Hipsters Can’t Save Music

Buy all the damn vinyl that you want—you can’t stop progress.

It’s really interesting that while the sales of CDs and downloads are diving, the sales of vinyl records are on a pretty stable climb. Amazon has reported that over the last five years, vinyl sales have increased sevenfold (745% to be exact). Though I would have to warn you about the optimism about this number, as vinyl is still very niche and represents only 2% of the overall market.

I’ll admit that I quite enjoy listening to my vinyl collection and I’m guilty, myself, of ordering a few pressings of my favorite groups’ records on the high-fidelity polycarbon based medium, but I have no illusion in my mind that I’m doing it to prop up a dying business model.

The future is here right now and it doesn’t require a physical media, it’s all available with persistent data connections and cloud storage. Heck, I could be wrong about that as the entire world starts to flock to streaming music programs. Maybe we can set up a vinyl streaming service?

by Alan Smithee

I sit upon my throne as the owner/shogun of this site, WatchPlayRead. But it wasn't always so. I too have had blogspots, I've done other community blogs, I've even written professionally for other sites out there...yet none of them provided the content I had a real passion for. It is then that I became tired of being a small cog in a big machine, and of writing about nothing but game news after game news article and the periphery that comes from such schlock, like knowing who Michael Pachter and Bobby Kotick are. I decided to start MediaWhoreNetwork.com and ran up my post count there for about 2 years, commenting about any and everything that I wanted to. I even started a weekly podcast that I feel has come into its own. It wasn't until earlier this year that I realized that having the word "whore" in your URL might be a bit limiting to my potential audience. I then made the website and its branding move over to WatchPlayRead.com.

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