The Format Wars
These days we hear a lot of “YouTube Influencers” talking about which format is best, vinyls or CDs, analog or digital. Every day some 20+ year old declares “Vinyl is back, CDs are dead.” These young people proudly show off their collection of 300 LPs and play them through their vintage 1975 turntables, receivers and speakers.
The amount of misinformation circulating around these discussions is staggering. The facts are out there though, and they’re much more interesting.
- Sales Volume Timeline
Let’s go back to the earliest mass-produced technology for reproducing speech and music, the Edison cylinder. Introduced in 1888, they were a wax tube played with a needle. Initially the cylinders had to be engraved one-at-a-time on a fresh cylinder, and being wax, their lifetime was limited to a couple dozen plays (but they could be shaved down and re-used, as when used for dictation). In 1900 a process was devised for manufacturing permanent copies of cylinders out of celluloid, an early hard plastic, using a copper stamper made from the wax original. This format became widely popular, and for the next forty years an estimated 200 million cylinders were sold worldwide.
By 1929 cylinders were replaced by the flat acetate (or lacquer) disc for recording and playing back music, because they were much easier to store and manufacture. Acetate discs continued to be used for low-budget recording studios well into the 1960s. Materials improved, durability increased and－stamped between two electro-plated lacquers－nearly a billion manufactured shellac 78s were sold by the end of WWII.
During the War, Germany developed the reel-to-reel tape recorder, which quickly obsoleted acetate discs. The tape recorder’s advantages were many, including reusability, fidelity, durability and different tape speeds.
The LP (“long play”) record was introduced by Columbia Records in 1948, running at 33-1/3 rpm and thus holding more than one song. Polyvinyl chloride, PVC－the origin of the nickname “vinyls”－became the substrate of choice. The RIAA (Record Industry Association of America), founded in 1952 to handle licensing, payments to musicians, and establish standards for LP manufacture, began tracking album sales in 1973, when sales were already in the hundreds of millions of units per year.
LP sales dominated the music industry, selling a cumulative 3½ billion units between the early ‘50s and the mid-‘80s.
What happened in the mid-1980s? The Compact Disc was introduced (1983), and it quickly ate the LP’s lunch. CD sales skyrocketed, while LP sales plummeted to nearly zero in 1992. At their peak in 1999 & 2000, CDs were selling almost a billion units PER YEAR.
A fascinating animated chart of sales by format can be found here:
To sum up, cylinders sold a couple hundred million units over 40 years (aver. 5m/yr), 78s sold a billion units in little more than a decade (100m/yr), LPs sold 3½ billion in about 20 years (175m/yr), and CDs sold about 12 trillion units in the last 40 years (300m/yr). CDs had far and away the highest per capita penetration, with an average of 2½ to 4 units sold for every man, woman and child on Earth.
Other physical formats—cassette, 8-track, Mini-Disc, DVD-Audio, Digital Audio Tape, Digital Compact Cassette, others—came and went but none rivaled the CD or LP for market share (95.6% and 71.0% respectively).
2. Trouble In Physical Format Land
So what happened to the Compact Disc? In 1993 the MP3 file format was developed, and by 1995 Napster had capitalized on the MP3 to offer bootlegged music on the newly-popular internet. Consumers could suddenly build a library of tracks outside of the RIAA-monitored sales of physical formats. This was totally unexpected by the industry.
Rather than embracing the new technology, four years later in 1999 the RIAA belatedly sued Napster out of existence… but by then the cat was out of the bag. Numerous streaming and downloading services were springing up everywhere to offer digital music, YouTube in 2005, Netflix in 2007 and Spotify in 2008. The RIAA saw a 90% decline in their revenue.
Physical media were still being bought and sold of course, but the RIAA doesn’t track used LPs or CDs… which became widely available as the format wars played out.
Meanwhile, most stores selling new records (LPs or CDs), and almost all pressing plants making them, went out of business, further reducing the options of consumers. Streaming services became the benefactor of the industry changes. Today, streaming services deliver tens of billions of streams PER DAY.
