Going analogue
I used to think vinyl was for grandparents and softbois, but I was wrong.
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The first album I ever purchased with my own money was Linkin Park’s Hybrid Theory on CD. I bought in a shop in my hometown called Music World which – along with movie rental stores and the original MTV – had faded from existence by the early 2010s.
Like everyone around me, I made the shift to digital media. As a young professional™ living in London with a terrible salary, initially I was just glad I could have so many songs at my disposal for a low cost. As the years wore on, I was hooked and began to preach the benefits. I was dazzled by my annual Wrapped and religiously used Release Radar and recommendations to discover new artists.
At the same time, physical media started to give me the ick. I found myself feeling relieved that I was born when I was – before having the resources to amass piles and piles of CDs or records. I passed by boxes of cassette tapes and videos in second hand stores and thought of it as junk. Record players in particular always had a stench of trying too hard. I imagined them as the central point of a Venn diagram where legit audiophiles, grandparents, and softbois who ask you how you know about Berghain converge.
Streaming music feels clean and minimalist because we’ve spent years absorbing messages that, intentionally or not, make us fear physical media. And as any fellow city dweller slash expat will tell you, collecting anything is decidedly unwise. Collections are not practical. They cost money. They require storage space, which comes at a premium here in Europe. What’s more, if you move apartment or country, a sizeable collection quickly becomes your ball and chain – at best a hassle to move around, and at worst something you have to bid a painful goodbye to.
I’m more of a minimalist in theory rather than in practice. The thing is, I don’t think that music streaming platforms are actually all that minimalist. My Spotify homepage is a cacophony of new releases, music videos, recommended stations and auto-curated playlists. There’s the constant urge to discover new music (on a weekly basis!), to stay up to date with new releases, to create a digital playlist in a bottle that you can open one year from now. It’s flashy and fancy, and it’s distracting us from the bigger issue.
Over the last two years, I’ve grown increasingly concerned about the state of the music industry and how platforms like Spotify are impacting artists. It’s no secret that streaming platforms aren’t really helping artists to earn more money, but once I started to read more about it, I found myself questioning whether streaming music is indeed an ethical way to support artists at all. In 2024, Spotify stopped paying out songs which get less than 1000 streams per year. Meanwhile, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek has a net worth twice that of Taylor Swift. What really stopped me in my tracks was this article by The Honest Broker, which revealed that Spotify is creating fake artists on their platform to drive down the payouts for actual, living human beings.
Attending live shows is often touted as the best way to support music artists, but vultures are circling the skies over there, too. This eye-opening post from musician James Blake revealed just how dire the state of live music is. Similarly, Kate Nash, a well-known British singer-songwriter, recently explained that she saves up the money she makes at festivals to “afford” to go on tour, where she usually ends up in the red.
In light of these revelations, I’ve been searching for a different way to support artists I love, and I kept landing on vinyl. Buying music (digital downloads, vinyl, CDs) and merchandise directly from artists is unequivocally the best way to financially support them. After weighing up the decision, I decided to take the plunge and get a record player. I’m just a couple of weeks in – and I couldn’t recommend it enough.
Record players are a hefty piece of equipment, and I find that alone gives the music more of a presence in the room. My record player is from Audio Technica, and when I unwrapped it I literally stopped to appreciate the craftsmanship of the machine. Since taking up space in our living room, my partner and I have been listening to records and actually discussing the music in much more detail – the artist, the lyrics, and what the songs remind us of. The investment really encourages you to make listening to music an active experience – rather than a passive distraction. I’ve also navigated away from Spotify’s endless recommendations and started reading music blogs to get a sense of new releases – my current favourite is The Line of Best Fit.
Opening a new record is an almost childlike feeling. Do you remember sliding the small paper cover out of the cheap plastic case of your new CD and marvelling at the lyrics and the album art on your bedroom floor? Well, imagine the same thing, but in XXL. I’m astounded by the level of artistic investment and attention to detail I’ve seen in the vinyl I’ve purchased so far – from the records themselves to the lyric cards and sleeves. It’s so nice to see the album cover printed large, and one of my favourite things to do is to listen to the music while looking at the album art. I could lie and say that the sound quality is so much better from the record, but I won’t make you suffer through that. What I will say is that the little scratch it makes when you first place the needle down on the spinning vinyl is very special.
At its core though, I feel a renewed sense of power in owning media again. I don’t envisage myself as someone who will ever have a massive collection of records (I still think books are the only object that look beautiful at scale) – but I now see the value in collecting things that have journeyed through life with me. It is better to own physical copies of music you love instead of renting it from a streaming platform run by a billionaire. As our girl Dido once sang: “if my life is for rent… then nothing I have is truly mine.”
I don’t wish to live in a world where people no longer have any incentive to create music, which I worry we are swiftly sliding towards. Some of the albums I have bought on vinyl have been with me for decades – they are pieces of work that I have come back to time and time again, in different surroundings and phases of my life. I continue to grow with them and pull new meaning from them. That, to me, is worth the price tag.
the ick you describe is literally how i feel towards streaming services for movies and shows now
One year our friends got a very fancy record player and we loved listening to it as a group so much that they bought us a little record player for Christmas. We love to listen to new vinyls but I’ve also found a lot of fun looking in thrift or secondhand shops for old records (mostly holiday related) and found some lovely albums I wouldn’t have considered. Big fan of record players and switching away from streaming media (I say as I have a YouTube lofi channel playing 🙃)!