TL:DR – How consumers are duped into upgrading, again and again.
We were quite content with vinyl. Indeed, aside from the occasional warped record and friends who didn’t hold them properly by the edges, we loved our US import 45s, our double gatefold sleeve live rock albums and our picture discs. We put up with the crackles and pops and built our bedroom collections. We lent our vinyl to friends, despite their not understanding about sleeve liner orientation and they lent us theirs. We recorded them on to cassette when we couldn’t the latest and greatest and we made mixtapes, the playlisting of a Generation X. They even tried to stop us by telling us that “Home taping is killing music”…we replied vehemently that “Home taping is skill in music”!
It was all going so well, but they wanted more of our hard-earned cash. More than that, they wanted us to pay again for what we already had and so was born the CD. This little disc apparently couldn’t be scratched, it was pure digital sound, there was no warping…and for many no warmth. Although at the time we were yet to recognise this limitation. So, we bought the new-fangled CD players and collected, at much greater expense, all the CDs of the albums we already had on vinyl, filling already full shelves with yet more bejewelled plastic discs.
This would be it. The ultimate Hi-Fi. The last word in sound quality. Of course, it wasn’t. There were more jobs to be done and it was Jobs who did us! If we could be re-sold the digital version then we could almost certainly be resold a virtual version too and perhaps even just access rather than possession of that digital copy in the form of streaming. For the companies yet another financial bonanza, despite Napster and Kazaa and Bit Torrents, and so we thought we wouldn’t get fooled again, but we most certainly were.
But, where is the love, where is the warmth? The ease of endless streams of over-saturated, over-compressed sound files was, like a much-loved mixtape from the 1970s beginning to wear thin. We hankered after the warmth of the old analog world. We may have grown into digital men and women, but at heart we were always analog kids…and so we went hunting as we once did back in digital pre-history, seeking out black discs of PVC, polyvinyl chloride, VINYL! We wouldn’t be islands in their streaming river, we’d be 20th century boys and girls and proud of it.
It’s only rock and roll, but I like it, again and again, and again, deeper and down…
Part Two: Let there be light! How we were resold the warmth of the incandescent bulb by way of the fluorescent tube, the halogen bulb, the compact fluorescent tube, the LED lamp, and back to the squirrel-cage!