Elvis Costello skips the CD
The other day at a record store in Summit, N.J., my friend asked the owner how business had been. He said it's been extremely slow since the beginning of the year, with (as he put it) a bunch of releases from acts nobody had ever heard of, but that vinyl sales were very strong. He was particularly happy about the growing trend in which artists offer free downloads with LPs--fans get great sound and a nice collectible item with the vinyl, and portability with the digital files.
Elvis Costello understands this trend: his next album, Momofuku, will be released on April 22 on vinyl and digital download only, according to a Reuters report. Each record will come with a code redeemable for a free download, and the album will be sold online as well, but no CDs will be pressed.
The unusual name seems to be a reference to a trio of restaurants in New York City, or perhaps some offbeat attempt at Googlebombing.
Piracy may be the reason he's skipping the CD. ElvisCostello.com references piracy for his decision to release another album in a super-limited edition set--one copy for each state.
Matt Rosoff is an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, where he covers Microsoft's consumer products and corporate news. He's written about the technology industry since 1995, and reviewed the first Rio MP3 player for CNET.com in 1998. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mattrosoff. 
Digital sound can be good, but most of the time it's compressed either dynamically or in a lossy mp3-sort-of-way. I think more people are and should buy records to protest the dumbing down of consumers via bad-awful digital crap. Sound quality has taken a real dive in the last 20 years in both mainstream releases and mainstream playback equipment.
Now ******** is great. Every time I listen to it it grows on me more and more. And the vinyl sounds MUCH better than the 256kbps free download that accompanied it!
But I do want to point out a couple of things:
1) Saying that vinyl sound quality is better than CD quality is just insane. A lot of people posting here might not remember this, but the whole reason CDs took off is because they [i]are[/i] better quality. Vinyl has hiss and pops that CDs simply don't have.
I don't think that the future lies in distributing vinyl with digital downloads. I think the future lies in digital downloads [i]alone[/i]. It would be interesting to compare Amazon's CD sales to their MP3 sales. I suspect they sell a lot more MP3 downloads.
Now don't get me wrong: I don't think MP3s are the right digital solution, long-term. I think you need a lossless format, be it lossless WMA or FLAC, or something else. But physical distribution of a product (that costs a lot more to produce) makes no sense, when you can just sell the original files with a lot less overhead.
- by ender21 August 28, 2008 11:13 AM PDT
- Wow, if vinyl lost 3db every time you played it, every record would be unintelligible after maybe 10 playings?
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(13 Comments)pubmat lost his credibility with that rant.