, the Alter Natives, and The Holy Rollers, among other bands. His free-form radio show, The Bopst Show, has existed for over a decade, appearing on multiple Richmond AM radio stations before becoming an internet podcast in 2008. Weekly episodes of the podcast can be found at rvanews.com.