Blue Lights on the Runway…

This week is the release of Bell X1’s new album “Blue Lights on the Runway”, and in a rare act of spending my personal money I purchased the deluxe preorder pack.  It arrived a few days ago, and came with a t-shirt, tote bag, poster, cd, and LP.  That’s right, a vinyl LP. The album is pretty freaking incredible, made all the better by the fact that I have it a week or so before its due out in North America.

I really like this band, but it has laid bare an interesting trend in music at the moment: releasing your music on LP.  It was pretty surprising to see the myriad of new release music on vinyl on the racks at Best Buy.  I get doing it for collectible reasons… they make a pretty interesting framed item.  I also get it if you’re a DJ, but is the population of DJ’s so great that this is a trend?  Before anyone points it out, I know there is a small pocket of curtain-smoking hippies that claim that vinyl actually sounds better than 256 kbps audio files but those people are morons.  I did actually see a turntable for sale at Circuit City’s closeout, but I didn’t think there were too many of those around these days.

If you want to take this pattern to different media, it would be like releasing a book on the Amazon Kindle, a dead-tree book, and handwritten parchment scrolls.  Does this make sense, or is there just something I don’t understand?

Either way, I’m still happy with my Bell X1 kit.  The music is still cool, even if it also comes in archaic format for nostalgic purposes.