Physical Obsession in a Virtual Plaza:

The Digital Community of Vaporwave

By Andrew Snaith

Vaporwave is a sample-based music genre and art movement that both critiques and embraces the idea of the free market. It is an entirely internet-based music genre and community that embodies a fascination with past time periods, achieved through its associated aesthetics and connection to nostalgia and idealized memory. Yet, even though it is a genre born in the digital era, countless members of its community display a constant obsession with obsolete physical media formats such as vinyl and cassette. In this paper, I attempt to explore this community’s fascination with old physical media and the connection that Vaporwave’s associated aesthetics and “plunderphonic” nature have on this phenomenon. I conclude that the obsession stems from the overtly vintage aesthetics of the genre by listening to Vaporwave on physical formats. Fans are blinded by nostalgia and inconvenience themselves in their listening habits, a practice that has opened opportunities for artists to release their sampled music in a preserved format while creating additional profits for them.

Introduction

Vaporwave exists as the world’s first completely digital and online-created music genre. What stemmed from a small sampled-based side project of electronic musician Daniel Lopatin in the year 2010 has evolved into one of the most interesting and perplexing media phenomena of the twenty-first century. The community of vaporwave artists and fans alike began interacting on digital communities such as Reddit, Facebook, and Bandcamp. Yet, despite the genre’s online origins and aesthetic centered on the early internet era, a significant group of community members devotedly listen to their favorite genre on physical audio formats. Artists constantly use outdated formats such as vinyl, cassette, and VHS to release their music, and these releases quickly sell out on almost every occasion. This raises a curious question: why would a genre that originated from—and exists solely because of—the internet have so many community members obsessed with owning physical media of the music? This paper will attempt to answer this question using various case studies and research examples, with the conclusion that this devotion stems from Vaporwave’s rose-colored vision of past eras. More specifically, this paper will examine the genre’s associated aesthetics and analyze their role in how people consume the music. It will also look extensively at Vaporwave’s “plunderphonic” and anti-copyright roots, along with their impact on the frequent releases of physical media in the genre. I will use my own immersion in these communities from the past five years to offer first-hand insight into practices and habits of community members as well.

Before understanding why this obsession with physical media occurs in this digital community, one must understand what Vaporwave is, how it came to be, its styles, and its associated aesthetics. Vaporwave is a sample-based music genre heavily influenced by the musical theory of “Plunderphonics,” developed by composer John Oswald in 1985. The term describes any music made by taking one or more existing audio recordings and altering them in some way to make a completely new composition. The genre finds its roots in an album known as Chuck Person’s Eccojams Vol. 1, released by musician Daniel Lopatin under the “Chuck Person” pseudonym in 2010. Strikingly, for an album released in 2010, it debuted exclusively on cassette tape via “The Curatorial Club.” The album featured sampled edits of various eighties and nineties pop songs rearranged, chopped, screwed, pitched up and down, and echoed to create a listening experience akin to having that one part of a hit song stuck in one’s head. The unusual cassette release eventually found its way to the internet. It struck a chord with people who appreciated the nostalgic feelings it created rather than criticizing it for its simplistic nature and production. This current of nostalgia, longing for a time now past, within Vaporwave would remain consistent as the genre evolved.

A year later, in 2010, a musician named Vektroid would release a sample-based project loosely inspired by Lopatin’s Eccojams titled Floral Shoppe under the alias “Macintosh Plus.” This project would skyrocket in popularity amongst the same people who enjoyed Eccojams and other internet users alike. It created “nostalgia for a time period I never grew up in,” as one supporter on Bandcamp described.4 Ultimately, the album would become the defining example for the emerging genre and bring Vaporwave to the mainstream, as videos and photoshopped pictures from the album would spread in ways Vektroid could not control. In particular, the practices, imitations, and viral spread fit Jean Burgess’s qualifications for an internet meme. Ross Cole would even describe Vaporwave as “free-for-all meme culture.”6 This newly gained meme status would eventually help solidify the genre’s visual tropes of Japanese text and ancient Greco-Roman busts.

