Vinyl might be the death of Compact Disks and DRM
This is an interesting thought, with all the fuss, anger, angst, and downright nasty things that have been embedded in your digital technology that keeps you from just listening to it, Vinyl records are staging a quiet come back in the Indie/DJ scene.
You can’t put DRM on a Vinyl album, and that might be its biggest saving grace, yours and the artists.
Wired Reports today that the resurgence of Vinyl Records
Pressing plants are ramping up production, but where is the demand coming from? Why do so many people still love vinyl, even though its bulky, analog nature is anathema to everything music is supposed to be these days? Records, the vinyl evangelists will tell you, provide more of a connection between fans and artists. And many of today’s music fans buy 180-gram vinyl LPs for home listening and MP3s for their portable devices. Source: Wired Magazine
This is something that most people would have been able to predict, not just that for the purists, vinyl has a richer tonality. But that to step back from technology that has been misused, abused, and otherwise restricts people from doing things with their music, Vinyl could be the best way to not only get to know the artist, but to also rip from Record to MP3 is really trivial to do.
Most PC’s come with an audio card, free software like Audacity can make an MP3 in a heart beat, it is so very simple to do something like this, and there is nothing in the way. Choose your bit rate, let the record play, just go with it. There are even USB record players that can tie in directly via the USB port on your PC to make recording even more stupid simple than it is now.
Cool idea, but given all that we have been through as consumers of music, and we have thousands of CD’s, and hundreds of records, the death of the CD and its overly restrictive processes, going back to simple clean vinyl records with nothing between the consumer and the artist, this is an interesting rebuttal to what is happening with media.
Sometimes, it is easier to fall back to an older technology than it is to deal with the issues of the new technology. It will be very interesting to see if HD-DVD and BluRay suffer the same issue down the road, with a resurgence of the humble DVD.
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