North Star

VINYL VS. STREAMIING
Making the case for vinyl, a once forgotten format in the new era of quick and easy listening on streaming services
by Jack Cleaveland
jack.cleaveland@gmail.com | @Braackn
If you look around the hallway at school, most if not every person wearing
headphones is using a streaming service. Whether it be Spotify, Apple
Music or Soundcloud, streaming services are the cheapest, quickest and
undoubtedly the most convenient way to listen to music today. So, why
would anyone want it to be different?
There are many reasons why someone may choose
not to use a streaming service. There’s sound quality
differences, more benefits towards the artist and a feeling
of pride when one is in a conversation about an album and
they can say, “Yeah, I have that one on vinyl.”
First, sound quality. While a lot of people don’t pay
any mind to the sound quality of their music, it’s there.
For example, on Spotify, all the song files have been
compressed to make the song smaller and able to be
played back faster and easier. This compression process
is what makes your music sound different on your phone
than it does on vinyl. There is more flexibility to how much
content you can put onto a 12-inch record than there is for
a single song on a cell phone or computer since streaming
services have a predetermined amount of space a song can
take up. Compression reduces your music’s dynamic range:
the variation between the song’s loudest parts and its quietest parts.
Second, benefits toward the artist. Everyone knows the artists we look up
to are pretty financially successful, but we never think about how the money
actually gets to them. If an artist is signed to a label, they own the rights to
the music and, therefore, they decide where and who the money goes to. The
artist’s management, their label and anyone else involved in the production
Where to Shop
for records:
Vintage Vinyl
Music Record Shop
Record Exchange
Discogs.com
Euclid Records
Music Reunion
Planet Score Records
Record Reunion
Dead Wax
Slackers
of the song or album in question is going to get a cut out of the total profit
from the song. If you listen to this song on Spotify once, an independent artist
without a label or any collaborators makes about $0.0044. Now to make
minimum wage off that one song it will need to be played 366,000 times.
Yeah, that’s a lot. Now imagine someone huge like Playboi Carti. Currently his
song “Magnolia” has 342,248,579 plays on Spotify. Doing the math, Carti and
his management have made approximately 1.5 million dollars off that song’s
Spotify streams alone. Physical sales are another story. If
someone releases their album to record stores on standard
12-inch LP’s, those records are going to retail for around
$20-$25. Let’s use Prince’s “Purple Rain” for this example.
Currently, the album is at 25 million record sales worldwide.
A rough estimate for the profit of that album is around
$562.5 million. So, it’s obvious to see that if you can get your
album in stores and people are buying it, the profit will be
much higher.
Finally, the pride that you feel when you own a record.
There’s something about listening to an album on a
streaming service, falling in love with it and then going to a
record store and making the commitment to spending the
money on it. It can make the album resonate in a different
way once you can physically hold it, look at any exclusive
cover art or listen to any exclusive songs that only came out
on the album’s physical copy.
All in all, whether you’re streaming your music or listening to all your
favorite records, music is music. While streaming’s convenience and ease of
access makes it a rational choice for the casual music listener, vinyl has higher
sound quality, record sales are more beneficial to artists and it makes you feel
much cooler.
PAGE BY JACK CLEAVELAND
ENTERTAINMENT | 11.20.19 | FHNTODAY. COM
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