Vaporwave’s simple and easy-to-learn style of sampling old music, adding reverb, and slowing it down would inspire countless people to create Vaporwave music as the 2010s progressed. It should be noted that this straightforward process allowed Vaporwave to become part of what one could consider “participatory media,” defined by Michael Mandiberg as media that “destabilizes the one-directional broadcast from a reporter to an audience into a multivoiced conversation among participants.” While used journalistically, the term refers here to Vaporwave’s case due to its low entry barrier. Fans of the genre were making the same kind of music that artists were and participating in furthering the movement. This served to destabilize the idea that only the artists had the power to create works that inspired conversations amongst communities dedicated to the genre.

Vaporwave’s foundation in Plunderphonics and inspiration from these first two iconic albums meant that it would remain a heavily sample-based genre throughout its next eleven years of existence, with few exceptions. Under anonymous aliases, artists would sample copyrighted material, including everything from eighties pop music to Japanese radio transmissions to even supermarket Muzak (which is background shopping music) in an attempt to create unique sounds for Vaporwave. Eventually, the blatant disregard for copyright in sample techniques—the emergence of lounge, elevator, smooth jazz, and Muzak sampling—and the associated aesthetics would lead Vaporwave to be viewed as a simultaneous critique and embrace of the free-market society in which it was created.

As mentioned, associated aesthetics play a huge role in how one experiences Vaporwave. Drawing upon its eighties and nineties musical samples, themes of consumerism, and thematic details from the early computer era would lead specific visual aesthetics to be associated with the genre. These include various elements that cannot be defined in one set way. Moreover, Laura Glitsos describes the Vaporwave aesthetic as “repetitive appropriation of phonic and visual aesthetics of 1980s American ‘mall’ culture.”10 Ross Cole, on the other hand, describes it as “an obsession with the period from roughly 1980 to the mid-1990s, encompassing the childhoods of Generation X and early Millennials,” along with “the combination of analog media such as cassette tapes with outmoded high-end consumer technology and home computing software.” Observations of album covers and Vaporwave art prominently display this fascination with the eighties and nineties. For example, 猫シ Corp’s [sic] Hiraeth embodies a fascination with crude, early nineties computer graphics and operating system visuals. 식료품 groceries’ album “슈퍼마켓Yes! We’re Open” embodies through both its sound and album cover a fascination with eighties Muzak and consumer culture.13 The fascination and attachment to the “technology of a bygone era,” as described by Schembri and Tichbon, play into this aesthetic as well. The popular physical music formats of the 1980s and 1990s, cassettes and vinyl records, find themselves deeply intertwined in Vaporwave’s history.14

It should also be noted that many classic Vaporwave artists chose to produce their music in a distinct style. Indeed, Glitsos notes that Vaporwave songs are “usually short and repetitive, often slow (sitting around 60–90 bpm) with vocal samples positioned low in the mix, saturated with heavy reverb, and often slowed down to produce a ‘stretched out’ effect or a ‘melting’ quality.”15 Artists accompany this style with the deliberate choice to utilize poor sound quality for stylistic effect. Loignon and Messier note the common Vaporwave practice of purposely degrading audio quality during production and choosing “audio textures that are artificial and surreal.”16

As an online music genre focused on repurposing copyrighted music, the obsession of both artists and fans with owning physical recordings of media is puzzling. This paper offers three explanations each for both the infatuation of fans and artists. Fans’ obsession with old physical media is a result of the continuation of pre-established aesthetics, the thrill of owning items of value, and nostalgia. Artists’ obsession stems from the pursuit of degraded sound quality tropes, a desire to express ownership amongst the genre’s anti-copyright roots, and cashing in on fan nostalgia for profit. This paper will proceed to explore each of these potential explanations in turn. Each explanation serves to reveal how Vaporwave’s overall themes and aesthetics led it to the obsession its community has with physical media today.

Fans and Physical Media

First, an examination of the role of pre-established aesthetics which influenced a desire to experience Vaporwave via physical formats. As seen in the above historical overview on the genre, physical recorded media and Vaporwave have been connected since “Eccojams Vol. 1” was released originally as a limited-edition cassette before ever finding its way to the internet. Georgina Born and Christopher Haworth talk about how the aesthetics of Vaporwave and related genres work to “reframe aspects of twentieth- and twenty-first-century music.”17 They suggest that this reframing is accomplished “through the subtle redeployment of earlier and outdated musical, sonic, and cultural signifiers, as well as the use of obsolete audio media such as cassette tapes, analogue synthesizers, and boom box aesthetic gestures aimed at reanimating cultural memory.”18 Vaporwave clearly turns away from the internet and digital formats as the dominant music media of the twenty-first century and attempts to “reanimate” the time period (the 1980s-90s) from which the themes and symbols of the genre originated. It uses the recording methods of that period, cassettesand vinyl, to achieve this.

