A New Hybrid Music Medium

A German company has come up with a format that’s CD on one side, vinyl on the other, to be imaginatively known as the VinylDisc.

It sounds like a bizarre Frankenstein marriage of formats, the Guardian reports that a British group is preparing to release the first record that’shalf CD, half vinyl.   The mongrel medium has been developed by Optimal Media Production, and features a CD track on one side and vinyl on the other.  Rock group Fightstar will be the first to take advantage of this, a tactic their label admits is a gimmick, but one that will certainly garnerattention and find favor with collectors. There will be one track on each side, and the limited edition single – evidently set at just 3,000 copies – will retail for around $6.   Thequestion, of course, is whether this new medium will catch on. Known as the VinylDisc, it can hold a three-minute cut on the vinyl side and 70 minutes of music on the CD.   Grit Schreiber, headof marketing for Optimal Media Production, told the newspaper that “we have seen enormous growth in the area of vinyl production. Nothing seemed more natural than the idea of combining theworlds of digital and analogue sound."