Brief news items and worthy reads from around the Web:
Digital vs vinyl music infographic: With all the turmoil about album sales, one retro music format has been seeing a surprising resurgence. Superfi compiled data about sales of vinyl records and compared those results with digital music’s performance. The resulting infographic is a cool look at the surprising balance between the high-tech and the old school.
Explaining the podcasting Renaissance: New York Magazine examined the recent surge of interest in podcasts. According to this article, the combination of low cost for high quality on the production side coupled with the increasing number of people listening to online services in their cars could explain the explosion in popularity.
Studying the evolution of pop music: Research published in Scientific Reports examined the trends of loudness, pitch, and timbre over more than five decades of popular music. “An old tune could perfectly sound novel and fashionable, provided that it consisted of common harmonic progressions, changed the instrumentation, and increased the average loudness,” the team of Spanish researchers concluded.
Amazon Fire TV stick arrives: Launched last week as competition for Google’s Chromecast, Amazon is putting its new Fire TV stick into the market as a convenience to Amazon Prime subscribers, who get unlimited access to a movie. TV, and music catalog. On the music side, Prime Music sports a library of 1-2 million tracks. Other music service which have integrated with Chromecast might not jump onto the Fire TV stick (or be permitted to), in which case Prime Music will dominate the music-TV-streaming space of buyers.