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Metallica Is Selling so Many Vinyl Records It Bought Its Own Factory:
Despite technology bringing new recording media formats and improved compression algorithms, there is certainly a growing demand for vinyl again despite its death being announced several times over recent decades.
Metallica has bought a majority stake in Furnace Record Pressing, one of the biggest and most important vinyl records companies in the U.S. If anyone had any doubts about the growth of the vinyl sales, which last year outpaced CD sales for the first time since 1987, Metallica's new purchase just gave them a very loud reminder that what's old is new again.
Vinyl records are experiencing a renaissance among music lovers. Although Metallica hasn't released a new album since Hardwired...To Self-Destruct in 2016, it sold more than 387,000 vinyl albums in 2022, according to data from Billboard. That year, it ranked sixth on the list of most albums sold in the U.S., topping the 337,000 albums it sold in 2021. The price Metallica paid for Furnace was not disclosed; members of the band will now sit on Furnace's board.
Metallica is expected to release its first album in seven years sometime over the next few weeks, setting the stage for the band to sell to many, many more vinyl records in 2023.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Zinho on Wednesday March 22 2023, @06:56PM
Yup. I was going for brevity in my post, thanks for filling in the details. Especially regarding waveform compression, it's easy in an IT-heavy crowd like here for people to completely misunderstand what's being talked about since the word compression is used for completely different things depending on the context.
Speaking of waveform compression, in another post you mentioned that most popular music is targeting radio/TV which need compression due to competing with loud environmental noise (e.g. road noise). I've heard that the radio stations already have equipment for volume normalization and waveform compression that gets used to solve those problems whether or not the record company engineers their radio releases for winning the loudness wars. As a result, the audio waveform frequently gets run through two waveform compression stages between the band's performance and the audience's listening experience. *sigh*
I'm still going to argue that mass sales of MP3s is having a larger effect on the availability of well-engineered music than you're giving credit for. Back when I was ripping my own MP3s to play on Winamp the quality of my digital music was invisible to the record company. Once the engineers were given the job of mastering tracks intended for direct sale as digital files, they absolutely would take care to ensure it sounds good in the format and listening environment it was being marketed to. As you say, "they were forced to give up on the compression since the players just dialed them down." That's all for the good, in my opinion. And if they decide to give up on "winning the loudness war" in one format, we can dream that they'll stop insisting on it in the others, which is where this ties into the CD-v-Vinyl discussion.
Of course, that won't stop people from making bad audio design decisions, as you rightly pointed out. And vinyl will always be a technically inferior medium vs CDs and most digital audio formats. Whether the "better" media produces a better listening experience is the responsibility of the sound engineers, who too-often have their decisions overridden by the people signing paychecks.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin