Over at New York’s Vulture blog, Matthew Perpetua ponders the impact of Record Store Day. Towards the end of it, he notes the following:

…it seems to be that it is very much targeted to people old enough to have a great deal of sentimentality for vinyl and record stores, and
it does not do much to reach out to younger music fans who are not inclined to pay for music or care about it as a physical product.

This made me think somewhat about my own listening habits relative to media, which have shifted slightly in the last year or so in an unexpected direction. The majority of my music collection is on CD, and a good percentage of that is also contained in roughly 200 GB of memory on an external hard drive situated around eighteen inches from the hands that are typing this. I don’t have any plans to sell off the CD portion of my collection, in part because I’m a packaging and credits fan, in part because I’m sure that there will come a time when I’ll want to re-rip much of these albums at a higher level of quality, and in part because I’ve had enough hard drives beshit themselves that I’d just as soon pay a little extra and have a perennial backup.

That said, I’ve been buying more vinyl lately, and I’m not entirely sure of why. In some cases — Mississippi Records, I’m looking at you — it’s because that is the option available. In others, it’s because the label has opted to include a download of the music along with the record itself. But I’m also not opting for vinyl over CD in every case: the way my apartment’s laid out, I have a computer in my office, with CD and record players in my living room. I didn’t listen to music in said living room to the extent that I do now until my last roommate moved out, which was around eighteen months ago. I wasn’t much of a vinyl listener before then; the bulk of my vinyl collection consisted not long ago of LPs I’d been sent back in my zine-editor days (lots of music from No Idea, oddly), and even more seven inches that I’d received during the same time. But in the last year, as I spend more time in my living room, I’ve gotten more used to listening to albums end to end or, depending on the format, side by side.

All of which is a deeply roundabout way of asking: is a preference for physical releases something that’s simply a vestige of the listening habits of music aficionados over a certain age? Or is it more that the living arrangements that one settles into at a certain point are simply more amenable to certain formats? God knows, if you told me ten years ago that I’d be buying a noticeable amount of music on vinyl, I’d have laughed (metaphorically speaking) at you.

(Also: Norman Brannon offers an entirely different take on some of the issues covered here.)