"All this machinery making modern music
Can still be open hearted,
Not so coldly charted, it's really just a question
Of your honesty, yeah your honesty."
-Rush, "Spirit of Radio"
I do not own any vinyl. I will not deny this.Anyone who owns vinyl will tell you that it is something you need to have, the benefits being the sound quality and, I suppose, being able to look down on people who don't have vinyl. When people tell me "you need to get your hands on some vinyl," they say it as if not owning vinyl is something that I'm supposed to feel bad about. Not that I'm just missing something, but that I'm depriving myself of something essential and doing an injustice to the artist. I have no interest in purchasing or owning any vinyl. Maybe I'm missing something by not hearing the sound so crisply that I feel like I'm front row at the Blue Note, getting a facefull of Chet Baker's spittle, but as a child of a post-industrial America I'm willing to say that vinyl is useless to me.
This goes beyond the fact that I do not own a record player. The way we consume music now is radically different; the entire equation has been changed. Each song is now a packet of digital information that is portable, duplicable, and easily accessed. You can do some of that with vinyl, you can get good at using a turntable and seamlessly switching between songs, but there is nothing that come close to the versatility of digitized music. The way I perceive it, I don't "own" the song unless it is in the same digital library as the rest of the music that I "own." So vinyl, unless I were to convert it into an mp3 file, rendering the vinyl aspect irrelevant, has no value. Yes, we are losing something in sound quality, no one will pretend otherwise. Music is consumed and perceived differently now, ever so slightly. This is not better or worse because it is new. Vinyl is not better or worse because it is old. This is just different.
This is Progress. Progress happens and you might as well make it work for you.
