A Christmas message from Queen - the limits to digital music?

Today was an interesting experience - the No. 1 son, a real* teenager, got a turntable (aka phonogram/record player) for Xmas and we duly cranked it up and listened to some vinyl records for the first time in about 20 years - among them Bo-Rhap (follow the link for music industry shortsightedness) from Queen's classic Night at the Opera album, shown above courtesy YouTube..

And the Christmas message from Queen and others is this - you can really hear the difference between digital and analog music, even on high sample rate digital tracks (and as for the low bit rate stuff that is streamed....). To be fair, Queen used higher production value than a lot of "pop" music does, but the difference in the same song between analog and digital is noticeable, the difference in effect between a finite and an infinite sampling rate.

So there it is - a fascinating counter-trend to the usual Teen Scene tales:

- The qualitative change from analog to digital has been a regressive step
- You can't reproduce analog music on digital online services (or you could, but the bandwidth required would be huge). It has to be bought as a physical good.
- Some New Teens are not just consuming more digital music, they are also driving a resurgence in anti-digital music - and the love of the physical media.

So here is a thought - there is a market emerging for quality analog music, driven by a youth market, and it cannot be disaggregated easily online (except for creating an efficient market in second hand records). A high- end in sight to digital disaggregation ?

(An afterthought - quite a few of those 70's albums have "home taping is killing music" printed on the dustcovers - some things never change... although, as one of the tracks on one of those old albums noted, they "aint seen nothing yet" )

* As opposed to "research" teens, the subject of multiple PhD's and papers, who often seem to bear little resemblance in many ways to the "real" teens I observe daily.