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Are we the last 'Hifi' generation?

I thought your point was that just because you own the kit to listen to music, it doesn't follow that you necessarily do?

Correct

So the technology moves on, the choice increases, and people can move from free services to paid ones if they have the interest. The proliferation of paid services (including high bitrate 'hifi' services or tiers) surely goes to show that the interest in music remains?

How do you figure that with no ratio known of one to the other? It could be 0.001% or anything else. Suitable kit has proliferated - probably similar to the ratio of guns to US population - quite a bit more than one item per person. What is the number of individual subscribers to all these services?
 
I agree that the market is different now but I think the revival of vinyl gives cause for hope

Different insofar as a large proportion of LPs sell to people who have nothing to play them on..................................
 
I’ll add that my kids are into music (and my hifi). They own about five records and no CDs between them.
 
I agree mine was a total over generalisation kernow. There was some old guy on YouTube, who owned one of those £5,000 DACs that Mike Hanson mentioned. He did a video of “music you must listen to” for its sound quality. It was compressed and it sounded atrocious, so I switched it off after a few seconds. I just don’t understand any of pointlessness.
 
I’ll add that my kids are into music (and my hifi). They own about five records and no CDs between them.

Actually I think that's a more interesting point than the observation that teenagers aren't lusting after Naim power supplies and level 12 Mana.

When I was a teenager it was often hard to find the music I liked (death metal and hardcore). Getting anything beyond the really well known stuff involved taking the train into Central London to visit Shades record shop in Soho or regularly checking the racks in second hand record shops for anything that might turn up. I traded tapes through the post collecting bootlegs and demo tapes and nth generation copies of rare records. By the time I left home for uni one entire wall of my bedroom was filled with the hundreds of C90s I'd accumulated.

I wonder how I would have engaged with music differently if it had all been available online. Would I have been quite so obsessive? Would I have been exposed to more music earlier on? Dunno.

P.S. kids today obviously don't know what they're missing...

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Correct

How do you figure that with no ratio known of one to the other? It could be 0.001% or anything else. Suitable kit has proliferated - probably similar to the ratio of guns to US population - quite a bit more than one item per person. What is the number of individual subscribers to all these services?

You can easily find numbers for people that have paid music streaming service membership: Music Streaming Statistics in 2023 (US & Global Data) - Musical Pursuits

Or you could just look up music industry earnings and see how that has changed over time: 30+ Harmonious Music Industry Statistics [2023]: Worth, Data, and Revenue - Zippia

People may have multiple subscriptions (although there are 180M Spotify subscribers alone), but then people have always bought multiple record/CD's so in the same way it is difficult to disentangle total individuals from total sales, but there are plenty of people still choosing to pay a seemingly growing amount for music.
 
I wonder how I would have engaged with music differently if it had all been available online. Would I have been quite so obsessive? Would I have been exposed to more music earlier on? Dunno
That's an interesting one for sure, Paul. My kids rely on Spotify to point them at different stuff, it is quite good for that. Also, they use friends, friends of friends and me. They have no interest in hard copy ownership for now.

As for my own musical education, whilst living with my evil stepmother and going to a shitty comprehensive (St Joseph's on Lee Terrace, you might know of it) it so happened that I became good friends with Jonathan Dove: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Dove He did his best to interest me in more challenging music whilst I tried to convince him Foxtrot was a compositional masterpiece.

Also, my stepmother was a huge Wagner fan so it took me at least 40 years before I even listened to him. She hated Mahler so I liked him from an early age.
 
My own kids (about thirty years old) enjoy good sound at home and gigs but hi-fi isn’t of special interest to them. They put the music first. MP3 and Spotify will do just fine.
Our generation made hi-fi a real necessity from our early teens. We worked summers and saved a lot to be able to buy stuff. I remember buying a cartridge with a whole month’s hard earned money back in 1982 :) We were (hi-fi) nuts.
 
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I think younger generations have more things to worry about spending their money on than fluff like hi-fi, especially when they already have a phone in their pocket, and a perfectly good pair of headphones is all they need to get really good music playback. Not to mention the fact they're living in ever smaller homes and have to prioritise the use of space.

IMO it will only get even more niche than it already is as fewer and fewer young people end up with the desire to own an actual hi-fi.
 
our city has loads of Hi Fi shops ... at least 7 !! solihull alone has at least 3

one road in the city centre has high end shop at one end and another at the other end of the street .
I wonder if there's a correlation between distance from nearest beach and number of hifi shops ;)
 
See links posted above - in the UK it is tiny.

I couldn't see anything about music subscription numbers in the first link (only that 42.9% of mobile phone owners listen to music on it), and the Statistica link is behind a paywall.

The number of paid for music service subscriptions in the UK seems to be pretty high at over 30M and growing (Music subscriptions ‘shrinking’ in the UK? That doesn’t smell right… (musicbusinessworldwide.com)) even if a good chunk of that is people with multiple accounts.
 
I remember buying a cartridge with a whole month’s hard earned money back in 1982 :) We were (hi-fi) nuts.
In 1984, I bought an AT95E cartridge for £25. It cost more than the total value of a housemate's system.
 
I think younger generations have more things to worry about spending their money on than fluff like hi-fi, especially when they already have a phone in their pocket, and a perfectly good pair of headphones is all they need to get really good music playback. Not to mention the fact they're living in ever smaller homes and have to prioritise the use of space.

IMO it will only get even more niche than it already is as fewer and fewer young people end up with the desire to own an actual hi-fi.

I think that you are right, I guess I would ask the question what is 'actual hi-fi' then? If the definition is the ability to have good music playback, then (in my own experience) more people seem to own that now with high quality headphones, smart speakers, and streamers, than ever did when I was younger.
 
Yes, when is the best time to tell the record collection, before prices head south?
I bought my records to listen to and never considered them to be some kind of investment. The idea of dealing with selling them has no appeal to me. I want to listen to them well into the future. By the time I’m no longer in the position to keep that going, they will have likely lost their value much in the way the VCR tapes have.

When to sell them to maximize profit, likely sooner than later.
 
I’ll add that my kids are into music (and my hifi). They own about five records and no CDs between them.

None of my kids have vinyl or CDs, they all stream. But my eldest son has 5K Fyne Audio speakers, my daughter has a Rega Brio and middle son an AV amp and Kef floorstanders so none of them are using crap little plastic efforts.

My own kids (about thirty) enjoy good sound at home and gigs..

Thirty kids!! :0. Good grief, give her a break.
 


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