Not these days, when only hipsters and you use the things anymore.
I certainly don’t … I barely even have any any more (only those rare 12"/maxi singles I could never replace) … and I am so glad that (with the CDJ3000) Pioneer have stopped supporting CDs at long last ¹ — it means I finally won’t need to carry any CDs around in future (because no-one will be able to replace their old decks with ones that do).
But you might be surprised how many people still play vinyl at home — there has been increasing demand for it over the last ten years.
Also, there’s still a surprising number of DJs who play vinyl out; it does tend to be those who’ve been doing it a long time … and, therefore, even have any … but they do exist.
And whilst scratch DJs have gone digital in a big way, they use Serato Scratch (or whatever the competitor is) and timecoded ‘vinyl’ plates — there aren’t many people scratch with CDJs; it can be done, but still not as well with ‘vinyl’ (not yet).
We have to keep in mind that a large portion of our audience hasn’t even seen a touch-tone phone. “Vinyl” is a thing you stick on your car and “record” can be basically anything.
Have you seen that video of Millennials given a Walkman? Man, it’s funny: they really are simpletons; you don’t need to know the old tech to be able to investigate it, but it has buttons that you have to press and then something opens and they can’t make the mental connection between inserting cable into their iPod to copy tracks to it and putting something in the compartment to make music happen (they don’t even know how to think about it)— it’s like the peanuts strip where Linus and Charley Brown look at a washboard and wonder where the power cord goes.
But a vinyl record is the thing you use to play music. I know it’s technically a phonograph record but that term is probably even more obscure.
Even I don’t say ‘phonograph record’ and I’m older than even you!
Christ … even my dad didn’t say ‘phonograph record’ and he was my dad — born in eighteen-hundred-and-something (or something).
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¹ The fact that they didn’t do away with CD support in the CDJ2000 era already not only perplexed me but pissed me off, never mind my being upset that it took until now.
