Yesterday I stumbled across an article at Wired.com that argued that the final nail in the coffin of the compact disc would be the return of vinyl.  This may seem absurd on the face of it…  I mean vinyl wears out, it’s not portable, it’s inconvenient and it has extra noise on it.  Sure, audiophiles have long argued that it sounds better than digital but there aren’t enough audiophiles out there to influence the market quite like that.  Retro-loving indie music nerds like myself also like vinyl for reasons that have nothing to do with reason, but again, I doubt we carry the necessary clout either.  No, the only way for vinyl to make a true return is for it to have a selling point that artists can capitolize on to sell it to semi-mainstream music fans…  I think it does have just such an attribute and it has nothing to do with the sound quality and everything to do with the plus side to vinyls inherent limitations… intentionlity.

In case that word is not immediately packed with meaning for you, allow me to explain and illustrate.  These days, music fans can have their music everywhere.  It’s on our iPods, cell phones, PC’s, in our cars… there is almost nowhere you can go where you can’t bring it with you.  All this convenience gives a soundtrack to our days but just like an actual movie soundtrack it reduces the music to background sound to the events we experience.  The very convenience of digital renders the music less innately impactful. 

Back in the pre-digital era, listening to an album was something of an event if for no other reason than that you needed to actively make the choice to listen to it.  I can get in my car today and start it and the last CD that was in my CD player just starts playing… or I might grab the iPod and hit shuffle in leiu of tuning the radio in.  Yes, there is some sort of decision to put music on or kee music on, but  in a lot of the music listening that goes on these days, the activity taking place is driving, or working in an office, or mowing the lawn, or blogging, or IMing, or whatever.  How often do we sit down and just listen to music anymore?  It almost seems silly to sit down with the intention of just using our ears to hear an album when we can play our music around the clock.

And yet, this is what a vinyl album demands of us.  It demands that we make the intentional choice to put it on and stay put to listen to it otherwise why put it on?  Listening to an iPod will rarely seem like an event that will focus our attention in this multi-tasking distracting world but sitting down to play a record, to flip it over halfway through, to look at the large format art work, to clean the surface and the needle… these are intentional listening processes and they transform the experience of the music.  Artists can and should encourage their fans to do this, to carry the music with them but also to take time to stop and focus on it.  This strengthens the bond between artist and listener in a way a MySpace page and a massive iTunes library never can.  If listeners in the larger community can learn on some level to view the digital copy of an album as the “light” version for transportation and the vinyl version as the “real” version for serious sit-down listening, it might give us all the best of both worlds.

Me?  I’m gonna start shopping for a new turntable.

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