Vinyl Revival ?

[GhostShip]

This sounds interesting  

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004313.php

There's a new trend underway among indie labels, dubbed "digital vinyl": offering free MP3 downloads for customers who buy albums on vinyl. First Merge Records offered free downloads to those who bought vinyl releases by Clientele and Robert Pollard. Now Saddle Creek Records has announced that they will be doing the same thing for their customers who prefer vinyl, starting with What the Toll Tells, the new record by Two Gallants due in February.

For a variety of reasons, vinyl has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity among music fans (I, for one, can attest that The Decemberists' Picaresque vinyl release sounds better the CD). Unfortunately, music fans who own turntables and iPods find themselves in a bit of a quandary.

Who cares, you say? How many people could that be, you say? Well, smart independent labels aren't asking those questions. Instead, they are trying to make their customers happy, even the vinyl-loving, iPod-equipped ones.

Quite a stark contrast to the likes of EMI and Sony-BMG, whose copy-protected CDs are stopping music fans from getting their CDs into their iPods.

I suppose the fact that the vinyl disk will outlast the lifespan of a CD by tens of years is a good incentive too  

[Lysander]

What I'd do as an audio quality conciencious (whichis a word I totally jsut failed at aspelling) music maker would be to offer downloads in FLAC. The way I see it, listening to FLAC on a good sound card has all of the advantages of CD (no vinyl crackle, portability) without all the disadvantages of CD (no "noise floor", etc.) with the added bonus of it being un-scratchable. I mean, really, forget about CDs *and* records, going completely digital is truly the best of both worlds; the only downside is bandwidth cost and space, but if you don't like it oyu can downmix it to mp3 or buy a bigger hard drive. And when these people are paying $8000 for a set of speakers (and that's for a *really* good set of speakers, not a fake price-marked-up set of average speakers) no one's going to balk at an extra hundred dollars to get 30 more gigabytes of music storage.