Eliot Van Buskirk of Wired points out that RIAA numbers show that records are on the rise again, after two years of declining sales. No, I’m not just using the old-fashioned term "records" to refer to something else — I mean records, as in vinyl, as in big round things with grooves that you put on phonographs. $22.9 million worth of retail value moved in records in the US alone — not a huge industry, necessarily, but nothing to be sneezed at, either. By the way, even though the CD industry is shrinking fast, $7.5 billion of CD albums were sold in 2007. So the record industry has every right to be scared by rapidly-depleting sales — and every opportunity to be intrigued by the money that might be made on digital (which, totaling all different formats, was well over $2 billion).

In fact, here’s one for you: online digital growth outpaces CD shrinkage by a factor of greater than 2:1. It’s tough to project rates forward, but that should be a good sign.

RIAA Admits Vinyl Sales Are Climbing [ Wired.com Listening Post ]

I think the vinyl anomaly, though, is brilliant for a whole number of reasons. What you read in the press about the music biz is pretty one-dimensional. We’re expected to believe the industry is collapsing, and sales are down. The reality is much more complicated. Here are some other factoids you can extract from the RIAA’s 2007 sales figures in the news of the weird category:

• High-def audio formats have completely failed — so much that cassette sales are equivalent to units of SACDs and DVD Audio combined.
• More money was spent on mobile downloads than single downloads elsewhere — thanks to the fact that they’re so ridiculously expensive, of course.
• People spent nearly as much on vinyl records in 2007 as they did on music videos online ($28.2 million).

So, here’s to the cassette and the vinyl record. And what does all this really demonstrate? To me, it’s a blunt reminder that what the record industry has failed to do is successfully transition to new media and new, more diverse audiences. When cassette sales started to deteriorate with the introduction of the CD, no one said the industry was doomed then. Vinyl was a great format, which is why it’s still alive. The online formula is starting to come together, but it’s just not quite there yet. And given that most of the industry’s money still comes from CDs, it seems like it’s likewise time to figure out how to get more mileage out of that format and slow the decline, rather than obsess over it, while continuing to work on new formats.

Photo: Michelle’s House of Disco.

MP3s, bad because they have less music in them. So much less music, in fact, that your brain loses the ability to feel emotions listening to them. Okay, sure, over-compressed MP3s sound awful, especially at lower bitrates. But get ready for some strange psychoacoustics here, folks.

Producers howl over sound cut out by MP3 compression (and I see, while I was sitting on this, it got slashdotted, though no one took the bait

As Joel Selvin writes for the The San Francisco Chronicle, MP3s have less music:

…the music contained in these computer files represents less than 10 percent of the original music on the CDs.

Wow, I knew that compressed digital audio files contained less data, but less music?

In its journey from CD to MP3 player, the music has been compressed by eliminating data that computer analysis deems redundant, squeezed down until it fits through the Internet pipeline.

Of course! If they didn’t, we might stop up the tubes that make the Internet — or … um … one tube, apparently. (No wonder congestion is bad if we have just one pipeline! You need it to fit!) And there’s more:

When even the full files on the CDs contain less than half the information stored to studio hard drives during recording, these compressed MP3s represent a minuscule fraction of the actual recording.

The humanity! All those years when we were buying CDs, we were only getting half of what was recorded in the studio?! Why, that must mean they’re recording, say, four whole tracks when they record the album. And one take. (Okay, I’m assuming they somehow got this statistic by assuming 96kHz sample rates … except that’s not really half the amount of data … and that would still require 16-bit … and I don’t know who told them that, anyway.)

There are the obligatory and predictable quotes from Phil Ramone and others. I can understand engineers being squeamish about someone listening to a low-bitrate MP3 on iPod earbuds, though I wonder how they missed people taping pennies to their turntables in the 60s. (Scratches and dust, I suppose, just give you more music!)

You’ve read these kinds of articles before. They’re not entirely wrong, they just struggle to explain what lossy compression is. A journalist, I can imagine, would do that easily; I haven’t written any compression algorithms this morning so I’ll admit my own understanding of data compression is rudimentary. But, of course, what a journalist should do is talk to experts, and you hope they’ll tell you something that makes sense. In this case, they seem to explain away our ability to hear music at all. Get ready for — experts gone crazy!