Why is this happening?

[The Curmudgeon]

In a first ever occurance, physical sales of older music have overtaken physical sales of new music.

Take a look:

www.nme.com/news/various-artists/90839

The obvious answer is "because new music SUCKS!" But that's too easy and probably not accurate. But what causes more people to invest in an older record than a brand new release? It's certainly not cost, because if anything older albums by the Who, Stones (and especially) the Beatles are the same price or more expensive than chart stuff.

I think the climate of music has changed so much that the overall landscape is pop. Not just boybands and Bieber types, but EDM and chart hip-hop pretty much make up the top 40. And today's fan isn't going to pay full price for an album with a couple of hit singles on it. They'll either steal it, stream it or buy the individual tracks from iTunes.

Although it's clearly not just "older people" buying albums, as the stats show that a new generation of kids are buying vinyl, the most since the early 90's. I saw an ad on TV advertising fucking record players a few weeks ago.

Maybe the want for older music are people reading and hearing about great bands, either from the net, YouTube, their parents, whatever, and wanting to invest in it, having an MP3 on their desktop just isn't enough?

Honestly, I dunno. Any ideas?

[trashcanman]

Retro novelty or cost, I reckon. Obviously older music fans trend towards physical releases, but one of the reasons I stuck with them until Spotify and the like came along and cut the costs even more is because they pretty consistently cost significantly less than a typical iTunes download. As for why this is happening NOW, I can't really say I'm "with it" enough to say for sure, but I'm not complaining1.

[The Curmudgeon]

So how do you use Spotify, Trash? Do you just think of a band you'd like to hear and select, or do you have a playlist of songs you like or.. what?

[trashcanman]

You can add individual songs or whole albums at will and you can create playlists or you just shuffle the whole big mess. Right now I'm mostly just listening to albums since my laptop is too shitty to run Spotify and I prefer not making playlists from my phone. I do have a playlist where I toss songs I want to use for future reference, though.