The author, John Marek, is a writer and executive director of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.

Last year, for the first time since the mid-1980s, vinyl record sales surpassed that of CDs. While that’s an interesting factoid, it doesn’t reflect a resurgence of vinyl so much as a change in the way music is consumed in general. The niche market of vinyl aficionados is going to continue to purchase those records whatever other technology comes along, while the vast majority of former CD purchasers have switched over to digital downloads or streaming. The last music I purchased in “physical” form was nearly a decade ago, a rather forgettable Springsteen CD called “Wrecking Ball.” Everything since has been downloaded and stored on my iPhone, or streamed from the “cloud.”

My first home stereo was an 8-track tape player I received as a Christmas gift in 1976. It was the size of a shoebox with two similarly-sized “bookshelf” speakers. Along with it, I received one of those K-Tel compilation tapes that featured a dozen popular songs from that year: “Star Wars Theme,” “Afternoon Delight,” “If You Leave Me Now.”

Eight-track was a strange and doomed technology. Honestly, if you tried to engineer a music delivery system to fail, I’m not sure you could come up with anything better … or worse, as the case may be. The mechanism consisted of a single spool of magnetic tape pulled from the center and wound back around the outside as it played. Under the best conditions, this was an arrangement that was bound to fail sooner rather than later, but when heat, humidity and dust were factored in, the average lifespan of an 8-track tape was likely in the single-digit hours. The  other obvious fault of 8-track tapes was that they were more-or-less sequential. You couldn’t skip a song or repeat a song, although the tape was divided into four “tracks,” and you could move from one track to another. I never owned more than a dozen of these tapes, and most of  those were received as gifts.

In the spring of 1979, I bought my first real stereo. A  turntable/cassette/AM-FM radio combo. This opened up the world of vinyl records and was timed nicely with the start of my first real job. With my first paycheck, I ran to the record store and bought Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumors” and The Eagles’ “Hotel California.” These albums had come out a couple of years earlier, but I had only ever heard the “hit” singles from them. Every song on those records is great – even “Pretty Maids All In a Row” grows on you with repeat listenings – but they are even greater in the context of the album as a whole. 

In the vinyl record era, new albums by popular artists were released with much fanfare and on a very specific schedule. An album had to be recorded, mastered, pressed, packaged and distributed to retail outlets. It was a laborious and lengthy process that required weeks. Consequently, the release date of an album was generally announced months in advance.  These days, artists often” drop” new songs or albums with little or no advance notice, and the digital download model offers little incentive for the casual listener to dive deeper than the popular hits.

If an album like “Hotel California” was released today, I fear most people would download the title track, “New Kid in Town,” “Life in the Fast Lane,” maybe “Victim of Love,” and probably stop there. And that would be a shame because “Wasted Time,” “Try and Love Again” and “The Last Resort” are great songs, just not pop-friendly ones.