What Your Music Format Says About You

Considering the current preponderance of formats—including vinyl, streams, CDs, and cassettes—how we listen to music can now seem just as revealing as what we’re listening to. By Joel Oliphint.
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Article: What Your Music Format Says About You

by Joel Oliphint

November 9, 2015

If specialization is your thing, there’s never been a better time to be a music fan. If you want to create your own radio station based on your favorite genre or artist, you can. If you’d like to listen exclusively to chillwave all day, every day, you can. But that’s just the beginning. In the last several years, music formats have begun to mirror the personalized path music has trod in the Internet age. Even within each medium, segmentation abounds: the options for vinyl vary by size, color, and weight; downloaded music can take the form of an MP3 (with its own range of bit rates) or some type of lossless format; and in the realm of streaming, there seems to be a new service—offering even more meta-preferences—popping up every month. More than ever, how we listen to music can seem just as revealing as what we’re listening to.

Each format has its own cheerleaders and naysayers, of course. For example, vinyl is seen by some as the reclamation of listening in its purest, most immersive, and tangible form; for others, it is utter snobbery. But it’s not that simple or binary. In fact, the BBC broke vinyl collectors down into eight separate tribes last year: the nostalgic collector, the new buyer, the audiophile, the young enthusiast, the romantic musician, the digger-turned-DJ, the digger-turned-dealer, and the sighing skeptic. (Not to mention the countless permutations between those tribes.)

There’s no typical downloader, either—and this goes for fans and artists alike. Twenty-five-year-old Yannick Ilunga of eclectic R&B act Petite Noir tells me he prefers MP3s because he’s tethered to his laptop all the time, while my 65-year-old father-in-law used his first iTunes gift card to buy Meat Loaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” because it’s over eight minutes long and he wanted to get the most song for his money. Or perhaps you got a download code after buying an album on vinyl, and you want to be able to listen on your computer, too. And then there’s grumpy-old-man audiophiles like Neil Young, who swears only his Pono player and files can provide the high-resolution experience we need to truly appreciate music (even if a scientific study determined the difference between CD-standard recordings and high-resolution recordings is virtually undetectable).

Apple's first-ever iPod television ad, from 2001


Not long ago, the act of buying an album in the iTunes store was to embrace the convenience and portability of the iPod and to reject the CD. Today, it’s still a rejection of CDs, but iPhones have mostly replaced iPods, which means that if you’re buying digital files, you’re also rejecting streaming—you want to own the music, even if it’s not something you can hold in your hand. Maybe you buy singles digitally, embracing the fact that you don’t have to purchase an entire album just to get one song. Or you get all the files for free from a torrent site—you want to own it, but you don’t want to pay for it.

Let’s not forget the dogged CD, a format that has refused to exit gracefully or quietly while ceding the throne to digital (CD sales were down 10 percent in the first half of 2015 but they still count for about 20 percent of all album purchases, according to SoundScan). Some listeners are hanging on to CDs just to have something to listen to in the car other than the radio, in the same way that listeners with old cars hung on to their cassettes 20 years ago. Others have been happy to dispatch their cracked jewel cases to the land of yard sales and bargain bins. Speedy Ortiz’s Sadie Dupuis, 27, did away with CDs, but she had a hard time letting go. “I had a gnarly, massive CD collection that I’ve recently downsized now that my car has an auxiliary input,” she says. “It sorta broke my heart to get rid of them. RIP: ‘Say My Name’ CD single featuring Kobe Bryant remix.”

“All streaming sites are the devil—asking which one you prefer is like asking which head of the hydra you like best.”

—Sinkane’s Ahmed Gallab

Photo by Erez Avissar

Perhaps the trickiest format to parse, in terms of common associations, is streaming. For a lot of listeners, streaming has become the go-to format when you don’t care about format at all. You want music on-demand, all the time. With streaming, there’s usually no desire to have a deep, romanticized listening experience (real or imagined), and preferences within each program tend to be based more on differences in software than the music itself. In an ad-based model like Spotify’s free version or YouTube, there’s no act of exchanging money for music, which may lead to listeners having a less concrete attachment with their favorite artists. Even for someone who pays for an ad-free experience, that monthly fee covers all your listening, from The Ultimate Christmas Playlist to Silentó. In that way, it’s perfect for listeners with commitment issues who like music but want an open, undefined relationship with bands.

