Earlier this year I ran out of space to store records. I could ship a load of old ones to our storage unit, but I really do like having my music around me so that didn’t feel like a good idea. I was also noticing the the already high price of records was creeping up, from £20 to well over £25 in most cases. So apart from a few new releases from Wrong Speed Records, I’ve not bought vinyl at all this year, and have instead reverted to either digital music or CDs.
Both of those formats provided challenges for me though. Digital music is great, but it means I have to think about backups, and having multiple copies in case of disk failure. I largely solved that by saving all new music to Dropbox, and then making it available on all my computers that way. I also back up to a large hard drive in my main computer that contains everything I have ever downloaded since 2021. The challenge with CDs was that the 20+ year old machine I used to play them on died over a year ago, so I was just ripping them to MP3 and playing them that way.
That wasn’t too much of a problem to start off with, as two of my main sources of music was the albums I get as part of my subscription to The Quietus magazine, and a Bandcamp subscription to the music of Constellation Records. In both cases new music arrives every few weeks, and I download it and play it on my computer. My computer is plugged into an amp, which is connected to the speakers from my old CD player, so the sound is pretty decent.
In the end I did buy a CD player, and another cheap amp to connect it to some other vintage speakers I have. So now I have my record player and CD player routing to one sound system, and my home and work computers to the other. That way I can play any music I own in my home office without too much effort with cables and switches. It also means I spend a lot less money on music because CDs are under half the price of records, and digital music is cheaper still.
After doing this for a few months, I can’t say I notice a huge difference in sound quality between anything I listen to, and I’ve enjoyed the subscription music a lot, whilst also spending far too much time on Ebay tracking down things I want to own on CD that other people are getting rid of. That’s where the real cost saving happens, and I’m operating on an average of about £3 per CD right now.
We are also setting up a media swap scheme at work, so I can take in any CDs I don’t want anymore, and hopefully pick up a few things from other people.
So that’s how I’m consuming music in 2024. I still have Spotify for when I’m walking the dog or on my work computer, but my default is still very much an ownership model, with a strong preference to buy directly from the artist or the record company. That way money goes to the people who make the music, and should hopefully support them sufficiently to make more.