Every spring since 2011, vinyl has been the star of the show at independent record stores for the traditional Record Store Day. On Saturday, April 18, enthusiasts will be able to rush for more than 330 collectible titles, alongside concerts and DJ sets organized throughout France.
Too much music kills music? by David Godevais, president of the Disquaire Day – Record Store Day association
Each day, nearly 60,000 new titles are added to streaming platforms. Thousands of hours of sounds, beats, voices, including an increasing portion generated by artificial intelligence. Music has never been more accessible. It may also have never been more invisible, and it is perhaps relevant to question the path we are taking. Platforms now host more than 100 million titles. At first glance, it seems like a golden age. In reality, it is a dilution. For the model is simple: subscription prices form a total mass, then disperse according to plays. The bigger the offer grows, the smaller the individual share becomes. The larger the catalog grows, the more artists split the crumbs.
100 000 streams ? That represents about 200 to 350 euros for an artist. The equivalent of 30 to 70 records sold… In other words: a figure that may seem massive, but economically remains paltry. Meanwhile, algorithms decide what deserves to be heard. Automated recommendations replace human prescription. The “stream farms” artificially inflate listens. Tracks designed to fill ambiance playlists take up space. Music becomes a flow. Background noise. A product optimized. And we call this progress. What this surplus economy destroys, it isn’t only the remuneration of artists. It is the very possibility of emerging. It is the listening time. It is rarity. It is desire.
Faced with this industrialization of the infinite, the record store appears almost subversive. A record store does not offer you what you already loved. It hands you a record, it tells you a story, it passes on a passion. It takes the risk of subjectivity. It belongs to a human chain, where everything becomes calculable.
Buying a record today is making an economic and cultural act. It is deciding that music deserves more than a compressed flow among millions of other files whose sound quality is degraded. So yes, on this Record Store Day, stepping through the door of an independent record store is a meaningful gesture. A gesture so that artists can still make a living. A gesture so that music remains an art and does not become merely data. By making music infinite, we have made it interchangeable. Perhaps it is time to make it precious again.
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