And those who don’t almost always only set a minimum price, so you can still pay more if you want. And if you buy on BC Friday [0] (next is February 6th), Bandcamp doesn’t even take a cut of the revenue.
Bandcamp Friday is such a fun day, I always have +5 purchases lined up from the previous month, and usually keep track of the social media of the artists I buy from that day, and many of them post something really wholesome about how much they made on that day :) Such a fun time all around.
https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/fan-support/
https://support.spotify.com/us/artists/article/getting-a-fan...
As a bar/restaurant owner who sometimes host electronic parties, that sucks and does mess up a lot. But as a dance party attender, that sounds like a good thing, the parties tend to have way too high attendance, and if there is no space for people to actually move around and dance, I don't really know what the point of it even is anymore.
I don’t know why they do this, but I do know I have an ever growing stack of tapes I can’t listen to…
What? Do you have an example?
I'd rather them spend this time on doing their art, or going on with their lives. If you want to give an artist a token of appreciation, send them money. I always increase the suggested price of an album or track on Bandcamp to some interesting-looking number.
To produce, ship, and store an otherwise unused complex artifact just as a token of appreciation which is not otherwise enjoyed by the parties looks wasteful for me.
I support artists I like by going to their shows and buying lossless digital copies where possible (even if I listen to their music elsewhere).
But I don't want or need more physical "stuff".
Yeah, in some way that's true. In the house music scene almost every producer also sells vinyls of their best songs, sometimes "collectors editions", and also DJs obviously sometimes pride themselves on only playing vinyl. For the artists I really do enjoy, I tend to buy their songs + with the vinyl, as a way to support them, but I indeed have no way of actually playing them, and haven't had for more than a decade.
So here I sit with 20+ vinyl records, most of them unopened, and no record player. But I don't mind, I just want to give money to the artists that provide me joy.
The secondhand market becomes saturated with inferior pressings that are inevitably bound for landfills since they don't meet the quality/expectations of the people who actually play vinyl.
Hypothetically.
Little do they know, the true sonic experience comes from wetting the disc with a special felt pad and watching the stroboscopic markings on the edge of a turntable platter...
This was a 5 year play by my dad. Shout out.
Sometimes I wonder how much INTENTIONAL engineering people's discontent for good or ill happens across the spectrum of human activity. One thing is for sure, people don't talk about it much.
I can think of many examples.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_(Klein_and_Thompson_...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/12/supply-b...
[3] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf
(think in systems)
I'd love to learn how you came to this definitive conclusion. At no point in human history have humans not worked (I'm sure there are some limited exceptions, none of which have been sustainable).
Perhaps you meant to say the point of life is to survive, but you have to work to make that happen.
“Art is the proper task of life” -- Nietzsche
"Art is to console those who are broken by life." -- Vincent van Gogh
Broadly speaking, creation is the meaning of life, not work, although some creation could be considered work. Survival is table stakes to achieve self actualization and a chance at finding meaning and contributing to the commons during a lifetime.
However, a huge difference is that on CDs you're up against a fixed maximum (0 dBFS) so all peaks are equal, which is fatiguing; on vinyl you're up against the adjacent groove, so your maximum amplitude any given moment depends on the amplitude of things in the recent past and near future! Ways to optimize for this are prevalent, amazingly, and the result is less fatiguing.
This has strong energy of "Teach your kids how to play Magic, they won't have money for drugs."
This will also so let you listen to it on computers (including cell phones). You can also transcode the music to e.g. MP3 to allow easier storage.
I gave all my CDs (probably more than a 1000) away about a decade ago. I find physical media annoying, they take up space and require more effort to use them. All those CDs became more of a burden. I guess it's because I grew up with cassette tapes, portable tape players, then CDs, then Discman, then Discman with buffering. Having gone through all of that, being able to play music on your phone is... excessively nice. I also care more about the music than the packaging -- if I want something nice on the wall, I would get a painting, litho, etc. instead.
The only thing I really miss is old-school music discovery. Reading reviews, then going to a record shop, listening a stack of records to decide, talking to record shop owners and friends for scoops, etc. was so much more fun than letting algorithms do recommendations. And after spending your monthly pocket money on two albums, you were invested in the music.
(Ultimately I went all-in on smart speakers, so I couldn't just hook up the turntable anymore, and getting a turntable/adapter that digitizes the audio to send over Bluetooth, just no...)
If you want to listen to music then Spotify runs circles around vinyl as a medium. Records really suck for music quality which is why everyone dumped them when tapes came along and then even more so when cd's became a thing.
