When I was (much) younger, there were two major ways to own music: Either through vinyl records or cassette tapes.  Yeah, for a brief moment there you could buy 8-Track Tapes and there were reel-to-reel tapes (a rarity), but this, my friends, was it:

Then came the CD…

The CD pretty much spelled the end, and in a fairly short period of time, for Vinyl and Cassette tapes.

Why?  Because it was the proverbial better mouse-trap.  You could store more music on a single CD versus Vinyl albums and many cassettes.  CDs were also small enough that you could take them anywhere, including -very importantly!- to your car to play them on a CD player.  But the most important thing CDs provided, in my humble opinion, was durability.  Unlike Vinyl albums or cassette tapes, CDs didn’t degrade.  They appeared to last forever.

Then came the MP3 file.

Suddenly, you didn’t need to have actual physical media but rather some kind of memory device and, almost overnight, the CD became an afterthought.

This past weekend I wandered around a Best Buy and was not all that shocked to see their CD section has shrunk down to perhaps 1/5th the size it used to be.  Now there were only two shelves worth of material available, though a sign put up nearby helpfully stated customers could order “Thousands” of CDs through Best Buy’s website.

Thus, music is exclusively a digital media now, right?

As many of you know, not quite.

For years there have been vocal proponents of the vinyl album.  Those proponents insisted -and continue to insist- there is a big difference between hearing music via vinyl album versus through digital means.

Personally, I dunno.

Yet the vinyl album, something at least I thought was all but obsolete, is instead making a rather strong comeback.  So much so that musician Jack White has invested in a vinyl company, as reported in this article by Adam Graham for The Detroit News…

Jack White makes vinyl beautiful at Third Man Pressing

Obviously there are those who swear by Vinyl.  I like music quite a bit and have a very large collection amassed over many years yet hardly consider myself a music connoisseur.  I’ve listened to vinyl in my younger days and, at least to me, I don’t find a significant difference between the formats.

Yet I will not discount those who swear by that particular medium and, further, wish them all the luck in the world that what they find enjoyment out of continues to not only survive, but thrive.

I also suspect the artists who create music must also be thrilled.  Vinyl albums, because of their fragile nature, wear out.  I strongly suspect this fact contributed to some “classic” albums, like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, to sell so incredibly well over many years.  If your vinyl copy of that album, or any other favorite, develops a nasty pop/hiss or *gasp* skips, you are willing to shell out the money to buy a new copy of the vinyl album and replace the now defective one.

Good business for artists, good business for the vinyl companies.

The fact that Vinyl has made such a strong comeback after being on the edge of extinction is certainly a surprise.

Perhaps one day soon we’ll see Record Stores returning?

One can always dream…