An interesting topic has been bubbling away for the last couple of years, amongst the DIY music world, and that is one of physical format.

Fence Records talked about going vinyl only last year, and I got stuck into them for willfully alienating too much of their audience.  And then, just to prove that hypocrisy is alive and well in Toad Hall, it looks like we ourselves won’t be far off being a vinyl only label by the middle of next year – not by design either, it just worked out that way.

Then there’s tapes.  I wrote a post recently expressing my excitement about the relatively recent abundance of tape labels in the UK.  There was a little bit of a back and forth on Twitter about tapes recently, between Ian from Song, by Toad, Adam from Wiseblood Industries and Kevin from Avalanche, where the former were defending tapes and the latter was strongly advising bands not to release on them, resulting eventually in this blog post.

Tapes are certainly an obsolete technology, so resurrecting them is a strange thing for us to be doing.  But then again so are books, really, albeit more recently, and if you are talking about high fidelity sound reproduction, vinyl has been obsolete pretty much since the CD. Nevertheless, the vinyl revival has now become sufficiently mainstream that the Telegraph is writing articles about it, and BBC 6Music are (perhaps less surprisingly) dedicating shows to its waxy splendour.

People may disagree with Kevin’s advice to not release on tape, but pretty much everything he says in his blog post is right.  In the UK you should still, if your aim is to reach as wide an audience as possible, release your music on CD.  CD-R if you have to of course, but the CD is still the most broadly accessible format we have (apart from the mp3) of course. CDs are cheaper to make, they sell faster, more people have the means to play them, in almost every commercial sense they are the best way to get your music to your audience.

And yet, people seem to be moving away from them, and towards more willfully obscure formats which fewer people can play, and hence fewer people will buy.  On the face of it it makes no sense at all.  Nevertheless, of the entire previous paragraph, it’s the bit in brackets which might be the most significant part of the current conundrum: ‘apart from the mp3′.

The fact is that in terms of practicality, cost and efficiency digital music has rendered all physical formats obsolete. Disregarding aesthetic preferences and nostalgia and emotional attachments and all that, by far the best way to distribute music is digitally.  It’s cheaper, easier, gives the consumer more choice, permits greater audio fidelity (or at least it can, not that people ever choose that option), it can be played pretty much anywhere, shared, remixed… it is pretty much better at everything, if you’re looking at it in any kind of objective, rational way.

So of course total physical sales are dropping, the mp3 simply does it better for almost all purposes.  But as the vinyl revival, and the even more recent tape revival, show us, objectively better is not the same as subjectively better.  Just as readers still want to surround themselves with books no matter how much they read on their Kindle, just as wine bores prefer foil and corks despite the fact that apparently screw-tops are better for the wine, so music lovers adore surrounding themselves with objects and rituals which tell them and the rest of the world who they are.

So if physical formats are no longer necessary, which they aren’t, the question becomes different: we don’t need any of these things, so which ones do we want?

And the answer to that seems, at the moment to be music on vinyl and tape. For some reason, despite Kevin’s entirely reasonable assertion that you can make absolutely beautiful packages for CD-Rs if you want to, the CD has never really managed to stir the affections of the music-listening public.

So, to go back to Fence’s original plan to go vinyl only, and Kevin’s advice not to release on tape, labels and bands are left with a tricky decision to make.  Do they willfully turn away from large portions of their audience and press on with formats which have only really become fashionable again in the last couple of years? I know an awful lot of young folk who won’t buy CDs – not ‘tend not to’, actively ‘will not’ – and who actually have no way to play them even if they did, but this is still a relatively recent, young, and small portion of the market.

Cassettes are obscure, and vinyl is both costly and bulky to store.  And given how fast the industry seems to be changing at the moment it would be very brave to bank on either format still be the one to release on in five years time.  I don’t mean ‘bank on’ in terms of armchair commentary either, I mean ‘bet your label or your band’s financial future on’, by putting your money into releasing on the damn things.

The other way of looking at it is that quite simply people are not making much money from music retail at the moment.  Actually selling your album makes you pretty much bugger all, even if you sell a few thousand, so if the difference between vinyl or tape and CD is measured in a couple of hundred quid, then fuck it, that’s a couple of week’s wages at the day job you daren’t quit, so why not go for the format you prefer and hope you snag a publishing deal or high profile booker who might actually make you some proper money.

As a label I don’t want to be snobby or exclusive though, and for obvious reasons, the more people who have access to our music the better. [Edit: also, it is worth pointing out that refusing to offer music in the most accessible formats is probably making people far more likely to pirate them, which is something we should all be looking to avoid.]

As a fan and as someone involved in the process of actually making music, however, I will confess to not listening to CDs anymore either – it’s either digital, vinyl or tape. And yet these formats do, as Kevin says, sell slower, and vinyl costs more.  That means it ties up even more of our capital in stock, and fills our house up with records we will probably never sell.

