Rebekka Zuckermann Kristiansen's Blog

As you may know, the music industry has been through a lot over the past thirty years, ranging from bad-quality vinyl, to the introduction of the CD, to the recent innovation of streaming, all of which have left todays music industry battered beyond recognition. Now, one has to compete not only with substitutes like other forms of entertainment, but a musician has to compete with himself. The vinyls, the CDs and the Spotify availability of a musicians work will inevitably become competitors in their own way, and an ethical issue recently (re)raised by a norwegian raidiostation refers to this problem and it’s ethical echo: does a producer purposefully decrease the quality of a vinyl to raise the demand for the CD (or the mp3)?

 (picture and article from)

http://p3.no/musikk/juksa-med-vinylen/

If there is truth to this theory, the producers are manipulating the quality to force the hand of the buyer – an obvious ethical issue. Is it the role of the producer to decide what a buyer faces when entering a record store? It appears to me that the vinylrecord-industry is surviving only because the suckers like me who are in love with the retro-nostalgia idea of vinylrecords decide to pay way too much for something that is apparently not even top-of-the-line.

Now on the other side we have the theories stating that vinyl does provide better sound quality, and of course the very intuitive counterargument (also raised in the article) saying that as long as there is demand for a product, one just doesn’t turn down the opportunity to meet that demand.

In the end however, it seems that regardless of how much manipulation is in play, the record stores are closing down by the hundreds. Ultimately it comes down to this: can vinyl records or CDs compete with the internet?