alt Hacker NewsVinyl is populair, inconvenient and doesn't have crisp audio quality. Cassettes are also inconvenient and have poor audio quality, plus they are cheap and portable. So I definitely also see them stick around. I also see plenty cassettes being issued on e.g. bandcamp for years already.
The poor audio quality can be seen as desired feature btw. It brings a certain lofi or warmth with it.
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Vinyl is big, which makes for a nice display of album art. 50% of vinyl buyers don’t own a record player. People play their convenience and high quality digital music, while displaying the vinyl albums as decorations.
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/50-of-vinyl-buyers-do...
I just released an album on cassette and definitely has _not_ poor audio quality. Anyway I remember a lot of releases with poor audio quality too, but this is more the problem of the production and not the cassette itself. All studio recordings back in the days were made with the same tape material, ferro oxid, sames as a Type I cassette.
Vinyl is nowhere near as inconvenient as tapes and sounds way better. And I say this as someone who used to lug around big bags of 12" records as a DJ! It's pretty annoying, but it's still better than having to rewind, and deal with the appalling durability of cassettes!
I kind of regard physical media, and especially analog media, as merch these days. And to be honest, they're a great kind of merch.
“The two things that really drew me to vinyl were the expense and the inconvenience”
https://cartoonstockart.com/featured/the-two-things-that-rea...