If Vinyl was a good medium to listen to music then no one would have bought cd's or had a Spotify subscriptions.
I can't imagine people going back to old school crt televisions to watch sports or movies either, but I do see people
No one uses it because of quality or because it is the best medium for music.
CDs killed both.
Napster + portable mp3 player and smartphoned did kilómetros ll the cassette.
[1] especially the late 90's early 00's ones that were barely bigger than a standard cassette case.
[2] there was buffering for discmans but it wasn't 100% effective if skipping happened for longer than the buffer
After buying one vinyl album from a niche artist (djpoolboi), he actually then sent me a link to download the same tracks on flac, which I appreciated.
Lately I've found myself buying the same album both on vinyl for listening to at home, and on CD to rip for my digital music collection.
I work from home a lot so having to get up to flip the record gives me an excuse not to stare at my screen all day too.
I’m a recovering audiophile. I got into the hobby because I enjoy technology in its myriad aspects, and had discovered that good speakers can make things sound better. As I began accruing CDs and re-ripping into lossless audio, I also began collecting vinyls via Record Store Day events of bands or artists I found interesting at the time, or the odd Collector’s Edition bundles of albums or games. The thinking was that when I finally settled into my own place, I could invest into some Hi-Fi kit to play them back.
Well, I fell out of the audiophile sphere when I got into data analysis, physics, human biology, and psychology: I had become inoculated against the bullshit that permeates the space, but still recognized the value of my album collection. I’d also pivoted into preservation, and so I began accepting relatives’ collections of older formats, like 78s. I still lacked playback mechanisms, though I now had the space and budget - just more pressing projects than a record playback setup.
And so here I am in 2025, in an apartment that transmits energy between units, with an upstairs neighbor that does somersaults and tumbles all day (thus shaking the space slightly). The cost of everything has skyrocketed, but it’s no longer a matter of a turntable and a phono stage to get going (need isolation as well, and that ain’t cheap). I’ve also - shockingly - got other, more pressing projects in front of me, one of which is a bedroom Hi-Fi setup that has physical controls for music streaming instead of smartphone apps - again, not remotely cheap.
Right now, my meager collection sits in a crate under the sofa, languishing. One day I’ll get to enjoy them, but today is sadly not that day.
I've got news for you: you won't. Your post reads like you're letting perfect be the enemy of good enough. Also it's 2026, and being the first day of the new year the PERFECT time to just go ahead and do it. You could probably buy a used record player today for < $50 and be listening to a record.
In my family group there were a good numbers of vinyls gifted this past christmas and none of them are going to be regularly listened to as the majority of music consumption they do is "on the go" in the car or mobile.
Similarly, I'm seeing them make more purchases of "trophy books" where they read the book on their phone or listened to the audiobook but liked the book so much that they want to have it on their shelf (there are also special editions with elaborate edge decorations, etc. that seem to feed into this).
The first is that even if people don't own a record player at the moment doesn't mean that they don't plan on getting one. I have multiple nieces/nephews who got record players (at their request!) this year for Christmas. Briefcase record players are becoming ridiculously more popular. The thing is there's no point in buying a record player if you don't already have some records, and artists are doing a lot more limited prints so sometimes you need to buy immediately to be sure you're going to get one.
My wife and I bought a new sound system in 2024, and we decided to include a record player. We have used it way more we had expected to. We still have streaming services (Tidal) but listening to a record has a ton of benefits. There's the fact that the entire album itself is an organized experience, not just random tracks, and the tactile nature of it is really appealing. The albums themselves are like pieces of artwork in a way that a CD or screensaver would never be.
It's also nice knowing that the artist I'm buying from is getting real money from the purchase, unlike the pennies they get from streaming.
And these were all artists and albums I know and love through CDs or streaming, so it's not like I'm buying them blind.
Artist make no money off streaming. This is a real artifact I get to own, keep sealed and maybe get signed.
I did have the unfortunate experience of buying a D12 Devil's Night vinyl to find the cover image quality to look like some intern copied it off Google images.
I have many happy memories of getting a new record as kid, laying in the floor and listening from start to finish while poring over liner notes and album art. There was a level of connection with the music that I just don’t get from listening to Spotify while I’m washing the dishes or something.
I know it’s sentimental, but I get so much joy out of watching my daughter do the same thing now. She has a blast going to our local record store, finding records from her favorite bands old and new and then coming home and just listening. No devices, no distractions, just her and the music she loves. In a sometimes horrible and depressing world, it’s a sweet escape.
ResisBey•2h ago
exitb•1h ago