Vinyl (Premium)

I previously defined a hipster as someone who is nostalgic for a past that they never experienced. It’s not a particularly unique idea, I know---the movie Midnight in Paris plumbs this notion of nostalgia pretty effectively---but whatever. I’ve found it amusing watching people embrace physical media, whether it’s books, movies, or music, during the shift to digital and streaming technologies in the early 21st century.

And I was never going to be that guy. Until I was. Well, sort of.

As I wrote recently in Music (Premium), I grew up loving music: I received my first album by the age of three and was collecting music by the time I became a teenager in the early 1980s. In that era, music was sold on vinyl and on cassette, and there were both singles and albums. And because my first stereo offered better quality playback with vinyl than it did with cassette tape, I purchased music on vinyl, and I used the stereo’s cassette recorder to make mixtapes I could enjoy with a Walkman and, later, in cars.

Albums were a thing when I was growing up. What I mean by that is that the shift to digital and streaming has somewhat obliterated the album, replacing it with singles and playlists, the modern mixtape. This shift happened early: One of the big complaints that record companies had about iTunes was that it made singles, which initially cost just 99 cents each, too attractive, while making albums, at $9.99 each, much less attractive.

As you may recall, I had a rule when it came to purchasing an album in the early 1980s: There had to be at least three good songs on that album before I made the purchase. In the world of iTunes, that rule wouldn’t make any sense, and in the subsequent streaming world of today, it makes even less sense since few are buying music in any form. We’re just renting it.

This wasn’t technology’s fault; technology just provided the final nails in the coffin. The quality of albums had been going downhill for years, if not decades, before Steve Jobs ever dreamed of killing Napster and making music downloads legit. By the time I started buying music 40 years ago, quality varied by album. There were perfect albums---Def Leppard’s Hysteria, Billy Joel’s Glass Houses, and so---but those were rare. More common were what I call perfect half-albums, like Def Leppard’s Adrenalize or Billy Joel’s The Nylon Curtain. And more common still, of course, was the bad albums, with perhaps just one or two good songs.

Perfect albums required some attention. They could be listened to from front to back with no skipping of songs. One could listen on headphones, which in those days were generally larger over-the-ear models that blocked out the outside world and created a more immersive listening experience. And albums themselves, thanks to their large form factor, were often entertaining and educational themselves, thanks to the liner notes and song lyrics. The lack of either was always disappointing.

Albu...

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