Vinyl sales surge big time last year

The numbers are in south of the border, and holy frigging cow.

Vinyl album and EP sales went up last year, according to RIAA stats. Not by a little, but a huge 36.6 per cent.

Vinyl is still a small piece (tiny tiny piece, actually) of the overall pie-of-music-sales-formats. But there's something to be said for an old, obsolete media surging more than 36 per cent in sales last year, when supposedly all the kids are just stealing music off the internets.

The news was posted in Wired's Listening Post blog today (Link)

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Happy Record Store Day

Well, it's tomorrow, but I'll be on the road tomorrow to my hometown to see my mom sing in a Sweet Adelines concert.

As much as I love getting music online, there's something to be said for a good ol' fashioned music store, especially one that sells vinyl. In celebration of Record Store Day tomorrow, CBC Radio 3 had a contest to find the coolest independent record store in Canada. The result:

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/music/story/2008/04/18/indiestore-contest-recordday.html

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A case in point: Moby CD vs. iTunes

I'm loving the new Moby disc. (BTW - here's Moby talking about his new album, always interesting for me)

Anyway, here's something (as if we even needed one more thing) to add to the "regular old music stores are dying and this is yet another reason why" file.

Moby's new album, Last Night, went on sale last week. Here were my options:

• Buy the CD in HMV in downtown Edmonton: $14.99
• Buy the album on iTunes Plus (256 kHz AAC, no DRM, etc, plus a bonus track): $9.99

I bought it on iTunes. Duh. 

Is there any hope of music stores ever cluing in? Or should they just blame Steve Jobs for ruining the music industry, fail to make any meaningful adjustments, and slip slide into oblivion? This isn't even the "long tail" artist, this is a huge release, and they can't price it to compete with a digital music store? Brutal.

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