Digital vs. Vinyl

Digital vs. Vinyl

The rise of digital music has virtually demolished any other form of the consumption of, listening to, and the production of music. To the average consumer, everything analog has become to be known as "inferior quality", which has led to the demise of many things, including:

1. Vinyl records
2. Analog recording equipment
3. Honest commercial records
4. The music industry

Although vinyl records and analog/monophonic music is starting to rise again, it still has a long way to go if it wants to compete with the digital age. Almost every classic album has been remastered to sound better for means of digital consumption, which to me, is a shame. These remasters are not done by the artists in order to make their songs sound better or because they randomly decided to try something new thirty years later, it's just a tactic by the music industry to try to milk a few more sales out of the album by introducing it on a newer format.
Sure, CDs are compact and smaller. It's playable in your car stereo/gaming console/laptop. It's cheaper to make. Sadly, this lead to the decline of the vinyl record. If you've never listened to a record, you need to. There's a warm crackle and pop that's reminiscent of a fireplace with the music. The music is completely uncompressed unlike CDs, so the audio from a vinyl is virtually identical to what it was intended to sound like. Music has become a secondary form of entertainment that never has the chance to be primary source of entertainment. It's always in the background. You listen to music while driving, while doing homework, while writing a story, while playing a video game, while doing anything, but one almost never simply just listens to music as a primary source of entertainment. This is the beauty of the vinyl record. The dropping of the needle and flipping of the record forces the music experience to become a primary source of entertainment. 

As the wave of digitization crashes over us, vintage recording equipment is pulled out and replaced with a laptop and ProTools, the industry standard recording software. There are several pros and cons as a result of this. On one hand, it is now possible to record a close to perfect sounding album in your room with the right equipment. Nowadays, anyone that loves music can create music. This is both a good and bad thing. It isn't hard for anyone to plug an instrument up to their laptop and record. It also isn't hard to autotune every note that Taylor Swift sings, design it to fit a certain audience and sell millions of copies, either. Although recording is no longer as time consuming or back breaking as it was, the obstacles that many artists faced with the recording process spurred a lot of inspiration and created amazing albums. Analog equipment naturally has a warm, lightly fuzzy tone to it that cannot be replicated in any way. With analog equipment one truly has to be talented and know what they're doing. With digital equipment, not so much. This is the true death of honest music. Everything can be polished, made to sound better, and errors and wrong notes can easily be fixed without having to have the talent in the first place.

Digitization, in my opinion, has also led to the death of the music industry in many ways. As far as a record goes, you can't copy it. You buy it from a record store, take it home, and listen to it. With CDs, you can copy it. It's as easy as ripping it to your computer, putting those files to a folder, and posting it online for everyone to copy and own, and that's it, that's all there is to it. It has made music virtually worthless. Why buy a CD at the store when you can just download it online for free? No one wants to pay for music anymore. With no one wanting to buy music anymore, record stores close. CDs don't sell anymore. Major labels buy out smaller labels. It's harder for musicians and artists to get a record deal and on the off chance that they do, they make virtually no money because most of that goes back to the label/management/producer/whoever. It's plain to see that digitization ruined the music industry. However, we are only in the beginning stages. There is still a chance that digitization will also be the savior of the music industry due to ease of recording on your own.