The return of vinyl records
Twenty years ago, almost everybody was thinking that vinyl records were a memory of the past because CDs and digital sound had taken the place.
Today however, everybody can notice that vinyl records are back in records shops like FNAC and even in supermarkets. What happened then?
Musical industry promoted CDs in the eighties mostly because it was cheaper to produce. Making vinyl records is a complex task, looking like steel industry with hot vinyl molded in matrix by workers in old fashioned factories.
To the opposite, pressing CDs was very simple and could easily be done by robots.
Music industry made marketing campaigns to convince people to throw away their vinyl records and to replace them by CDs.
They said CDs had a better sound because they were making no noise when they were played. Moreover, a CD can contain one hour of music versus forty minutes on a vinyl record.
CDs will play correctly on a poor audio system; however, vinyl records will play better with good turntable, cell, and needle. Analogic sound is warmer and contains more harmonics than CDs because sound is compressed to spare data.
Music industry earned a lot of money with CDs. But in the 2000’s, people began to convert their CDs in MP3, to share the files on the internet, and the CDs sales collapsed.
So now music industry is back to make vinyl records because of the better sound and because they can not be converted in MP3 !