| Don't blame it all on the customer. The labels are very guilty of this, too!
The labels make new tunes during the week and want to play out their music on the events that weekend. Now, had they gone the oldskool route, they would've had to send the tunes off for master and then have it pressed, so that they could play out their dubplates. The way it works today is they finish their tune, smash it into L2, burn it on a noname CD-R and play it out. If they notice that the crowd reaction isn't all that great, they spent almost no money on their tracks.
Many labels have a few artists from around the globe working for them. In the old days, whenever those artists would DJ, they would have to wait for the vinyl to be shipped to them instead of just getting the WAV in a sendspace-link and burning it to a CD-R within <15 minutes.
The vinyl would usually crackle and pop etc. whereas the WAV will have none of that, since it's all digital.
So you see, there are many reasons (time and money) for labels not to use vinyl when they play out.
When any up and coming DJs see what hardware the pros use, they tend to copy them. You've probably bought gear, just because some professional you like used it, yourself.
The result is that everyone uses digital. It's also very easy to adopt, because you can rip vinyls to digital, so you're not missing out on anything by going digital.
Using the vinyl medium as a means of lessening piracy is not the way to go. You can argue about how the quality is poor in a ripped vinyl, but the fact is that most people either don't care enough about the quality to be bothered by it or don't care enough about your music when there's so much other music readily available for them to download on beatport.
In this day and age where intellectual property is easily accessible and many big labels offer mp3 downloads on sites like beatport, you would only make it harder for yourself by making the music inaccessible for your fans.
The way it looks now is that vinyl is on its way out. I hate it, but it's a fact. I love the idea of having a huge 12" record spinning on ingenious equipment blasting out all the latest tunes, but as the music industry looks now, it's just not feasible. |