perfidy

Yesterday, Buckethead emailed me a link to an article in that there Wired publication, about how the future of recorded music is... vinyl, which is gonna come back big.

Bucket commented at the time, "the idea that vinyl could make a real comeback seems absurd, but there it is in print, on the internet, so it must be true."

Ah, so pretty and so very naive.

Here's the deal.

What's a "real" comeback? Honestly. Vinyl isn't dead, and it's not dying, but it's not exactly picking itself up off the canvas and taking another bite out of Evander Holyfield, either.

The future of music recorded on physical media is this: it is going to slowly dwindle into a niche pursuit like the model train industry, or home brewing or whatnot. A hard core of hobbyists and aficionados will favor the sonic quality of analog or of audiophile digital over the portability and convenience of commercial digital, and by doing so keep vinyl and probably tape "alive" for decades to come. There's already thousands of independent used record stores around, and unless they are legislated out of existence by aggressive copyright law reform (a real possibility), they'll still be there a hundred years from now, a little run down, a little tattered, but crammed with more 12-inchers than Tiffani Towers. On the same page, there's hundreds of little local labels out there run by kids with Chuck T's and sideburns pressing small runs of vinyl (both 7'' and 12'') of their releases - sometimes as the only medium the album comes out in. It's art!

But a "real" comeback, that's more than a piss in a rainstorm? Impossible. The music business, no matter how it diminishes, measures its revenues in hundreds of millions of dollars. Vinyl doesn't need a lot to stay on life support, but no way it's going to *ever* be the domain of anyone but music nerds ever again. Music is a convenience nowadays, a *utility* like water or electricity or internet access, especially to the all-powerful demographic of people under 25. These days normal people don't have solar panels on their house, they don't carry a bucket to the well when they want a drink, and they sure as hell don't walk over to the turntable when the side ends. What's a "side?"

In fact, as we just saw with the new Radiohead release, habits form fast. The album was free if you didn't want to pay for it, available for download right there on the internet, and still many thousands of Radiohead fans went to Bittorent to pull it down illegally rather than visiting the official site, where it was right there for the taking. There was literally nothing standing in the way of getting the album for free and totally legally on the internet, and people still stole it (from the point of view of copyright law), only because they were in the habit of going to bittorrent and stealing music. Why? Because that's where music comes from! Flip this switch, the light comes on! Turn the tap, water comes out!

The lessons to take away from this?

That the modern major labels and the larger indies have doomed themselves to a slow and painful decline by giving their fans (and an entire generation of new ones) eight years in which to get used to getting music off the internet for free from places that don't pay copyright fees of any kind. Yep - music's a utility now, and the companies that make the most high-profile music have no way of controlling or monetizing that fact.

That vinyl will do just fine, if by "just fine" you mean "out there if you want to find it, and isn't that quaint."

And that the future of music belongs, as always, to people with Chuck Taylors and interesting sideburns.