The year 2023 marked a momentous occasion in the music business. For the first time since 1987, sales of vinyl records surpassed CDs—by about eight million units. Last year, vinyl sales continued to grow by roughly six percent. There are many reasons for this trend. During the pandemic, for example, demand for vinyl soared as consumers spent more on all kinds of entertainment they could enjoy at home. Industry journalists also point to cultural factors, such as the nostalgia-inducing appeal of records. The popularity of streaming services such as Spotify, of course, still dwarfs CDs and vinyl records. But this renaissance of vinyl as a medium ought to prompt some reconsideration of the personal and tangible dimensions of music that are missing in the age of streaming.
When the German philosopher Martin Heidegger discussed the spatial character of human experience in his 1927 book Being and Time, he used the example of radio to illustrate what he calls “de-severance.” To put it briefly, human experience is characterized by Dasein (a technical term for Heidegger that can be translated literally as “being-there” or “being-here”), which tends to overcome spatial distance through meaningful action or symbolic understanding, to bring even the world close to itself, a tendency that Heidegger calls de-severance. With various modern technologies, however, this tendency of Dasein is made more complicated. He writes:
All the ways in which we speed things up, as we are more or less compelled to do today, push us on toward the conquest of remoteness. With the “radio,”…Dasein has so expanded its everyday environment that it has accomplished a de-severance of the “world.”
There are a few pertinent points to keep in mind here. For one, the radio itself is the sort of thing that Heidegger calls a ready-to-hand tool, that is, something that seems to become invisible to us as we use it. It is precisely not an intentional object of contemplation. In this sense, the radio is a technology that expands Dasein’s everyday environment. It allows us to communicate with people far beyond our immediate location and scope. The radio both expands and reduces the world. It connects us with people and sounds so distant that experiences become remote—in the sense that the experience is inaccessible in an ordinary or everyday manner.
Considered in these terms, Spotify is not unlike Heidegger’s radio. As a form of communication, streaming is also primarily present to the ear. It gives the listener access to, among other things, an expansive world of music in digital form. The music plays over, so to speak, platforms and services—usually in earbuds and through Bluetooth speakers—and is absent to touch, smell, and sight. Though we are presented with textual information about a song, for example, or visual advertisements that accompany the music, we experience such music strictly through sound. Such is the nature of the Internet cloud: The songs and performances are not present to us in any traditional sense of the term.
When we experience a record, by contrast, we feel the record in our hands, see the imprint of the music on the vinyl as well as the “blank” space between the tracks or the runoff near the center of the album’s side. Album artwork is powerfully expressive; it conveys far more than a small picture on a screen not only because it is larger but also because, in the days when vinyl was king, the artist and studio usually invested more in creating distinctive covers to attract the attention of shoppers.
As with any other object, the reality of a vinyl record corresponds with one’s intentional experience of it. By intention, I mean the term as phenomenologists use it: the mental effort to hold something presently in one’s mind; to focus on that thing, both in itself and in its relationships with the rest of the world that it occupies. To use a different example, I may intend a baseball. I picture the rubber material, the seams and stitches which hold it together, the colors of red and white, and so on. I also intend the thing as it relates to the rest of the game, e.g., in the hands of a pitcher, or in contact with a bat, and in the air above the diamond after a hit. Likewise I can intend a vinyl record in more ways than I can with a digital service both because the record is more in tune with various physical phenomena and because there are more perceptible physical qualities at play.
The vinyl record requires a sound system (and a high quality one at that, if one wants to hear the subtleties and intricate moments in the music). This encourages a sharing community—that is, a group audience—because the record player, the music, the receiver, and the speakers are a set built to project music into a room. With Spotify, the stereo is not a necessary piece of equipment. Instead, all that I need to listen to music on Spotify is a smart device and a pair of earbuds. This relation promotes a more personal and private experience.
While radio and streaming services share some characteristics, it is crucial that we not conflate the two. Radio does indeed take what is remote and bring it closer, but the experience of listening to the radio is remarkably different. Typically, a DJ curates the music that plays over the airwaves. In decades past, the music was spun on turntables or played through a tape deck or with a CD. We could say something similar about news and sports broadcasting. Furthermore, all those who tune in to a radio station in a given area, even if they are not physically next to one another, listen together to the same broadcast at the same time.
Spotify brings the world of music closer, even closer than the radio did in Heidegger’s time: the seemingly limitless library of songs, the algorithms that tailor music to one’s individual tastes, the recommendations of playlists and “radio stations” updated constantly based on what one has listened to. Spotify is convenient and enjoyable in its own ways, but there are consequences of this hyper-consumeristic and individualistic mode of experiencing music. It strips popular music of its popular element, its people element. Discovering new music once required at least one of two things: to listen to the radio and hear whatever songs that the DJ chose that day, or to receive recommendations from friends, family, and peers—or from popular magazines or record store employees. It entailed engagement with others. Far less so, if at all, with Spotify.
Although the renewed popularity of vinyl records may be the result of any number of factors, it points to something that has been radically diminshed in the age of Spotify, namely an experience of listening to music that is more broadly experiential and more richly social. The vinyl record participates in a fuller sensible world of which the audible dimension of music is only one part: We come together, sometimes even as strangers, to listen to, to touch, to see, and to hear a world brought together by music.