When I say "a large vinyl collection", I imagine something comparable to Haruki Murakami's one [0]. I neither have the space, nor the time or financial means to collect that amount of vinyl, though I have some collections and albums I'd never exchange with any vinyl.
I prefer a good CD or a very nice FLAC rip played via a nice vintage Hi-Fi over vinyl for casual listening. Vinyl has its very place in the music world, and it should be present, but life (at least mine) has no space to accommodate it as the primary source of music.
[0]: https://thevinylfactory.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Murak...
It‘s cliché but not very far from the truth that vinyl records are the hipster male equivalent of designer handbags.
I don't think so. I for one buy the vinyls of (new and old) albums I love to listen so much that I can put time aside to solely listen to that album and do nothing else.
Buying vinyls just for buying them is just plain consumerism, and not different than buying things you don't need, or buying just for impressing others.
"Don't worry, the price of CD's will come down," they said. Over the following years, vinyl faded and CD's maintained the same price point.
Perhaps, an optimist might point out, the price of the CD did drop — relative to inflation over those following years. I don't know. But when AOL saw fit to flood our mailboxes with CDs to get online, it was clear that the cost to manufacture the compact disc certainly wasn't a factor in dropping the price of the music CD.
I'm too old fashioned in my understanding of business, capitalism. I always assumed that you priced a good based on what it cost to produce plus some reasonable amount of profit that would allow you a nice home and car. I assumed therefore that a downloadable eBook would be significantly cheaper than the same "pulp" book from the publisher that had to be manufactured from raw materials, printed, shipped....
That is completely reasonable if you own and run your own business.
But most businesses aren't owned by the people running them. The owner doesn't care what happens, they just have $X and want that money to grow a small % every year. The way that's gonna happen is if the business they bought with that money grows a small % every year.
The board, the CEO, the managers, the VPs, they all work to make that % increase happen, whatever it takes. If they can't make it happen, they get fired. If they need to increase prices for that, that's what's going to happen. If they need to milk people, cut corners, move manufacturing overseas, whatever it takes, they will do it. If they don't, someone else will.
The owner's money must grow. And "owner" doesn't have to be some fat cat evil billionaire. It's also the retiree living off their 401K savings. It's the 20-year-old starting their contributions. It's the employee pension fund that is there to protect employees.
P.S. I'm positive none of this is news to you or anyone reading it, but I love talking about this sort of thing.
What broke my reserve, back when, was the "cheap rack classical CD". They'd churn out cheap "collection" box sets that didn't sell, and then recycle them into $2 to $10 single CD issues for the cheap bin. Some of those were mastered off wire still, I'll swear it.