Our parents had vinyls, we grew up on tapes and now the majority of us sail the Internet as musical pirates. Somewhere along the way, there was something called an eight-track. Though music download programs have become so readily available as well as inexpensive, there has been debate over which recording medium rules over the rest. With factors such as sound quality, accessibility and price being major factors, students are finding value in a variety of these options.
Finding new life in the rise of hipster culture and mash-up bands such as Girl Talk, vinyl and turntables are again on the rise. With many believing records to have the best sound quality of all the recording options, vinyl sales doubled from 990,000 units in 2007 to 1.88 million units in 2008, according to numbers released by Nielsen Co.
According to RollingStone.com, "Part of the leap can be attributed to Capitol Records' decision to reissue many of their most famous albums on vinyl, as the Beatles' Abbey Road was the year's second-highest-selling vinyl album, Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon ranked seventh and Radiohead's OK Computer rounded out the Top 10. Radiohead's In Rainbows, an album that began its career as a free download, was 2008's biggest vinyl seller…"
"I started buying vinyl because it's something tangible you can have for music and it increases in value pretty quickly," said Jesse Grab a 6th-semester journalism major. "My friend has a Bloc Party's vinyl he bought two years ago and it's worth almost $200 now and it was originally $20, I think. The sound is so much clearer on vinyl. MP3 quality is just awful in comparison."
As vinyl rises, CD sales have continued to drop, though they remain the most popular format. According to the Neilsen Co., "Total album sales, including album equivalents made up of single digital tracks, fell to 428.4 million units [in 2008], down 8.5 percent from 500.5 million in 2007. Physical album sales fell 20 percent to 362.6 million from 450.5 million, while digital album sales rose 32 percent to a record 65.8 million units." 2008's top CDs were Lil Wayne's "Tha Carter III," followed by Coldplay's "Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends" and Taylor Swift's "Fearless."
"CDs sound a lot better than MP3s, because MP3s are only about 10 percent of a music file," said Audrey Van Roosen, an 8th-semester health psychology major. "It's the high and low pitches of the song and the most prominent sounds on an MP3, but with CDs you get it all, better sound quality and all. But vinyl kicks everyones' a**. CDs aren't very portable though, they scratch very easily and MP3s are more transferable."
The most controversial and up-and-coming format of music is easily Internet downloads. Though it is difficult to track exactly how much music is being downloaded due to hard-to-track P2P programs, torrents, etc., Apple's iTunes program has become an overwhelming success and downloaded music has become the second most popular music format. According to Apple.com, as of Feb. 2008, iTunes was "the number two music retailer in the US, behind only Wal-Mart, based on the latest data from the NPD Group."
"Apple also announced that there are now over 50 million iTunes Store customers. iTunes has sold more than four billion songs, with an incredible 20 million songs sold on Christmas Day 2007 alone, and offers the world's largest music catalog of more than six million songs from all of the major and thousands of independent labels." The easy accessibility, lower costs and convenience of downloading on the Internet have all lent to its success.
"It's the easiest way to get music, and as I'm in the UConn bubble, downloading doesn't hurt me," said Christopher Marciniak a 6th-semester English major. "It may hurt the music industry or the artists financially, but it doesn't harm me. The amount of music on the Internet is overwhelming, and it exposes me to so much other music. Sometimes you can type in random words and it will lead me to bands I may not have otherwise known about."
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