Free Republic

BENTON, Ark — How we do anything changes constantly— though it may sound vague, think about any electronic you use. You're upgrading every few months or years, using the latest and new greatest item. The same is true for how we listen to music. We now live in the age of streaming, but just a few decades ago, vinyl records dominated the charts. Since then, we've seen CDs, MP3 players, and streaming services take over, but there's always been a dedicated base of collectors, keeping vinyl records alive. Recently, that base has been growing by groups you may not expect....

Promotional nights have been a part of baseball games for years, but there will never be anything like what happened at Comiskey Park on July 12, 1979. On that night, a radio promotion led to an on-field storming, a forfeit for the White Sox and a longtime debate on what the night really represented. This is Disco Demolition Night: A promotion featuring popular WLUP disc jockey Steve Dahl and his quest to destroy records featuring disco music — a genre he despised and made fun of on the air during his shows. Josh Harrison stops by after the White Sox...

...Left for dead with the advent of CDs in the 1980s, vinyl records are now the music industry’s most popular and highest-grossing physical format, with fans choosing it for collectibility, sound quality or simply the tactile experience of music in an age of digital ephemerality. After growing steadily for more than a decade, LP sales exploded during the pandemic. In the first six months of this year, 17 million vinyl records were sold in the United States, generating $467 million in retail revenue, nearly double the amount from the same period in 2020, according to the Recording Industry Association of...

Pop history is littered with the albums that could’ve been, the albums we could’ve heard. Sometimes we call these “lost” albums, the works that never quite came into focus, that suggest some path not fully taken. Sometimes we simply call them “unreleased,” albums we know were supposed to exist and were supposed to materialize and yet were held back. A more aggressive term there could be “shelved,” albums seemingly complete and ready to be unveiled and subsequently met with a concrete decision that there was some reason they shouldn’t be. There are as many possibilities for what that “reason” might...

Rock bands tend to peak early in their life cycles, riding the wave of youthful inspiration. It's hard enough to keep a project going for years. It's almost impossible to make great albums up through the end. In other words, not all "final albums" are created equal. Some long-haul acts slowly fizzle, trickling out average material every few years — mostly as an excuse to rev up the touring engine and play the greatest hits. Others keep the machine running organically, hitting the brakes due to inevitable creative tension, oversized egos or commercial backslides. In cases like Nirvana, Jimi Hendrix,...

Albums are almost as old as recorded music. A hundred years ago when the most music a 78 RPM record could hold was four minutes, long pieces like operas or symphonies were broken up over multiple discs. Those discs were then sold in book-like packages that reminded many of photo albums. That’s how the record album got its name. The multiple disc problem was solved by Columbia in 1948 when in June of that year, they unveiled the 33 1/3 long-playing album. When RCA countered with the 7-inch 45 RPM single a year later, the LP became the domain of...

U.S. album sales hit 3.97-million last week, the smallest weekly total for album sales since Nielsen SoundScan first began tracking data in 1991, Billboard's Ed Christman and Glenn Peoples report. It's also the first time during that period that weekly sales have fallen below 4 million, they write.Sales for the week ending August 25 fell 18.6%. The best seller was rapper Whiz Khalifa's "Blacc Hollywood" which debuted with 90,000 units, Billboard says. For the first time in more than a year,  sales for the soundtrack to Disney's "Frozen" fell below 100,000 units.CD sales have practically vanished, down 19.2% year-over-year, with sales at...

Investing: old vinyl's top of the pops Last Updated: 2:52am GMT 09/02/2008 Vintage records are shooting up the investment charts – if you know which ones to buy. Toby Walne reports Vinyl can provide record returns for investors willing to take a musical spin with their money. The Holy Grail is That'll be the Day, a seven-inch single recorded exactly 50 years ago by the Quarrymen – the group that later became the Beatles. On paper it is worth £100,000, but experts believe it might fetch more than double this at auction, if the only known disc could be wrestled...

It was 40 years ago today. Ah, you knew the story would start like that. What other way to begin? June 1, 1967. That's when "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" hit the streets in the United Kingdom, a day later in the United States, and hit the consciousness of the pop world like a dose of something strange in the Kool-Aid. It was the eighth (British) Beatles album but also the beginning of a new chapter for the band and for a popular culture entering into the Summer of Love and a period of heightened experimentation with music, fashion,...

The following list - the Definitive 200 - was developed by NARM, the National Association of Recording Merchandisers in celebration of the art form of the record album. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is pleased to recognize this varied collection of some of history’s most influencial and popular albums, many of which are Hall of Fame Inductees.

Perhaps the first thing that leaps out is that it's a very Beatle-centric list. "Sgt. Pepper" is No. 1 as it often is in such lists, but two of the top three albums are by the Beatles, three of the first five and four of the first 10. The first 10 are: 1) "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" by the Beatles 2) "Pet Sounds" by the Beach Boys 3) "Revolver" by the Beatles 4) "Highway 61 Revisited" by Bob Dylan 5) "Rubber Soul" by the Beatles 6) "What's Going On" by Marvin Gaye 7) "Exile on Main Street" by...

NEW YORK -- Spin magazine named Radiohead's "OK Computer" the top album of the past 20 years, praising a futuristic sound that manages to feel alive "even when its words are spoken by a robot." The British band's album edged out Public Enemy's "It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back" and Nirvana's "Nevermind" on a list in Spin's 20th anniversary issue, currently on newsstands.

>>> John Collomosse research pages >>> Video demo of the technology [may be slow for dial-up users] The family portrait is set to become a great work of art thanks to new computer software that can turn photographs into cubist artworks in the style of Picasso.The Picasso-effect software is part of a unique suite of imaging technologies developed by computer scientists at the University of Bath that turns photo albums, videos and movies into drawings, paintings, and cartoons. The software could also revolutionise the way that animations are made.In order to create the software, the researchers had to teach...

kattracks posted an article about the gag order for celebs. I say we take the month of April and refuse to: attend movies, buy CDs, buy or rent DVDs, watch network television (or CNN or MSNBC) and send these celebrities a message.I know Freepers across the country could get "Entertainment is History Month" going across the country.