Vaporwave has been established as much as an art style as a musical genre, in which the associated visual aesthetics find equal appreciation. This fact leads to a second connection between the genre and physical media, namely, what Bartmanski and Woodward describe as an appreciation of vinyl as an artistic object.19 They argue that vinyl records are “artistic objects in their own right,” resembling pictures and sculptures.20 The “analog music experience” they detail involves not only listening to the music on the record but appreciating the beauty of being in direct visual contact with the music. I would argue that this idea of having a visual connection to the music while listening is reflective of the thematic intentions of “Vaporwave” itself. Visually, the style thrives on symbols and stylistic tropes, such as palm trees and marble mall staircases while listening to sampled mall Muzak. These trends feature prominently in examples such as “Palm Mall.”21 It makes sense that the participants of a genre heavily reliant on a visual connection to its music would crave something more than just simply streaming their favorite music on Spotify. To possess a vinyl record not only satisfies this craving for a visual aesthetic, but it also physically revives the object-reliant method of listening emblematic of the eighties and nineties.

Vaporwave’s connection to nostalgia can be traced back to early reviews of the aforementioned Floral Shoppe, and this sentiment has consistently continued ever since.22 Almost all aspects of Vaporwave seem to be rooted in some form of nostalgia, both audibly and visually. Glitsos presents a specific kind of nostalgia in her studies on Vaporwave, “compensatory nostalgia,” a word coined by Chris Healy.23 Healy states that this particular nostalgia “stems from the paradox between remembering and forgetting that is ubiquitous in contemporary Western culture,” and occurs mainly as a result of media saturation.24 It can be surmised that the media saturation that has occurred digitally with music over the digital age has led to a renewed nostalgia for the previous ways people experienced music. This provides a key explanation for why online community members flock to the obsolete technology of the past era. “Compensatory nostalgia” allows Vaporwave fans to idealistically remember the physical formats of cassette, VHS, and vinyl, creating a desire to listen to music on these formats again.

The practice of collecting and owning physical Vaporwave items of high value is a third possible explanation for the phenomenon, and it is one that comes with great irony. First, these practices must be officially defined. Observations of the Reddit Community r/VaporVinyl show that most Vaporwave vinyl released by artists and labels are “limited edition,” in low quantity, and in high demand. Products sell out in anywhere from an hour to a few minutes and even, at times, in seconds. One such occasion of this phenomenon occurred with the vinyl repressing of the popular album Hit Vibes by artist Saint Pepsi. The label Carpark Records released only 300 copies of the record at noon on August 26, 2020. The copies sold out before the clock even hit 12:01, with some Vaporwave community members on Reddit claiming all copies were gone in a matter of seconds.25 Observations of the secondhand market for Vaporwave vinyl show that many items retain great value after limited editions are sold out. Looking at Discogs, on one of the main websites used to buy and sell vinyl records and cassettes, the aforementioned record “Hit Vibes” sells for an average price of around seventy dollars.26 Given that the original price was only twenty dollars when put up for sale originally, this almost 250 percent price increase shows just one of the many examples of Vaporwave vinyl being worth large amounts of money once all their limited editions are originally sold. Moreover, this is just a small example; if someone wanted to attempt to own one of the original cassette copies of Floral Shoppe, they would have to pay an average of 400 to 800 dollars per copy on the resale market.27

A 2019 study conducted by Amanda Krause and Steven Brown examined people’s use of six specific music formats to determine trends in use and gratification associated with one of those six formats. The study found that one of the main factors influencing preferred listening format was value for money and that participants were anything but “passive consumers” when it came to choosing a format.28 Krause and Brown say that this desire for people to receive the best value for their money when choosing a format “highlights that participants choose not only which formats to use for music listening but also which music formats not to use.”29 In relation to Vaporwave, this “value for money” factor when choosing music formats is exemplified in the exact opposite way. Community behaviors of physical media obsession directly oppose these ideas of buying music in the most cost-efficient manner. What causes this absurd departure from their study?

