Let's Get Physical

The yearning for tangible items in a digital world

Earlier this year, Tim Bricheno and I released an album, the first we'd written and recorded together in around 34 years. Despite our audience hoping for CDs and vinyl, we've not yet delivered on that promise, but the album has been available as a high-quality digital on download on Bandcamp, since May 2024.

The response we've had has been distinctly positive. Comments from those who've bought it - including those from the faithful who were there back in the day - would warm the most frigid of heart-cockles. However, what many desire in addition to the musical patterns of binary digits, is something to hold in their hand.

Perhaps it's a little like perfume, with those digits acting as the carrier facilitating the diffusion of the fragrance, of the music. How much more precious that perfume seemed when you saw it on a grandmother's or great-aunt's dressing table, crystal-bottled, with an atomiser bulb attached, resembling an impossible, intergalactic flower.

Great-Aunt Eccentrica’s dressing table

For some, musical perfume needs to be bottled, and vinyl and CD are the vessels, yet there are some considerations. According to Music Ally, for the first six months of this year sales of vinyl increased by 13.5% year-on-year, to just over £86 million. Sales of CDs, seen in some quarters as vinyl’s poor relation, grew 3.2% to almost £58 million.

What of the most unlikely of comeback kids, the cassette? No longer are tapes just a whimsical extra lo-fi artists might offer, but the pop kids are having to get to grips with them also. Swifties who bought 'Fearless (Taylor's version)' in a clunky double cassette format, have taken to Amazon to complain about the fragility of cases. One lamented;

• 'I love Taylor Swift so of course I love having her cassette. Amazon just ruined it by sending me one that is cracked,'

Sweetly, another found a silver lining in their cassette cloud, thanks to Adele;

• 'After paying a whooping (sic) £27 the case came broken so badly... I ordered Adele's 30 from Adele's website and it came on the same day and Adele's cassette's plastic quality looks way better than Tay's.'

Of course, packaging should be more robust and couriers should be more careful, but we're talking about plastic here; shatterable, crackable, plastic. If the seller and their courier don't mess up, then you probably will. CD and cassette cases do have a tendency to end up the worse for wear, even if they are your favourites.

Cassettes from my personal collection . Used, abused but very well-loved.

In the 70s, 80s and 90s, when we were gaily collecting tonnes of the stuff, we were unaware of the extent of plastic’s nastiness. Now that we do know, some artists are trying to mitigate their carbon footprint. For her album of covers, 'Versions', The Anchoress offered vinyl pressed from 'leftover wax pellets', which seems considerably eco-friendlier than using standard vinyl.

Coldplay have offered eco-friendlier options in the past, but with their next release MOONMUSiC shipping in early October, they're certainly going the extra nautical mile. Their website claims a couple of world firsts. (I know, I know, the garbled battle between upper and lower case distracts me too).

• "First album released as a 140g ecorecord rpet lp, made from recycled pet by a global recycled standard (grs) certified company. Each lp is made entirely from, on average, nine recycled plastic bottles."

• "First album released on ecocd, created from 90% recycled polycarbonate, sourced from waste otherwise headed for landfill."

Releasing eco-friendlier physical content might be more manageable when you've got the Warner Music Group machine behind you, but for independent artists such as The Anchoress, I imagine things aren't as straightforward, even if she is quite the veteran of cottage industry Bandcamping compared to me and Tim.

I can't speak for Tim - that would be plain rude - so let me explain where I personally stand. I know that people want to buy a physical copy of our album, but I’m no businesswoman. The logistics of finding the right manufacturer, processing payments and getting the CDs and vinyl records posted out, well that confuses me.

Digital is easy. You don’t end up with boxes of unwanted ‘product’ in your garage. As for customer service, it has not been at all taxing to help the occasional buyer with the download of the accompanying lyric booklet, but that’s where customer service has ended. I’ve not had to deal with issues or complaints regarding lost or damaged items, nor have I had to deal with problems that Brexit has caused concerning borders and customs.

I’ve been rather burned by a handful of unscrupulous record companies - I’ll save the juice on that for another post - and so even when someone is genuine and trustworthy, I still have concerns. This album is so precious, that I don’t want it to be abused or neglected in anyway, and that can mean accidentally rather than knowingly. There’s also the reticence to share percentages of profit. Naturally, that has to occur, but are the percentages fair? I don’t know because I’m completely out of the business loop, and have been for decades.

In addition, there’s the guilt that would go with being responsible for a whole load of plastics being manufactured in my name, and the fact that most of that plastic will eventually go to landfill, even though that will be long after our generation has gone the way of all flesh. The time it takes for a CD to completely decompose in landfill, has been estimated at over one million years. For vinyl, it’s a thousand years.

I’ve got an old suitcase packed with CDs that I’ve never listened to, or that I will never listen to again. When you’re signed to a record label you get lots of freebies, and somehow, I’ve got a Boo Radleys CD. I’ve nothing at all against the band, but I’ve never played it and never will. That virgin Boo Radleys CD will exist one million years from now, but where will it be? According to Greenpeace, it may well be landfill in Turkey or Malaysia.

My local council does not recycle CDs or cassettes, nor their cases. Regrettably, I gave away most of my vinyl, but the upside to that is that those records are now someone else’s guilt trip. As for what I’ve kept, I’ve currently got nothing to play it on, so there’s even a corner of landfill in my living room.

Do I buy physical product? Yes, if it’s an artist I really love. Unfortunately for the planet, as well as buying their albums digitally, I’ve also bought their CDs. Do I play those CDs? No. Why did I buy them? For the artwork possibly, and certainly in the case of a band such as And Also The Trees.

I’m just a modern gal, and a lazy one at that, so I like to just click on an mp3 or a wav or an AIFF etc. etc. and enjoy the music. I don’t need to touch the music, but that’s just me. I understand why it’s different for others, how they ache for the weight of the 180gm vinyl, for the opening and reveal of the gatefold sleeve, and for the exquisite drop of a diamond stylus into a coal-black groove.

I wonder if the owning of something physical where music is concerned, might go the way of films. When was the last time you bought a DVD? If I want to watch a film or a series, I’ll stream it. Very rarely would I wish to watch a film more than once, but for the instances where I do, I own the DVD. I’ll never part with my Twilight Zone boxset, for example, and I so wish I’d never loaned out my DVD copy of Spirit of the Beehive for it never to be returned.

Ana e Isabel ¿dónde están?

So today is Bandcamp Friday, and once again - understandably - folk are wondering where the physical copies of the ‘Apparitions’ album are. At the moment they exist in the land of good intention, or just off the coast of maybe, or halfway up the mountain of perhaps. It’s not that I don’t care, it’s that I’ve been burnt and confused (for so long it's not true) - Patience is a virtue, but I’m aware it can run out…