And as for tapes well, I like them, but I would have no idea if they are just a fad based on the slightly misplaced nostalgia of people of a certain age. Would I personally choose to make an actual bet with my own business on their longevity?  No.  Mind you, given the fact that they are produced as a niche item for the most involved fans and that the digital files are there to act as the commodity anyway, does it matter if they stick around?  Perhaps not.

Either way, it’s not an easy decision.  In every practical sense I agree with Kevin on this one, but in every emotional one I am probably on the other side of the fence – vinyl and tapes are AWESOME! But if you’re in a band or you run a label, making these decisions on such a blatantly non-rational basis is probably not all that wise.

When I sat down to do my end of year lists in early December, one thing became extremely clear: in 2010 my listening habits changed drastically, and it has had a massive effect on which music has made the greatest impact on me this year.  And by listening habits, I am talking purely about practical logistics, not vagaries in my personal mood or anything like that: pure physical circumstance has had more impact on my musical world in 2010 than it has in probably the last fifteen years.

I think I was living at home the last time the format of my music really made a difference.  Back then I had a twin tape deck in my room, and my parents had a full vinyl/cassette/CD system thingy in the living room.  I bought most new music on vinyl, because it was all that was available for a while, and then was cheaper than CDs when they first emerged.  Often I had to tape my own records to give them a good listen, as my folks weren’t always happy to have my music on in the living room; not that it was ever that offensive back then.

Then, when I left home, I made my first of two big breaks from a specific format: abandoning vinyl, because there was simply no practical way to take it all with me in a single suitcase, and I didn’t have a record player of my own anyway.  I purchased, as soon as I arrived in Manchester, a twin cassette deck plus CD thingy, a variation of which everyone I knew owned from then to the end of my student days.  One of these things, though very basic, was robust and entirely sufficient to play anything you might want to listen to.  Vinyl was, for practical reasons more than anything, consigned to the dustbin of history, and my listening habits didn’t really change for the next seven years or so. Read the rest of this entry »

Whenever the digital revolution gets mentioned in the press, or indeed in conversation, it tends to be closely accompanied by murmurings about declining CD sales and questions about whether or not the rise in digital sales makes up for that shortfall and whether or not anyone will actually need to own music in five years and so on and so forth.

The answers to the above questions are both simply ‘no’.  There is no need to own music anymore and digital sales will probably not make up for the revenue generated by the somewhat false heights of the CD industry.  So what.

What doesn’t get mentioned too often, though, is what an incredible benefit the mp3 has been to the CD in another sense: it has liberated it from the constraints of being a commodity product.  The mp3 is now the commodity, needing to be as cheap and readily available as possible, with price and availability considerably trumping any questions of quality.  High bitrate mp3s and lossless file formats don’t seem to have made any impression on the digital market when they have been provided at a premium price, and I don’t really think people care that much.  An mp3 is merely a commodity, shunted about in large quantities, and exists simply to reach as many people as possible and to generate revenue.  It is important, but very unglamorous work.

That used to be the job of the vinyl record, of course.  Then for a while it was the job of the cassette tape, although to a lesser extent, and by the nineties it was pretty much entirely the job of the CD.  What did that mean for the little shiny silver disc? Well as with any commodity product, it put pressure on price.  It was all about how cheaply you could make them, and in what volumes.  At those numbers any kind of increase in the manufacturing price has a massive knock-on effect on revenue generation, which is by its very nature what the ‘industry’ part of the industry cared about, no criticism implied.

Now, of course, no-one ever needs to buy a CD; it is as obsolete as vinyl and tapes.  There are still plenty of CD players around of course, and it will take a while to fully die out, but basically the CD has had its day as a delivery medium for music, as has any and every physical medium.  And for these various media that is a liberation, not a condemnation.

As we’ve seen recently, there has been a significant rise in vinyl releases and vinyl sales.  In the last year or so we’ve seen all sorts of things released on tape as well.  I wouldn’t be wholly surprised to see something released on DAT tape or something stupid like that in the near future, provided it still comes with a digital download.  I seem to recall someone from Domino boasting recently at a Born to Be Wide seminar that they had recently released something on a tin of beans.

Basically, it is no longer enough for a CD to be a mere delivery mechanism for the songs, because the mp3 does it cheaper, faster, and with more flexibility – better, in other words.   A physical product nowadays has to justify its existence in its own right, because the music contained thereon is not enough anymore, and this challenge has been risen to with some alacrity by the more forward-thinking record labels and self-releasing bands.  No-one needs to buy a CD these days, so if you are going to bother going to the trouble of making them then you have to make them worth owning.  The packaging has to be beautiful.  There has to be something extra.  It must, in itself, be something which is a pleasure to own and to use.