Paying for a one-dollar Vaporwave album on a site like Bandcamp may be the cheapest option, but the value (in this sense, appreciated value) it retains is virtually nothing. A physical copy of a Vaporwave album like the aforementioned “Hit Vibes” tends to retain and increase in value in contrast. This tendency challenges Krause and Brown’s findings that value for money drives choice of music format. The retained and potentially absurd increase in value for most Vaporwave physical items acts as a driving factor for community members to purchase them. There appears to be a certain thrill of owning an item now worth hundreds of dollars that one bought directly from a small artist or label at retail price.

As mentioned, there exists great irony in this obsession over physical Vaporwave objects. The community appears to be indulging in the same practices that the music inherently satirizes. Bandcamp author Simon Chandler described the use of mall iconography and its relation to the themes of Vaporwave as evoking “the sense that consumer society can give the individual everything they want or need, without setting any limits on their desires.”30 Vaporwave mocks this very idea of hyper-consumption through its sample practices and satirical iconography glorifying the mindless consumption of products at a theoretical shopping mall. The irony, of course, is that these same people engage in mindless consumption themselves of Vaporwave memorabilia. Observed behaviors on community spaces such as r/VaporVinyl on Reddit and the Vaporwave Cassette Club on Facebook have shown an almost instinctive nature for some fans to purchase blindly any and every cassette, record, or VHS released by an artist or label. The embrace of needless consumption in a free-market economy so heavily mocked by the community has now been embraced by the community, as if to prove Vaporwave and its themes were correct all along. The idea that many are bound to limitless consumption of products for our fulfillment in a consumerist society is alive through this example.

Artists and Physical Media

As big as is the role that fans play in continuous support of physical Vaporwave releases, it is the artists who continue to release such items in the first place. Although previously high demand explained the main reason for continued physical releases,the decision to release one’s music physically in 2021 extends beyond this reason. Rather, this decision is rooted in a continuation of stylistic trends in the genre, a desire to express true ownership, and even potential business strategies to generate revenue based on Vaporwave’s nostalgic roots.

As mentioned previously, Loignon and Messier noted Vaporwave’s trend of purposeful degradation of sound quality when producing music as a stylistic choice. The choice by artists to release their music physically on outdated formats, such as cassette and VHS tapes, is a direct embodiment of this stylistic choice.31 Many Vaporwave artists purposefully produce their music to sound worse (quality wise) and edit any related visuals to appear outdated, as if from a different decade. Releasing music on cassettes with background tape hiss and VHS with fuzzy visuals achieves this aesthetic. Take, for example, the case of the album Good Morning America by prominent artist 猫シ Corp. This album is the perfect example of outdated physical media providing the desired sound degradation that the artist was searching for, as it contains two separate levels of the phenomenon. When the album was released digitally in 2017, it coincided with a music video uploaded by the artist. The upload noted in the description that the audio and video from the digital album and accompanying visual feature was produced on a computer, then recorded to a VHS tape, and finally recorded back to a computer.32 猫シ Corp specifically used outdated physical media, in this case, a VHS tape, to achieve the degraded sound quality from the 1980s weather channel that the album tries to recreate. Taking this a step further, the same artist then released the album on a limited-edition cassette tape in 2018, pursuing the trend of lowering sound quality to match the tropes of the genre trying to recreate a lost era. Good Morning America is a prime example of an artist using outdated physical formats to continue audio quality trends that the genre has exhibited since its inception. This offers one explanation for artists’ continued obsession with these formats.