But the culture’s sea change toward streaming means that some people are getting caught up in the tide. When Ahmed Gallab, 32, of Afropop-inspired funk-rock act Sinkane, is on tour, he streams music out of convenience—but that doesn’t mean he likes it. “Streaming sites make listening to music very boring,” he says. “I'll hardly listen to a record or song completely because I know that I can change to something else right away. They’ve almost ruined the experience for me. I feel like all streaming sites are the devil—asking which one you prefer is like asking which head of the hydra you like best.”

With streaming on the rise, is passionate fandom doomed?

In a recent New Yorker profile of Grimes, Kelefa Sanneh made a distinction between listeners and fans. “In the modern, low-friction music industry, listeners are easy to reach but hard to retain,” he wrote. “Clicking on a song doesn’t necessarily inspire a listener to do any biographical research.” So if we define a fan as someone who is in a committed relationship with a band, then the act of choosing a format is now another way fans can separate themselves from listeners. And with streaming on the rise—the number of tracks streamed through the first half of 2015 nearly doubled 2014’s numbers—does that mean passionate fandom is doomed?

Maybe, but those categories and characterizations are unstable. They break down. While streaming ruins the listening experience of Sinkane’s Gallab, 37-year-old indie rocker Dan Boeckner—currently of Divine Fits and Operators; formerly of Handsome Furs and Wolf Parade—has the opposite experience. Boeckner likes vinyl, but streaming, which he does primarily through Bandcamp and SoundCloud, opens up worlds of music that were once inaccessible. It makes him more of a fan.

“Being able to listen to whatever I want, whenever I want, is amazing,” Boeckner says. “I like cross referencing songs, going from Ash Ra Tempel to Cluster to Conny Plank to James Holden to Blawan. It’s like being in the world’s biggest library. Growing up in a small town, I would read about esoteric releases that would never make it into the skate shop where I bought most of my music, so there’s a sense of wonder and excitement with streaming that has never really gone away for me.”

“Lower-commitment formats like cassettes or even digital allow for more freedom and expressiveness. You don’t have to [press to vinyl] to make your music valid. Those symbols of validation don’t exist anymore.”

—Helado Negro’s Roberto Carlos Lange

When I wrote about the vinyl industry last year, I talked about the format’s badge status, how it offers a way for listeners to identify as true music fans. But badges aren’t static. Vinyl is for someone who loves the experience of holding a physical object and listening to an album sequentially just as much as it’s for a totemist who doesn’t even own a record player. Listening to music on vinyl 15 years ago meant you were a DJ, or that you listened to older music or limited releases of punk, hardcore, and indie rock. Now, listening to vinyl doesn’t mean a thing. You could be listening to the Velvet Underground or Ed Sheeran. Twangy storytellers Drive-By Truckers or Australian metalcore manicas Parkway Drive. Fleetwood Mac’s Tango in the Night or songs from Disney’s Tangled.

Roberto Carlos Lange, aka atmospheric singer/songwriter Helado Negro, is “not anti-anything,” but after going through the lengthy, imprecise process of pressing his own music on wax, the tangible benefits of vinyl don’t give him the same warm and fuzzies. Lange, 35, likes to record in a pristine environment with a computer, and he didn’t like the noise that ended up on his last LP, Double Youth.

“Vinyl feels like it’s some kind of crazy-ass commitment with thousands and thousands of dollars spent, and you’re trying to hire these audio scientists to capture your stuff,” Lange says. “I think lower-commitment formats like cassettes or even digital allow for more freedom and expressiveness. You don’t have to [press to vinyl] to make your music valid. Those symbols of validation don’t exist anymore.”

