Inkswel
What are your favorite music mediums/rank the following: cd, vinyl, cassette, digital, (other)?
Vinyl:
I’ve had a love/hate relationship with vinyl for over 20 years. I used to be a vinyl-only DJ, I used to work in record stores, and now I run a record label. Vinyl has such an authentic and beautiful quality to it, a beautiful way to truly appreciate music the way the artist intended. But with every positive there is the opposite -- it’s terrible for the environment, and it’s made from petrochemicals. As an activist and environmentalist in some ways, I’m opposed to the resurrection of vinyl…but that’s an unpopular opinion not shared by many. I guess it’s all about balance. As a medium, it’s still my favorite for sure.
Cassette:
I grew up on tapes, as an ‘80s kid growing into the ‘90s…tapes were the last frontier before CDs, then digital music for me. They hold a lot of nostalgia. Tapes, to me, solidified the curated idea of mixtapes and made me appreciate full albums.
Digital: (But also we forgot mini disc)
I embraced digital as a listener when I was young. Early on, I had a mini disc player. I loved this technology…it was almost like a hybrid of cd, tape and digital hard drives, as the later players enabled you to store data on the discs. So mini disc was actually my first introduction to mp3s…I opted for this hybrid tech over the first iPods, as at the time, I also used the mini disc player to record my DJ sets. They really had a tape sort of vibe, but with all the trimmings of new tech. But just like CDs they didn’t last long…I think the physical tech was quite expensive to make and problematic. I do remember the players breaking down a lot!
CD:
This is one I think we can just collectively forget about. Yes, a lot of great music came out on CD, but the tech is trash. Sound quality may be good, but the actual physical format just doesn’t last. I was reminded this recently when I bought a second-hand Jeep that only had a CD player. For a whole ten minutes I was excited about disconnecting from the digital world and listening to classic albums on CD, then I remembered the skipping, and the scratches ruining the CDs…yep def a format we should leave in the bin and def a format we don’t need to keep producing environmentally.
