Obviously outlandish, obviously super-dumb and clearly trolling posts are easy to ignore…you just…don’t engage them.
This type of media (whether so-called ‘news’ media, podcasts, social media posts, everything) is undertaken with a dirt-simple purpose: to get you riled up and get you to attend to it.
If this stuff is not attended to by would-be clickers and commenters, it starves and goes away.
Now, to the topic at hand:
My hope is people who just buy crap gear for vinyl playback and overpriced, terribly mastered vinyl (i.e. the majority of vinyl buyers these days) are starting to realize they’re wasting their money and filling their homes with cumbersome, burdensome dead weight, and will stop buying vinyl and go back to digital media for it’s many advantages.
This would drive the prices of vinyl down and allow people who know what the hell they’re doing when they buy/listen to vinyl to no longer pay silly prices for every slab-o’-wax they want.
As I say this, I wonder if this is selfish of me.
I don’t know, but I would guess the vinyl trend these days is what keeps brick-and-mortar stores open. I would guess the stores are kept open these days largely because people, in lieu of scouring the “used” racks, walk in and and say, “do you have the new (insert current top pop artist) album on vinyl?” They want the new (blank) LP on vinyl because they think it’s “better” than streaming it or buying a CD.
Sound-wise, these contemporary vinyl masterings and pressings typically are, at their very best, just as good as streaming only far more expensive. At worst, undeniably worse than their digital counterpart (this occurs frequently) on top of being way, way more expensive than streaming.
I would like to think that brick-and-mortar stores would still exist if this vinyl trend subsided, that they could still survive with well-curated “brand new” selections and well-curated “used” sections, but I don’t know.
I certainly don’t want brick-and-mortar stores to go away.