It reminds me a little of the argument about wine bottle sealing technology.  Screw-tops are, I seem to recall, actually better at preserving the wine properly, but they haven’t really made as much headway as they might.  Simply, they cannot compete with the satisfaction of cutting and removing the foil, and then uncorking a bottle of wine.  It’s a tactile pleasure, and I feel the same about music.

Vinyl may not reproduce music as faithfully as a CD or a high quality digital file, but there is a ritual to putting a record on the record player which mp3s and playlists can never match.  When it comes to opening a CD package to play an album the same has to be true.  Click on the picture above and have a look at the gorgeous packaging of the Now Owl album.  Apart from being an excellent piece of music (buy it here), that album is a pleasure to own, and a pleasure simply to open up and play.

Now, I think the CD has a few years left where people will buy it simply as a commodity – because that’s what they can play in their cars or their living rooms, perhaps.  In general the technology isn’t quite obsolete just yet.  But we are getting ever closer to the point where a physical medium for music is more of a hindrance than a help, and soon it will not be enough to simply put together some graphics and duplicate the music.

And in a way that will be a blessing, because freed from the rather brutal economics of the commodity product, where all is dependent on keeping costs down, you are now selling a luxury item, and the economics of that are rather different.  All of a sudden it makes sense to spend a little more on paper; to think of new ways to package your music; to release on tape, on CD on vinyl, on wax cylinder, on whatever you want; to sit there and hand-fold a few hundred copies and sell them for a little more; to hand-stitch your vinyl sleeves; to superglue actual sequins to your album cover…

When no-one has to buy your product anymore, the people who do buy are the ones who really want to, and they are great people to be working with as they will spend a little more money, and they will appreciate and reward that extra effort.  The whole transaction becomes a little bit more rewarding for everyone, which in my eyes is a very good thing indeed.

I am not one of those people who goes on and on about the quality of vinyl and the sound it makes and so on and so on, because I am just not an audiophile, really.  I’m not saying that I can’t hear the difference, just that I have no real objection to listening to badly recorded songs on 92Kbps mp3s or on a shitty old tape recorder or anything like that.  It just doesn’t really colour my enjoyment of a song, particularly, is all I’m saying.

This came up on the Fresh Air Radio show yesterday though, and I thought I might write a post about it: one of the things for which I love vinyl, more than the sound, is the way it changes the actual process of listening to music.  I have no CDs anymore, just digital and vinyl.  Because of the Biblical quantities of new music I listen to and the fact that I am jealous little hoarder, I have gigabytes worth of music on my main hard drive (and yes, before you ask, it is scrupulously backed up).  I don’t know the exact number, but I think you could start my digital music collection playing, walk away from the stereo for two months, and it still wouldn’t have to repeat a single song.

That kind of thing, along with Spotify and naughty downloading really does change how I listen to music.  I can find myself deciding I like something, shunting it into my music library, and then not listening to it again for years because I am so caught up with my inbox.  That a bit sad, really, and it is also where vinyl comes in.

Collecting vinyl is an expensive and painstaking process.  Between online purchases from small indie labels across the world (well, the US, Canada and here, let’s be honest), browsing through second-hand shops, the odd new thing purchased in actual record shops (remember them?) and occasionally going mental on eBay whilst plastered, it takes time and effort to accumulate vinyl.  It’s also bulky and expensive, so you just can’t buy that much of it.  I know some people might challenge that, but they are mental people, like Ed from 17 Seconds, who has a whole room of the stuff.  Compared to digital though, it’s just impossible to own that much music on record simply for practical reasons.  This restriction means that your collection tends to stay manageable, and also tends to cluster around the things you really, really love, with a few random second hand purchases thrown in to mix things up.

Secondly, of course, playing the stuff is a very high-maintenance undertaking.  Records need to be sifted, selected, piled up and, most importantly, turned over at least once every forty-five minutes or so.  This makes the act of listening to vinyl so much more deliberate and selective than sticking your stereo on random and letting it play what amounts to a relatively closely selected personal radio station from your collection of digital files.  You have to actively choose what you play, and you tend to listen to it more because you can’t just walk away and let it look after itself.

For myself I find it tends to slow me right down, and take the haste out of listening to music.  A little like the Slow Food Movement, by its very slowness it’s not that it forces me to concentrate exactly, more that it prevents me really concentrating on anything else all that much, so I tend to just absorb the music more.  It stops me treating listening to music like a job, stops me thinking about too many other things, forces me to concentrate on a much narrower selection of music and in doing so allows me to form a better relationship with it.

So never mind the audiophile sound issues, what I think I like most about vinyl is its very inconvenience.  It is a demanding and awkward format, by today’s standards, and this forces you to listen to music in a certain way, a more deliberate and receptive way, and that is what I love the most about the stuff.

The Magnetic Fields – Time Enough For Rocking When We’re Old

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The Wedding Present – Spangle

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