In that way, cassettes have recently become what vinyl was before its recent revival: If someone listens to a cassette, the music is typically from the ’80s or early-’90s, or from modern-day cassette labels and artists like Helado Negro. “People associate cassettes with low quality, but that’s not true. If you pay the money to get cassettes done well, they sound good,” says Lange, who also likes the format’s low cost, quick turnaround, and associations with mixtape culture. “The idea of a mixtape still exists. Some people put out their best music in that idea, separate from an album cycle.”

Regardless of the advantages of the cassette, its status as “the new vinyl” won’t last. Now that Cassette Store Day and limited-edition Blink-182 cassette reissues exist, the backlash is inevitable. (And nothing foreshadows authenticity negation like an NBC Nightly News segment.) Contradictions exist within each medium, making the quest for a format that delineates casual listeners from real music fans endless—and pointless. The mere idea of format-as-badge-status is as superficial as it is fickle.

“For anyone building their fortresses around mediums—history has shown that all that shit collapses,” Lange says.

A Sony commercial from 1985 that describes cassettes as "the closest you can get to music."


All these feelings artists and listeners and fans associate with certain formats are snapshots of a particular moment. They’re all subject to change; nostalgia has a way of making modernity feel passé, even wrong. It’s hard to romanticize the past without condemning the present, which partially explains the Luddite tendencies of some music-fan subcultures. Sure, we can talk about the hands-on, ritualistic experience of playing vinyl records (guilty)—dropping the needle, staring at the big artwork, reading the liner notes—but is there much to fetishize about the cassette experience other than, “Hey, remember these? This is how we used to listen to music, but we don’t anymore, and I kind of miss that.”

Given our culture’s obsession with nostalgia, format has the potential to branch even further into cobwebbed corners of the past. Perhaps more people will discover the 8-track obsessives at KTS Productions, who are trying to keep the ’70s format alive. Pirates Press, a middle man between artists, labels, and manufacturers, already offers flexi discs—thin, flexible records that were once inserted into books and magazines during a brief period in the ’60s. The company can even stamp the grooves directly onto postcards, just like the old days. “They are a great way to hand out a physical product that will NOT be discarded, but instead bragged about and flaunted heavily,” Pirates Press says.

If fans or artists—or, more likely, cash-strapped labels—become thirsty for not just dated formats but more obscure, here-and-gone technology, the well goes deep. Maybe Jack White will tire of his Voice-O-Graph booth and champion the little-known Elcaset, a king-size cassette that briefly appealed to audiophiles and home-recording enthusiasts but never took off. Or there’s Digital Audio Tape (DAT), which can record at a higher sampling rate than a CD; the RIAA never liked the format, and, with the help of Al Gore’s Digital Audio Recorder Act of 1987, it tried (and failed) to require that DAT machines include a scanner that could detect if someone tried to make a copy of copyrighted material. (Wire’s 1988 album The Ideal Copy was the first and one of the only commercial releases on DAT.)

A breakdown of the short-lived Elcaset format, which came and went in the mid '70s.


Maybe fans will indulge in more recent history and come back around on regular-old CDs. After all, the sound quality is better than most streaming services and MP3s. They’re portable, shiny. “The more I think about it, the more I love that format,” Dan Boeckner says of the CD.

Or perhaps streaming’s popularity will continue to rise and eventually quash everything else, making talk of MP3s (or any other digital file you own) seem particularly quaint. Maybe others will join the chorus of Damon Krukowski, Mike Doughty, and Taylor Swift, asking for better payments to artists for streaming. And if the current services don’t respond, maybe we’ll see tech-savvy fans Kickstart a new kind of fair-trade streaming service—and maybe some of those fans will then brag about how they only stream music from services that pay artists fairly. The tagline writes itself: “Music fans who care stream with StreamFair™.”

Formats used to be purely utilitarian. In the early ’60s, vinyl didn’t signify anything. Same with CDs in the mid ’90s. In those eras, limited options meant format was largely irrelevant: I listen to music, therefore I buy CDs. Now, with a panoply of choices, we’ve come full circle, reaching a point when formats don’t have any agreed-upon meanings. An audiophile could be someone who listens to only vinyl—or only FLAC files. So as we stand at the edge of a post-format world, one thing is certain: Things will keep changing, and quickly.