Spotted in this month's AARP Magazine 😭

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PhiloLibrarian@reddit

In our house, we have LP’s, cassette tapes, CDs, and oodles of digital content/MP3s we’ve bought…. somewhere in the ether.

How do we listen to music? Of course we stream it on Spotify 🙄

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Secure_Sherbert_1202@reddit

I still have so much physical media that I won't throw away. Mp3 archives as well, because one day, there will be something that replaces Spotify.

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vantuckymyfoot@reddit

Same here. I've got about 200 pounds of vinyl records (my collection going back to middle school in the early eighties) along with around 500 CD's. Everything I listen to is on my phone. 🙄

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my23secrets@reddit

I've got about 200 pounds of vinyl records

Okay, but that’s only like a few dozen LPs

I keed, I keed

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vantuckymyfoot@reddit

Every time I moved apartments from the late eighties up until the time I got married and moved into my current house, my friends who helped me move invariably complained about the weight of my LPs. 😁

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PhiloLibrarian@reddit

I inherited all of my parents original LPs from the 60s and 70s… I have two Santana albums, original pressing that I don’t know what to do with

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There might be a collector online who'd like to buy them? Vintage vinyl is a hot commodity these days. I don't have much that's worth anything, unless someone's a collector of early eighties New Romantic music. 😁

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PhiloLibrarian@reddit

Oh, I can’t part with them… I just have to figure out what to do with two records from a bunch of bands.

What’s been interesting is to compare the condition of my mom‘s records versus my dad‘s records🤣

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JJQuantum@reddit

A long time ago I worked in high end residential audio/video. One of my regular customers was a guy in his 70’s or 80’s. I’m guessing he came by for the company but he did often spend money on some great gear. This was before installation was organized so he would just pay me whatever to come to his house and connect things up and make them work on his single remote. It got more and more complicated over time as he refused to get rid of old tech to make room for new tech. His reel to reel audio player that he used for his big band music was always there as well as 2 cassette decks, 3 VCR’s, turntable, cd player, sacd player, dvd player, etc. It was a thing.

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TheJokersChild@reddit

I'm confused. Is this article for people who don't remember some of these formats, or those who haven't yet heard of some of them? I'm insulted either way.

Extra hip points to your parents if that tape of The Planets was performed on synths by Tomita.

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Tejanisima@reddit

When I studied in Spain back in 1996, I mentioned 8-tracks and discovered they apparently didn't really make it over to Europe before they went away. I'm not saying they never existed there, but they apparently weren't widespread.

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Glad_Bunch_3473@reddit

This is insulting. We are the people who lived through it all, we don’t need a cool guide on music formats. Save this for Teen magazine, please.

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jasonstorm149@reddit

Not so much insulting as it is hilariously clueless. As you said, we lived through it...

We are the tech-savvy ones. We hooked up so many component stereo systems, and many of us even installed after-market car systems. We recorded from record to all sorted of tapes. We even recorded off the radio. We recorded from CD to tape, and later, ripped and burned CDs. We were there at the very beginning when Napster changed the world. We know what mp3 is, and if we got serious, we switched to flac. Was the article written by a gen Z?🙄

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wyohman@reddit

I believe CDs have surpassed vinyl as of 2025

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SigmaSeal66@reddit

Surpassed in what sense?

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wyohman@reddit

Sales. I just did a wick check and it looks like it didn't happen. Vinyl was 47M units with CDs being 29.5M units.

Now I'm not sure what I read.

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mearnest79@reddit

My parents had three 8-Track players when I was a kid and none of them worked.

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kayakyaketti@reddit

MP3 part made me chuckle. Im 57 and got my first MP3 player a couple years ago.I got it for work since I used phone for work. I of course started with records as a kid. One of my barely 20 coworkers walked by and asked "Is that an MP3 player?" Yes, I said. And he, "Ive heard of those." I felt old real quick lol.

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OldHead1776@reddit

Left out like 8 different proprietary formats Sony tried to get going.

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mootmutemoat@reddit

So more vinyl records are sold than cds now? 44m versus 33m?

Seems odd.

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