Having teenage children is a great way to stay in touch with the next generation. Whether you like it or not, you’re going to be exposed to current tastes in music, TV, clothes, reading material, social media, food, comedy, you name it. And Christmas and birthday lists will make it pretty clear what cutting‑edge technology is currently desirable. So imagine my surprise when my eldest’s number one request for Christmas 2023 was... a CD player!
This isn’t some sort of kitsch ’80s retro fetish. Like most people his age, he’s perfectly comfortable with modern technology, and mostly plays music from his phone over Bluetooth. But he really wanted a CD player — not to mention a selection of discs spanning about six decades of recorded music. (I wish I could claim credit for his eclectic tastes, but I’d never heard of most of them, either.)
With vinyl sales also at a 30‑year high, I wonder if this means that the streaming revolution has reached a natural limit. Perhaps the idea of listening to an entire album all the way through, with no adverts, isn’t just some dated boomer idyll, but an inherently satisfying way of appreciating music. Perhaps it’s human nature to want to have the art that means the most to us embodied in physical artifacts, not merely as digits in the cloud. And perhaps this is a trend that applies not only to music consumption, but also to its production.
Perhaps it’s human nature to want to have the art that means the most to us embodied in physical artifacts, not merely as digits in the cloud.
The fact that music can be made using software alone has led some people to predict that hardware will eventually wither away altogether. Older musicians, the argument runs, are attached to classic synths and studio gear because of its associations, not because of its intrinsic usefulness or creative potential. As the generations that grew up with the Beatles and Led Zeppelin die off, so too will the idea that you need expensive hardware to make music.
I’m not convinced. Artists from the ’60s and ’70s haven’t become irrelevant to younger audiences; in fact, streaming has proved to be a fantastic discovery medium for older music. The convenience of streaming hasn’t yet managed to kill off the physical album as an art form. And laptop production isn’t making traditional recording redundant, any more than sampling has wiped out instrumental skills, or video has replaced live performance.
No doubt some producers will be glad to ditch all of their hardware and do everything on a laptop. Others will stand out by doing everything the old‑school way. But the best producers will be those who recognise that different approaches have unique strengths, and who can integrate the best of all worlds.
Sam Inglis Editor-In-Chief