In the underground, vinyl is struggling in the US. Quite a few distros have gone out of business in the past few years, with no one picking them up (which means some labels are very hard to find in the US).

http://www.turntablelab.com/vinyl/149/627/44702.html

Buy vinyl Portishead, get MP3 free.

This solves the archive/backup issue, of course.

I would have to take issue with the “CDs are more robust than records” claim, though; CDs have proved to be less robust than originally anticipated.

A CD can be flawlessly copied. Assuming I am good about backing up my data, once I have music in a non-DRM digital form it is never going away.

The CDs that I have, that are of music I would be unlikely to ever find if it was lost/destroyed, have been ripped and stored on several backup hard drives that I have. Every few years I will upgrade a backup drive, and so assuming my house isn’t burned down or everything is stolen, there isn’t a nuclear explosion EMP attack, or some sort of worse case scenario (a scenario that would be far worse than losing my music), my music will be around for a long time.

On the other hand, ripping my old records is a pain in the ass.

MixMatchMusic.com
.Evolving Musi. -

I hate to go down this road, but this is empirically false. Vinyl may sound better to your ears, but records actually allow for less dynamic range than CDs due to the way that they’re produced. Vinyl isn’t more accurate, either: in fact, the reason that people react well to the sound of vinyl is because of the imperfections it introduces into the sound.

That having been said, I do agree that those imperfections can be aurally pleasing. The imperfections analog audio devices introduce are the reason for all of the effort that’s put into hardware modeling — while digital audio allows for perfect replication of a recording, we often prefer colored sound to the pristine sound.

Perhaps it’s just me, but with all my digital music now resident on a 1 TB drive, my listening used to consist of a couple of hours of jumping from song to song, playing bits of each like an aural smorgasbord. That approach has it’s charms, but… I’ve been buying used vinyl recently (<$5 each), which I play on a decommissioned DJ SL1200. I just love the dusting ritual and how it makes me slow down and listen to music the way I used to: all the way through!

If more gets released on vinyl, I’m hoping the prices will also come down. Which is weird because, adjusted for inflation, the price of new vinyl is probably less than it was 20-25 years ago IIRC.

I would have to take issue with the “CDs are more robust than records” claim, though; CDs have proved to be less robust than originally anticipated. And unlike records, CDs don’t degrade gracefully; as a digital medium, they’ll just cease to work altogether (or skip uncontrollably). Downloads fare better, but you’d better have an offsite backup plan. ;) Online storage should make this picture much, much better. But CDs and plastic in general are going to be a huge problem for archivists and history.