Here’s Ted Gioia on what happened with the “vinyl revival”:
On an aggregate level, consumers are simply not buying music. They prefer to stream it for pennies rather than purchase it for dollars.
And why it happened:
If [the music industry] had followed the standard playbook for growth industries, they could have brought vinyl back as a mass market option. They might have easily convinced 40-50 million consumers to buy a dozen vinyl albums per year. That would create a total market more than 10 times as large as the current one.
I still have a sizable vinyl collection and purchase most of the Blue Note Classics and Tone Poet releases. But I recently canceled my Vinyl Me, Please subscription after yet another price hike (even though I’ve been a customer for a long time, and wrote a blog post about them).
The magic is gone from vinyl because I feel like the love of music for its own sake is gone. We’re at the point where Taylor Swift releases 4 vinyl versions of her album because every version counts as a “sale,” and she knows that her fans are “variant collectors” who will buy all four, so, that’s a surefire way to get to the top of the charts.
I’m just not sure that’s the hobby I want to be part of any more.