And streams pay almost nothing to the artists they play, about 3¢ per 1,000 streams. Unless you’re a superstar performer like Taylor Swift—who sold 14 million copies of her best-selling “1989”—just 20% of what Michael Jackson sold of “Thriller” 30 years earlier—and only 1% of her streaming volume—you can no longer make a living from music streams alone. Artists must rely on concert sales and merchandising to survive.
3. The Record Industry Responds
All this is preamble to what came next. In 2008 the industry created Record Store Day, to celebrate and attempt to revive the moribund LP. By marketing “vinyls” as a premium product, while simultaneously denigrating digital as an inferior format, industry moguls were able to very slowly bring back about 12% of the market for vinyl physical media.
Not coincidentally, records are impossible to rip to your computer. Also list prices have gone from $9.98 per LP pre-digital, to $35 or $40 each today… with very little increase in manufacturing cost. How much of this do the artists get? About the same as they got before, $1.00 to $1.50 per disc… AFTER all costs are deducted.
Record industry lawyers clamped down on streaming services, forcing them to pay royalties on the music you stream. This money goes to the labels and copyright holders, and what’s left over is distributed to the artists based on who had the most streams. Only about the top 30% of artists get any payout at all.
And here’s another factor the record industry doesn’t want you to think about: you can never own a stream. At any point for any reason an artist or label can withdraw a song from all (legal) streaming services and you, as the consumer have no say. The songs you stream are not yours, you cannot share them with friends or leave them to your heirs when you die. There is no “ownership” at all for your investment.
If you download a song (for usually $1/song) you do own your copy, but the non-transferable copyright license theoretically prevents you from transferring ownership to anyone else. Just as the lawyers like it.
4. The Truth About Fidelity
Despite the Record Industry’s fervent cries about the purity of analog, and the inherent inferiority of the digital format, the truth is somewhat more sober.
Take as a lesson the story of Mobile Fidelity. In 1977 MoFi (as they’re called) launched their audiophile record label, using half-speed mastering and premium vinyl to press the best LPs they could. They claimed they were “mastered from the original analog master tapes”—without specifying which tapes those were. In the production of LPs, the artists & studios usually record onto a multi-track tape. This is then mixed down to a two-channel master tape, and a copy of that master, called the “safety master,” is used for all subsequent production. Sometimes the safety master itself is copied for a “safety safety master.” At any rate, the “analog masters” MoFi used were at best 3 copies removed from the original, and probably more.
As long as they were a limited run label, they could get away with dubbing from a safety master. However, stampers wear out and have to be replaced every 1,000 to 5,000 LPs, meaning the safety master would have to be played again to make new ones. No record label is going to let you play their safety master multiple times, as would need to happen with some of MoFi’s more popular issues. MoFi was faced with a choice, either dub from a 4th (or 5th) generation copy, or make a digital copy—which unlike the analog copies does not degrade with subsequent playing or copying. In 2011 their engineers began doing just that, although their premium-priced releases (up to $100 ea.) were still labeled “100% analog with no digital conversion.”
They got caught in 2022, and had to pay a class action lawsuit. It wasn’t the first time somebody milked the credulous.
The lesson here is that Mobile Fidelity’s engineers, who were striving for the highest fidelity they could achieve, determined DSD (direct stream digital) masters were superior to 4th or 5th generation analog tape dubs. Their marketing slogan—always analog never digital—was at odds with their engineers’ own assessment of the best technology.
What does this say about the larger analog-vs-digital debate? Well, if the most vehement analog purists in the world say digital masters are superior, perhaps they’re on to something.
The specs bear this out. Analog recording is limited to a dynamic range of 60-76 dB even on the world’s best tape recorders, and a mere 45-50 dB at the vinyl record. Digital is 96 dB, from recording straight through to CD playback (decibels are a logarithmic scale, meaning for every 10 dB the volume is 10 times louder). Analog recorders are limited to 20 – 20,000 Hertz by spec, but in practice the best tape formulations are 40 – 16kHz.
