Venture Beat:
Reznor has contributed to Apple Music since its 2014 acquisition of Beats Music, and he is arguably one of the company’s most prominent assets in the music world. Yet Reznor didn’t give Apple an exclusive on the band’s new release. What Apple got instead is a big interview, which the company understandably hyped on social media.
Reznor, though, has never been one to fit in. In the interview, he talked about how he “resisted iPods” in their early days, even though he’s an Apple employee and was making an appearance on an Apple media platform. And even though Apple offers instant access to tens of millions of songs on Apple Music for a monthly fee, Reznor said he prefers to listen to vinyl records the whole way through.
Reznor fascinates me and I’ve always enjoyed his thoughts on just about any subject.
It would be nice to have time to listen to an album, the whole way through – vinyl or no. There are not that many albums, where this is compelling.
how does it he listen to his records in the car? in the gym? in multiple rooms? at a friend’s? etc.. vinyl just isn’t anything practical except to enthusiasts. its like collecting stamps and has as much appeal to normals.
I think people who grew up listening to vinyl records on better equipment never really got used to the digital sound, even if it is effectively more truthful than vinyl ever was. Certainly the excessive use of compression and lack of dynamics did not help the image of digital audio, but even records that do not suffer from it (engineering stupidity) simply sound more sterile.
I still buy lots of vinyl, and even if I can only listen to it at home, it is still worth it. The ambient noise surrounding me everywhere else does make the sound and, if talking about Apple’s castrated downloads, the quality less of an issue.
Early digital music, as released on the first CDs, wasn’t always very well produced for the medium. People who remember buying a fourth copy of their favorite album might not have been very happy with their first impression of the digital version.
You can self-impose a limitation on yourself where you buy and only take entire albums with you on the go, rather than constructing playlists like many people do. It’s been my go-to strategy for over a decade of digital music now (essentially since digital flash storage has permitted it to be possible, I pointedly avoided HDD-based players), and I’ve gotten really into certain albums in a way that wouldn’t be possible unless I forced certain tracks to grow on me over time.