Ownership is an interesting issue in its relation to a sample- based genre like Vaporwave. Virtually none of the Vaporwave artists who sample music in their songs pay for the rights to do so, which embodies Vaporwave’s critique of consumerism and blatant disregard for copyright. This idea also relates to Vaporwave artists’ tendency to remain anonymous, as Sharon Schembri notes that “the Vaporwave community prides itself on a foundation of anonymity, which facilitates an avenue to avoid copyright liability.”33 This disregard for copyright, as well as a desire to have music preserved in some way that is unable to be rescinded from fans, offers another explanation for artists’ obsession with physical formats. As Owen Chapman explains in the Canadian Journal of Communications, for many electronic musicians, sampling is at its core “about understanding how this passage can be recontextualized in an act of new authorship.”34 Although artists attempt to take sound clips and turn them into new works of art, this artistic justification is a tricky argument to make in the modern world where copyright is so strictly enforced. Chapman notes that many artists are faced with the question of how much they should maintain the “recognizable identity” of the samples when they recontextualize them, and that this issue is complicated by copyright laws.35 Copyright strikes on popular music sharing sites like Bandcamp and YouTube are not new to sample-based Vaporwave producers. In May 2021 alone, the community has seen two prominent artists become the victims of these strikes. Moreover, one such recent case reveals how the choice to preserve music physically has allowed ownership of the music to exist beyond copyright strikes.

In 2020 and 2021 respectively, artist Tupperwave released two of his albums, Marina and Marina II, both digitally and physically on cassette, via the Bandcamp label First Class Collective. In February of 2021, the label announced on Twitter that certain tracks from the two albums had been hit with a DMCA copyright strike and were immediately taken down from the digital version of the albums on their Bandcamp page.36 At this point, however, all copies of the albums on cassette had already sold out and been shipped around the world to the fans who bought them. This would mean that while one could no longer stream the songs online via Bandcamp, the songs would live on via the physical tapes that had been produced. The songs are still uploaded from time to time to sites like YouTube, but each song is still subject to the same fate as the Bandcamp album. This case shows that physical releases of sample-based Vaporwave albums act to preserve potentially sampled copyrighted material, as the fans who own the tapes can listen to the songs no matter how the DMCA enforces copyright claims. Artists like Tupperwave recognize the risk involved in their work as they gain popularity and so release physical recordings of media to disregard copyright laws and give fans true, in-hand ownership of their music and art.

The final potential explanation for artists’ obsession with physical releases overlaps with the previous point of disregarding copyright laws and promoting ownership, along with profiting from nostalgia experienced by fans. In August 2019, prominent Vaporwave artist “haircuts for men” [sic] made the distinctive choice to release an album titled ランダムエントリー, which translates from Japanese Katakana to Random Entry. Unlike normal releases that include both a digital and a physical version of the album upon purchase on Bandcamp, however, Random Entry was released by the artist as part of what he called the “Analog Rarities Collection.” Thus, the album would be available exclusively on cassette and CD. Cassettes and CDs would be released in three different versions, each featuring a third of the complete album’s songs. Upon the album’s release on Bandcamp, haircuts for men stated that “none of these tracks will ever be released by me digitally. It is up to you to trade amongst yourselves to complete the collection.”37 The decision of an artist to release music solely on physical formats, and especially on one as outdated as the cassette, is perplexing. Considering that digital music, via both streaming and buying, made up 89% of music revenue in 2019 according to the RIAA, the thought of producing music in 2019 and not making it available digitally is absurd.38

This leads to the baffling question of why an online artist of a digital music genre would not release his music digitally. This is a case of Vaporwave artists—and the fans who buy these items—becoming so obsessed with nostalgia-seeking practices that they ignore traditional market logic in releasing and listening to their music. On this phenomenon, Schembri and Tichbon say that “releasing Vaporwave creations with retro technology such as cassettes, vinyl and VHS conveys a message of nostalgia and a sentimental attachment to the technology of a bygone era.”39 Vaporwave artists are aware of this message, and they have come to see it as a way to generate profit. Schembri and Tichbon talk of a “new breed of cultural intermediation” and how freelance music managers are emerging as key examples of this new breed, referring to the process of “distributing their cultural product in a way that skirts traditional market logics and relocates the intermediary activities from the professional domain to the consumer realm.”40 When it comes to releasing music, the artist haircuts for men embodies this “skirting” of traditional market logic with his physical-only release.

