The Revival of the Vinyl Record in the Digital Age
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| License | CC Attribution 3.0 Unported: You are free to use, adapt and copy, distribute and transmit the work or content in adapted or unchanged form for any legal purpose as long as the work is attributed to the author in the manner specified by the author or licensor. | |
| Identifiers | 10.21036/LTPUB10762 (DOI) | |
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:04
Analog records, popularly called vinyl, have experienced a tremendous comeback both in the mainstream music industry but also in various independent niches. This happened exactly at the time when digitalisation of culture became an obvious fact in everybody's consciousness.
00:28
But then all of a sudden something quite paradoxical happens and exactly when digitalisation is all around us we observe the comeback, the resurrection, the rebirth of the cool of the analog record.
00:42
The question simply is, why? Why would that happen? As a cultural sociologist, the way I approach social and cultural phenomena is to look at different kinds of data. Part of it is discursive data, discursive analysis, the analysis of what people say.
01:08
Part of it is generated by myself through interviews. In this particular case, those who produce and those who buy and consume music on vinyl.
01:20
On the other hand, it's a discursive analysis of various media texts and that is narratives that are being produced by different people. What is also important is what anthropologists and sociologists call participant observation. Taking part in different events, observing people as they do what they do
01:45
and trying to figure out what kind of meanings are attached to particular practices. The role of a researcher is to try to reconstruct the bigger picture that somehow could approximate a certain kind of synthesis of all those views
02:03
that brings us closer to the understanding of a cultural phenomenon such as the comeback of the analog medium in the digital time. I realise that there are certain recurrent themes and tropes that belong to four different categories or four different dimensions.
02:24
First is sound, the audio dimension, and that's, of course, obvious we're talking about a musical medium music format. Analog sound is different. Many people narrate that kind of audio experience as a warm sound,
02:43
a richer sound, as opposed to a more clinical digital sound. Digital sound is pure signal. It includes no noise. For some people, this is an advantage. For other people, however, the exclusion of noise means that something is missing.
03:01
A lot of people emphasise the haptics of the medium, the fact that it's a tangible medium, a concrete object that you can handle. This also means that it's an eminently collectible medium. This is something that can be given and received as a gift, something that represents the actual real value.
03:25
Another important aspect is visuality, and that, of course, comes with vinyl record being an actual object and with the fact that records have cover art included.
03:41
They come with particularly designed sleeves. If we can think of music as the most abstract of arts, then records give tangible visual form to music. They materialise music, whereas digitality further immaterialises already abstract artistic form.
04:03
Finally, what is important is the actual buying experience. Unless you shop online, which is, of course, right now possible, analogue records are very much associated with physical record stores. You go to particular places, dedicated stores and shops
04:21
that have their own culture around them. These are social spaces when you interact with other people. What is very important in contradistinction to digital buying practices is that in stores you open yourself to serendipity. There is a degree of randomness when it comes to discovering new music. Whereas in the digital world, algorithms already decide for us,
04:45
they already know probably better than we do what we want, what we need. So the degree of randomness is quite different. When we put all these things together, we realise that analogue records create a certain kind of culture around them that is equivalent to slow food.
05:05
While fast food may be very convenient and sometimes necessary and important for us, it definitely doesn't exhaust the possibilities of culinary experiences. And it's similar with music. Analog records are conducive to ritualistic use.
05:22
They may not be the most convenient, sometimes they are downright cumbersome, but they create opportunities for musical rituals, for ritualistic engagement with music, and therefore listening to music can become an experience.
05:41
Technological progress, technological change doesn't necessarily mean improvement. Of course, digitality means portability and this means convenience and this is something that we want. But our lives are not just about convenience and our engagement with music is not just about portability. It's also about other kinds of experiences, audible, haptic, visual experiences.
06:05
And for this reason, digitality is not all there is. It doesn't exhaust all the possibilities of good pleasurable experiences. This is something that the assumption of inevitable improving linear progress
06:20
doesn't take into account. And sociologically, we have to be aware of the fact that behind every progress, behind every technological change, there are organisational agents, there are institutions that have their own interests, political or economic interests, and from this point of view, this of course is not inevitable, rather it is socially constructed.
06:45
As human beings who still feel and hear in the analog way, we have a variety of desires, we have different needs that cannot be satisfied just with one particular thing and are not reducible to the question of standardised convenience, just like music is not reducible to data or portability,
07:05
or it shouldn't be or cannot be reduced to the question of greater profitability and supposedly linear progress. This unlikely story of the return of the analog in the digital age tells us something about the potential of critique
07:25
and potential of experiencing difference and this variability of our needs and experiences, and as anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss would say, this unlikely story is simply good to think with.
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