And LPs can have no signals below 50Hz, or the needle will try to jump out of the widened groove.
Digital on the other hand—at the CD spec of 44,100 samples per second—will record 0 – 22,050 Hertz without compromise. Distortion in the very best analog recorder+tape combination is 1%, while digital manages 0.0005% to 0.005%.
And there is no degradation from copying or repeated playback.
Much more information here: https://philmillerthelegacy.com/audacity-explained-digital-vs-analogue/
5. Garbage In, Garbage Out
So where did digital recording get such a rotten reputation? Much of it comes from the way Compact Discs were produced between 1990 and about 2010.
First of all, in the rush to “get product on the shelves” almost all CDs of this time period were derived from LP safety masters. These were always a couple generations removed from the masters, and almost always already encoded with what’s called “LP pre-equalization.” This encoding works sort of like Dolby, boosting the high frequencies to make up for the loss of highs in LP playback. In addition all signals below 50Hz have to be removed, so a common practice was to boost the bass 12dB at about 64Hz to make the low-end sound fatter. This is what audiophiles are referring to when they praise vinyl’s “bass warmth.”
This is separate, by the way, from the RIAA equalization curve. The RIAA curve is injected into the lathe while it is cutting the mother plate, and reduces all bass starting at 1000 Hz by 20dB and boosts the highs above 1000 Hz by 20dB—over and above the pre-emphasis curve. When the LP is played back through a phono preamp, the preamp reverses the RIAA curve, theoretically reducing the LP’s inherent high-frequency hiss and crackle noise and restoring the bass notes.
Another near-universal compromise made for vinyl is to intentionally add crosstalk. Because a needle will not adequately play (without distortion) any instrument which is on only one side of the groove wall, engineers usually pan the instruments toward the center. A very wide stereo field is impossible for a turntable to play (20 to 30dB separation max.)－but not for a CD player (100dB).
Almost all CDs of this era were made from these pre-compromised safety masters, especially if the album had been previously released on LP.
The second factor to consider is the Loudness Wars. Radio play was considered essential to selling albums between the late ‘70s and the mid-2000s, and it’s a well-known phenomenon that louder music stands out better on the radio. Because CDs (available from 1982 on) could hold higher signal levels than LPs without distortion, engineers began “pumping the volume” to 0dB on new releases, using early compression units. The available 96dB dynamic range on CDs was squashed, particularly in heavy metal and hard rock releases, to less than 14dB (often less than 7). Consequently hard rock CDs from this period are widely considered awful-sounding, when played back on a home stereo system instead of the radio. The same albums on LP don’t have that problem.
With new CDs sounding like crap, and old albums sounding no better than their source LPs, the backlash against digital formats was inevitable.
Of course the record industry was more-than-happy to feed the myth that the format itself was at fault. They’d rather sell you the high-profit, un-copyable analog format anyway.
And millions of consumers born after 1980, when all this went down, have drunk the Kool-Aid.
6. Conclusion
It only takes one experience, with an un-EQed un-squashed un-crosstalked CD on a well set up stereo system to reveal the truth. CDs are capable of fidelity LPs cannot touch.
That’s not to say a well-mastered LP on a high-end system can’t sound marvelous－they can and do. But there simply isn’t any comparison with a CD recorded and mixed for the digital medium… all B.S. aside.
The format fashions continue to rage. In the first half of 2026 sales of new Compact Discs surged 58.6% to 16.8 million units, still below vinyl’s 21.8 million but catching up rapidly. But here’s the thing: reportedly 49% of LP buyers don’t own a turntable, and 50% of CD buyers don’t own a CD player. So why are they buying physical media? It’s fashionable.
And the RIAA doesn’t track sales of used LPs or CDs, so these figures are essentially meaningless. I’m just happy youngsters are rediscovering physical media.