One thing that is still very appealing with buying on physical media is that you really own the item. When you buy digital downloads they could become worthless if the seller for some reason go out of business, often its DRM protected so you cannot do what you want with your own media. License restrictions also restrict what you may do with your digital downloads.
Vinyl is a bit like Instagram purposeful alteration of the original for artful purposes.
In large part because consumer watchdogs complained about how DRM was effectively platform lock-ins. And the easiest choice was to dump DRM fully rather than come up with a cross platform system.
> That's only true if people keep making the playing devices.
I think that's also a lot of the charm of vinyl: the technology is transparent, direct and simple, and a child could literally build a functional player in two minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJa6Ik6xmiU
Erm. Not really. Not if you want to play anything other than 78s.
78s were mono, and the data was encoded via a vertical movement of the stylus. A needle-and-paper-cup player will work fine on one of these.
Modern records are stereo, and the data is encoded as two channels, so the needle moves in two directions; these directions are diagonal to the plane of the record. The only real way to build a needle that will play these is via a magnetic pickup on the other end of the needle. These are rather non-trivial to build.
Once you've done that, there's an additional complication, which is that the dynamic range of the vinyl isn't up to reproducing the audio signal; low notes at high volume require large displacements and the grooves are too close together to allow this (even if it can move fast enough, which I'm unsure about). So you encode the audio signal in a standard way before pressing it onto the vinyl, compressing the low frequencies and... expanding? the high ones. The record player then undoes this encoding after reading the signal off the disk. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization for the full details.
Of course, getting a decoder is as simple as ordering the standard part and wiring it in. But now you've got a full electronic system, and it's decidedly non-trivial to build.
Modern vinyl has a lot of subtlety and sophistication to it. If you use a needle-and-paper-cup player on a 33, it'll make noises that sound a bit like music, but actually playing it properly is highly non-trivial.
A stereo record should still work on a needle-and-cup player; the two channels will just get munged together. The point is not that you can make a good player in 2 minutes, but rather that you can make one at all.
Then again MDs were laden with some of the most insane DRM seen on consumer media.
If you used a consumer deck to record something onto a MD, it was flagged, and that meant that the only way to get it back out was via real time playback and the analog hole.
Never mind that if you could lands your hand on a professional deck, the flag would happily be ignored. And you could transfer anything at whatever speed topped out first, USB or the read rate of the deck.
If they had simply sold it as a improved floppy, i think the tech would still be with us. But at the time Sony was being wagged fiercly by their Sony Music tail...
Vinyl is a bit like Instagram purposeful alteration of the original for artful purposes.