John
You know what really grinds a vinyl lover’s gears more than anything? MP3 download coupons. Surely folk buying the black stuff aren’t just young hipster kids or those looking to connect with something tangible. A significant portion of vinyl buyers are audiophiles – they buy records for their (supposed) maximal resolution.
And yet record companies insist on endlessly insulting our audiophile sensibilities with MP3 download coupons. I never redeemed one and never will. I already get the convenience of an MP3’s smaller file size from MOG and Spotify. Have record companies not heard of FLAC or Apple Lossless? Is bandwidth still prohibitively expensive in 2012? Surely not. Better still, bundle the CD with the vinyl (thank you Built To Spill, thank you Bob Dylan) and let us make our own rips; no 500Mb download required.
Some artists have it down. Sydney’s The Laurels (psychedelic/shoegaze) recently sold vinyl copies of their album Plains via their Bandcamp page. Pay via PayPal and get an IMMEDIATE download in any format of your choosing: MP3, FLAC, ALAC, OGG. Bloody terrific. I’d love to see more of this from other musicians.
What vinyl releases do you know of that come with a lossless download or a CD? Let me know in the comments below.
