Interestingly Ryley Walker is always recommending on his twitter account that bands go down the CD route for new releases as it’s much easier and quicker to get a new album out and more profitable for them.
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I read somewhere that pressing plants are making far more money doing ‘Special Edition’ Bowie box sets and All Things Must Pass 50th anniversary issues than they are doing 1000 issue new band debut albums.
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Yes, CD’s are fast and cheap. I guess the artists I’ve known want vinyl as it is their ‘art’ cd’s seem less aesthetically appealing. Still they have to put bread on the table. The last few years have been brutal with Covid, Brexit has also slashed profitability for many so it’s understandable any artist will want to sell and get paid, even if it’s on Dictaphone tapes. They certainly aren’t going to earn much from streaming.
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Yes, they also come under pressure from the majors…‘Rush this through or we’ll pull our account etc etc’. This pushes the little guy backwards and often.
Thea Gilmore did a vinyl release of an album a few years ago and spent a lot of time on marketing, offering signed copies, deals with merch etc.
At a recent concert she said the next album would be on CD as after all the effort and work involved she didn’t make any money at all from the vinyl release.
He also recently made the exact same point that Kev has made about pressing availabiilty for small bands / artists being almost nil.
I don’t blame her - it must be a sickener after all that work and to come away with nothing. A lot of people out there tend to forget that these artists need to eat and pay bills like the rest of us.
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Get outa here ! Can’t they just take nourishment from applause ?
Fuckin’ needy fuckers 
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Likes is what they need, 4 likes = 1 Pizza I believe!
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This is exactly where I have arrived. So much of the music I listen to is from the early-mid CD era. Vinyl was in decline, so quality and availability was low. The streamed versions sound compressed and thin, hi-res and MQA are inferior to CD.
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I think the issues with some hi-res is down to low quality transfers: I’ve heard alleged hi-res that has quite clearly been ripped from a pisspoor bargain-basement ‘K-Tel’-tier CD issue of otherwise well-known music, and not remotely from anything approaching original masters.
Realistically, this has been a problem forever - I have CDs that were obviously taken from vinyl, and not even good, clean, minty vinyl played on a top quality deck, for example.
Moving forwards Classic LP analog re-releases also took a dump in 2008 with the fire at Universal
The place housed the master tapes of thousands of artists, many of them big names…There may be safety copies, but digital is in many cases the only way to re issue.
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I’m encouraged by this but needs moar of them
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Oh god…
Don’t go reading up on what went up, it really is heartbreaking
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It’s one of those things that the less I know about it, the happier I’ll be…
The sheer breathtaking incompetence that allowed it to ever happen…
I has a Big sad.
They are not recording mainstream performers either. You get unheard of groups playing unheard of tracks or covers of someone else, or you get a re-release from the aged master tape of something deemed great when originally released (at great expense). I believe I have already chipped in here (and other forums) that the days of mainstream artists being recorded correctly in analogue to vinyl have pretty much gone the way of the Dodo.
I remember in the 80’s when Japan (and others) were selling their stacked systems (Sony, Sansui, Kenwood) to us, advertising 300 Watts and 0.0001% THD as proof of quality, yet could be lifted in total with speakers with one hand. Those selling points were BS.
At the same time, Japanese audiophiles were searching out Garrard 301 turntables, old (heavy) 12” SME tonearms, Ortofon SPU’s, Altec VOT horns and various old technology valve amplifiers. From those Japanese audiophiles forays into old valve and vinyl systems comes makers like Shindo and Kondo, and most of the great MC cartridges available today.
Or were they recorded in those early days of Red Book standards when filters were just not fast enough and jitter effects unknown? CD’s made then will permanently suck. I believe higher bit bytes holding more measurement’s of the musical event, and vast improvements in clocks, filters and jitter reduction is what has improved the sound of digital of late (but can not improve what was recorded back then).
Since Sampling rate must be twice the highest audible frequency (20 kHz for those with perfect hearing) then filtered to prevent wrap-around distortion, and since humans can not hear frequencies higher than 20 kHz, there is no advantage what-so-ever to increasing Sampling rate.
Yep. No question, Sony 1-bit ADCs have a LOT to answer for.