It’s the Kielbasa Kid…

…so this headline grabbed my attention the other day. Vinyl Albums Have Out Sold CD’S for the first time since the 1980’s. Vinyl accounted for $232.1 million of music sales while CDs only bought in 129.9 million. Vinyl grew by 4% in the first half of 2020 while CD sales were down 48%. And you know I’m not surprised. Why buy a CD when the name itself Compact Disc is no longer compact and is downright bulky when you compare it to an mp3 file that you can download straight to your smart device with the other gazillion tunes you have on your phone. Steaming is up 12% and accounts for more than 85% of the music industries revenue. So why are albums popular?  Well someone started to say how much warmer and brighter the music sounded when played music from an album as opposed to a CD or even a streaming service and that Vinyl has become the “trendy” thing to own these days. There have been stories about some hipsters trying to bring the cassette tape back. Well coming from a guy who grew up in the age of cassette I hated it then and I hate it now. I was more in love with the 8-track tape which like the cassette both could be eaten by the machine it was being played on. Nothing like popping either out of the player only to have to delicately pull the tape that decided to stay in the machine. Then if you were able to salvage it 9 times out of 10 the tape itself would be crinkled which was very noticeable whenever you played the tape again. Sort of like having pops and scratches on an album that wasn’t handled properly or has been played a gazillion times without cleaning the surface of the vinyl with a disc cleaner. Yeah, thanks but no thanks. I think I’ll stick to the convenience of just saying, hey Alexa, play ….WPKL the Pickle!