While to some it may appear that this phenomenon has no clear reason behind it, there exists two possibilities that provide an answer in regard to both Vaporwave fans and artists. First, fans and artists may have become so blinded by nostalgia that they listen to their music on inferior formats (sound quality-wise) and release and market their music in ways that are underproductive. Secondly, and more likely, artists recognize the manufactured nostalgia produced by the genre and how releasing their albums on retro technology can heighten this nostalgia, leading to greater profit. As previously established, high demand, low quantity releases preserve their value and make for easy, affordable ways for artists to make money off music outside of the revenue generated by streaming and digital purchase. It is also worth noting the simplicity of a cassette release, as well as the ease of making a profit that goes with it for freelance artists. Schembri and Tichbon note that “the value of lo-fi technology is synonymous with underground subcultural music productions because of the low cost and consequent accessibility.”41 Official cassettes released by artists can theoretically be made, needing only a few blank tapes, a printer, a computer to design and reproduce the artwork, and accessibility to a post office. It is both an affordable and accessible way for artists to make additional profit from their music, and considering the fact that retro technology is already embodied in Vaporwave’s aesthetic, it can be seen as a way to profit from the nostalgia for the formats of a past era.

Conclusion

An internet-based music genre that found its success due to the web’s ability to spread niche interests now globally finds itself consistently listened to and possessed as physically recorded media. Indeed, it is a fascinating phenomenon. Vaporwave has, and will continue to have, a digital community of fans and artists who long to experience music in the same ways as past generations. Fans of the genre are engrossed in the manufactured “compensatory nostalgia” it creates, and cherish formats that Vaporwave idealizes. Associated aesthetics have convinced fans that visual connection to their music is important, and watching a colorful vinyl record spin on a turntable seems to satisfy this desire for them. The genre’s history of high demand and low quantity releases seemingly attracts community members with the allure of owning a limited piece of the genre’s history. Artist-wise, producers take Vaporwave’s traditional practice of degrading sound quality to a new level by utilizing obsolete physical formats, such as the cassette. Pressing or recording albums onto vinyl or cassette and distributing them to fans around the world also appears to be a way to solidify ownership in a sample-based genre prone to copyright strikes. Physical formats also provide a cheap and accessible way for artists to make additional profits from their music while also allowing them to take advantage of the aforementioned “compensatory nostalgia” by which fans are blinded. The irony around the practice is palpable. A digital community obsessed with using music and art to satirize the supposed hollow and empty promises of a hyper-consumption-based lifestyle nevertheless finds itself amid a mindless consumption of its own; namely, buying album after album on physical formats. Further research on the expansive world of Vaporwave opens additional questions: does Vaporwave as sample-based music have a future outside of the internet? Do its plunderphonic roots and disregard for copyright doom it to fail outside of a small, niche community? Why is an obsession with eighties and nineties visual and auditory physical media manifesting in age groups that never lived through those time periods? One thing, however, appears to be certain. It seems artists and fans who participate in the physical obsession practices of Vaporwave cannot leave the nonexistent virtual retail plaza that their music plays in. Perhaps, this lifestyle of mindless consumption, no matter how aware of it they may be, is simply inevitable.

ENDNOTES

1. Kjell Hansen, “Eccojams Vol. 1 Was the Blueprint for Vaporwave,” Talkhouse, September 2, 2020, https://www.talkhouse.com/eccojams-vol-1-was-the-blue-print-for-vaporwave/.

2. John Oswald, “Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative,” Music Works 34, Spring 1986.

3. McG, “TCC011: CHUCK PERSON’S ECCOJAMS VOL.1,” The Curatorial Club (blog), Blogspot, August 8, 2010, http://thecuratorialclub.blogspot.com/2010/08/tcc011-chuck-persons-eccojams-volume1.html.

4. Macintosh Plus, Floral Shoppe, Bandcamp, 2011, https://vektroid.bandcamp. com/album/floral-shoppe.

5. Jean Burgess, “‘All Your Chocolate Rain Are Belong to Us?’ Viral Video, YouTube and the Dynamics of Participatory Culture,” Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2008), 101-9.

6. Ross Cole, “Vaporwave Aesthetics: Internet Nostalgia and the Utopian Impulse,” ASAP journal 5, no. 2 (2020): 297–326.

7. Precious Roy, “Floral Shoppe (フローラルの専門店),” Know Your Meme, August 8, 2015, https://tinyurl.com/32nvd2k9.

8. Michael Mandiberg, The Social Media Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 3.

9. Yung Bae, Bae, Bandcamp, 2014. https://yungbaebae.bandcamp.com/album/bae; 天気予報, 巡, Bandcamp, 2017, https://asutenki.bandcamp.com/album/--14; 식료품groceries, 슈퍼마켓Yes! We’re Open, Bandcamp, 2014, https://groceriesstore.bandcamp.com/album/yes-we-re-open.

