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Vinyl shoppers are all shallow narcissists, says Neil Young. Sort of.

By | Published on Wednesday 4 February 2015

Neil Young

Neil Young has dismissed the negligible yet widely reported ‘vinyl revival’ as nothing more than a “fashion statement”, saying that many of the LPs people are buying these days aren’t even properly mastered for the format. Though it’s not clear where he’s getting that information.

Interviewed by US radio show ‘The Frame’, Young said: “A lot of people that buy vinyl today don’t realise that they’re listening to CD masters on vinyl and that’s because the record companies have figured out that people want vinyl. And they’re only making CD masters in digital, so all the new products that come out on vinyl are actually CDs on vinyl, which is really nothing but a fashion statement”.

I’m not sure listeners mind their vinyl records not being mastered correctly though, as there’s plenty of research to show they aren’t actually playing them anyway. Though I guess that proves his point further.

Young, of course, is currently on a mission to take us back to the time before people used their musical purchases as some kind of status symbol and only cared about the purity of the sound that came out of their speakers. I’m sure you all remember those imaginary days as fondly as he does.

He is doing this, of course, by trying to convince people to spend hundreds of dollars on his Pono Player, in order to listen to files for which they’ve paid three times as much as they would on iTunes, to enjoy a sound quality so high that almost all of it sits outside the realms of human hearing. Basically what I’m saying is that the Pono Player is also a fashion statement. For people who iron creases into their jeans.

Here’s Neil Young droning on about nothing for ten minutes, if you want to listen to the whole interview:



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