Vinyl vs Digital Download in the 2010s
In the past few years it has been noticed that almost every artist in the industry today has resorted to focusing on dynamic styles of selling vinyl again to the modern music market. This has been assumed to be catering to vintage music lovers and people that have a liking to retro methods of listening to music, or just hipsters. Yet this has caught on with average listeners over the years since 2010 when it was revived by artist Jack White who created dynamic methods of publishing his latest albums with vibrant looks, colours, and tricks to change the listening experience from the MP3 standard (McCollum, 2017). This caught on with many artists of the industry and so in recent years, Vinyl sales have beaten MP3 downloads as a result for the first time marking a new era in the music industry (Ellis-Petersen, 2016).
Since this decline in digital downloads has presented itself, it is evident that average music listeners prefer a much greater experience and quality in sound. Music published these days, as projects are advised to, are done so in formats of WAV, FLAC, ALAC, and other forms of lossless, uncompressed formats. The main projects by students such as the author have been producing their final projects in highest quality audio format as a result of this progressiveness in quality. Ultimately, all these reasons have accumulated to the eventual death of MP3 file format so claims it's creators. The reasoning behind this demise is that MP3 has become an obsolete format as there are much higher quality forms of audio that are shared at a lower bit-rate than MP3 as iTunes and Youtube files share their media in AAC as a standard format (Field, 2017).
There has been alternatives to the music listening experience that have risen over the past few years in the form of streaming tracks through sites such as Apple Music or Spotify that have a vast following in replacing MP3 downloading through possession of Vinyl and turntables as they continue to lead the music industry for music sales in these modern times. They lead the music industry by means of giving the artist direct revenue rather than paying through monthly subscriptions in the form of streaming sites which give artists relatively less based on the shared profit with the streaming service provider (O'Connor, 2017).
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References:
Ellis-Petersen, H. (2016). Tables turned as vinyl sales overtake digital sales for first time in UK. the Guardian. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/dec/06/tables-turned-as-vinyl-records-outsell-digital-in-uk-for-first-time
Field, M. (2017). Creators of the MP3 declare it dead. The Telegraph. Retrieved from http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/05/15/creators-mp3-declare-dead/
McCollum, B. (2017). Jack White fuels vinyl revival, Detroit rebound with new record plant. Detroit Free Press. Retrieved from http://www.freep.com/story/entertainment/music/2017/02/22/jack-white-third-man-vinyl-record-presses-detroit/98199824/
O'Connor, R. (2017). What music industry experts predict for streaming and vinyl in 2017. The Independent. Retrieved from http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/vinyl-streaming-music-industry-spotify-ed-sheeran-2017-deezer-mr-bongo-formats-digital-downloads-a7635131.html