10. Laura Glitsos, “Vaporwave, or Music Optimised for Abandoned Malls,” Popular Music 37, no. 1 (2018): 100–18.

11. Ross Cole, “Vaporwave Aesthetics,” 297–326.

12. 猫シ Corp, Hiraeth, Bandcamp, 2014, https://catsystemcorp.bandcamp.com/album/hiraeth.

13. 식료품groceries, 슈퍼마켓Yes! We’re Open.

14. Sharon Schembri and Jac Tichbon, “Digital Consumers as Cultural Curators: The Irony of Vaporwave,” Arts and the Market 7, no. 2 (2017): 191–212.

15. Glitsos, “Vaporwave, or Music,” 100.

16. Guillaume Loignon and Philippe Messier, “Vaporwave Pedagogy: Multimodal Learning with an Internet Music Microgenre,” Liminalities 16, no. 3 (2020): 6.

17. Georgina Born and Christopher Haworth, “From Microsound to Vaporwave: Internet-Mediated Musics, Online Methods, and Genre,” Music & Letters 98, no.

4 (2017): 605.

18. Ibid., 605.

19. Dominik Bartmanski and Ian Woodward, Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age (London: Taylor & Francis, 2014).

20. Ibid., 30.

21. 猫シ Corp, Palm Mall, Bandcamp, 2014, https://catsystemcorp.bandcamp.com/album/palm-mall.

22. Macintosh Plus, Floral Shoppe.

23. Chris Healy, “Dead Man: Film, Colonialism, and Memory,” in Memory, History, Nation: Contested Pasts, ed. K. Hodgkin and S. Radstone (New Brunswick: Transaction, 2006). Quoted in Laura Glitsos, “Vaporwave, or Music Optimised for Abandoned Malls,” Popular music 37, no. 1 (2018): 100–18.

24. Healy, “Dead Man.” Quoted in Glitsos, “Vaporwave, or Music.,” 104.

25. /u/Drake31217, “HIT VIBES REPRESS IS LIVE,” Reddit, August 26, 2020, https://www.reddit.com/r/VaporVinyl/comments/ih1j76/hit_vibes_repress_is_live/.

26. “SAINT PEPSI – Hit Vibes (2015, Vinyl),” Discogs, March 5, 2015, https://www.discogs.com/Saint-Pepsi-Hit-Vibes/release/6737325.

27. “Macintosh Plus – Floral Shoppe (2012, Cassette),” Discogs, March 12, 2012, https://www.discogs.com/release/3469351-Macintosh-Plus-Floral-Shoppe.

28. Amanda E. Krause and Steven Caldwell Brown, “A Uses and Gratifications Approach to Considering the Music Formats That People Use Most Often,” Psychology of Music 49, no. 3 (May 2021): 547–66, https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735619880608.

29. Ibid., 556.

30. Simon Chandler, “Escaping Reality: The Iconography of Vaporwave,” Bandcamp, September 16, 2016, https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/vapor-wave-iconography-column.

31. It is important to note that vinyl is not included here because it is generally considered one of the best media for high musical quality.

32. “猫シ Corp., – Good Morning America, Discogs, January 28, 2018, https://www.discogs.com/%E7%8C%AB-Corp-Good-Morning-America/release/11486722.

33. Schembri and Tichbon, “Digital Consumers,” 191–212.

34. Owen B. Chapman, “The Elusive Allure of ‘Aura’: Sample-Based Music and Benjamin’s Practice of Quotation,” Canadian Journal of Communication 36, no. 2 (2011): 243–61.

35. Ibid.

36. First Class Collective, “Twitter / @firstclasslabel: We have been hit with our first DMCA....,” February 9, 2021, 8:51 a.m. ‏ https://twitter.com/firstclasslabel/status/1359137916094660608.

37. haircuts for men, ランダムエントリー, Bandcamp, 2019, https://haircutsformen.bandcamp.com/album/11.

38. Joshua P. Friedlander, “Year-End 2019 RIAA Music Revenues Report” (Washington, DC: RIAA, 2020), 1-11.

39. Schembri and Tichbon, “Digital Consumers,” 191–212.

40. Ibid.

41. Ibid.

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