A Phenomenology of Spotify and Vinyl

The year 2023 marked a momentous occasion in the music business. For the first time since 1987, sales of vinyl records surpassed CDs —by about eight million units. Last year, vinyl sales continued to grow by roughly six percent. There are many reasons for this trend. During the pandemic, for example, demand for vinyl soared as consumers spent more on all kinds of entertainment they could enjoy at home. Industry journalists also point to cultural factors, such as the nostalgia-inducing appeal of records. The popularity of streaming services such as Spotify, of course, still dwarfs CDs and vinyl records. But this renaissance of vinyl as a medium ought to prompt some reconsideration of the personal and tangible dimensions of music that are missing in the age of streaming.

When the German philosopher Martin Heidegger discussed the spatial character of human experience in his 1927 book Being and Time, he used the example of radio to illustrate what he calls “de-severance.” To put it briefly, human experience is characterized by Dasein (a technical term for Heidegger that can be translated literally as “being-there” or “being-here”), which tends to overcome spatial distance through meaningful action or symbolic understanding, to bring even the world close to itself, a tendency that Heidegger calls de-severance. With various modern technologies, however, this tendency of Dasein is made more complicated. He writes:

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