There will always be a very special place for vinyl albums. That place is called eBay.

There they rest in peace, alongside trashed DC comic books, used Pinto cars (read: moving coffins) and 500-pound Atari PONG systems.

But for the rest of the living, breathing and dare I say evolving world, the medium of choice is any of the latest supergadgets — may it be incredibly convenient iPods, laptops or BlackBerry phones. In the digital age, music can come at you from any and every source. Through your favorite blog, a friend’s mix CD or even the ever-handy flash drive, music flies through the air in our global village at exciting and even overwhelming speeds.

Vinyl lovers are thereby unavoidably left in the Stone Age. You wouldn’t ask a buddy to burn a vinyl album; you burn a CD. You wouldn’t show someone new music by re-needling (for lack of a better word) to each new song you want; you make a playlist. And you certainly wouldn’t carry a gramophone on your back for jogging; you carry an MP3 player.

Many vinyl users argue that the biggest difference between the modern digital album and the outdated … er, “classic” … vinyl album is the feel. Vinyl “feels warmer” or has a special crackling sound to it. I don’t hear many people pining for the days of VHS’s poor picture quality or dial-up Internet’s molasses-like speed, but I suppose to each his own.

Album artwork is another assumed plus for vinyl lovers. However, the “art of album art” is clearly a lost craft. Nowadays, new artists rarely attempt a smart or symbolic cover art, often retreating to pictures of themselves or poorly, self-drawn abstracts (see The New Porno’s horrific cover for Challengers).

Now, I don’t have a huge problem with old vinyl disc collections or collectors. I think they can be groovy — in the absolute, most literal sense of the word.
But modern artists, please, for your own sake, don’t convert to vinyl.

In indie music, nothing screams shameless pretension quite like vinyl records. For example, it bothers me to intolerable degrees when bands use the vinyl artwork over a CD on “The Late Show with Dave Letterman.” You can’t see Letterman’s charming, gap-toothed grin behind the Herculean-sized album. He might as well be holding up a giant billboard for the band saying, “We aren’t that great! But here’s what our album looks like in case you’re interested! It’s so big!”

As far as modern vinyl albums such as Radiohead’s In Rainbows go, I ask that if you make modern music, get with the modern age. I understand Radiohead’s Thom Yorke is obsessed with the “complete album” experience, which I respect. But people who want that experience will do so without buying a $100 vinyl packet. I’ll keep my pay-what-you-want (in other words, free) digital copy and still listen to it completely and in copious amounts.

What about underground artists who can’t put out vinyl records? These artists receive recognition through MySpace, metacritic.com and other online sources to get their product out to a broad and interested audience.

Let’s face it, we may be currently looking at the end of compact discs. Eight-tracks and casette tapes are long gone. Vinyl is as dead as disco, and the music-loving community needs to respectfully move on.

I’m listening to my iPod as I write this column. I can shuffle to whatever song I want, past or present, jazz, rock or hip-hop, whenever I want. Vinyl, your time is clearly up. Rest in a peaceful afterlife, and say hello to Game Boys for me.

— Contact Geoff Schorkopf