JUDAS PRIEST's GLENN TIPTON Praises Vinyl Resurgence: 'I Think It's A Great Thing'

Loper and Randi of the Columbus, Ohio radio station 99.7 The Blitz conducted an interview with JUDAS PRIEST guitarist Glenn Tipton at this year's Rock On The Range, which was held May 15-17 at MAPFRE Stadium (formerly Crew Stadium) in Columbus. You can now watch the chat below.

Speaking about the resurgence of old-fashioned vinyl records, Tipton said: "I think it's a great thing. I think it's great for this reason: to start with, we all know that downloading has affected music business; it has affected the record companies, the bands. You do have to ask yourselves the question, why should I spend the next eighteen months writing into the small hours recording, and then the minute it's released, it's offered on a thousand free sites? So why should I do that? One answer is, yeah, okay, it encourages you to go out and play live, which we like to do anyway. But the other thing is, we've got such a rich back catalog with PRIEST, it's great to… Like I used to do, I used to go down to the record store and I'd buy the album sleeve, and you'd take the album and you'd put it on and you'd read all the notes inside. It was a prize and you'd worked hard… I used to be able to afford two albums… Now, it's really nice to have the package there, the vinyl there."

He continued: "It's an album, you know?! Maybe it's 'cause I'm so ancient that I think like that, but I think the kids are getting it a little bit now, because [when you own] two tracks on an MP3 or whatever… That's not an album; it's not what the band wants you to do. Particularly stuff like [PRIEST's 2008 effort] 'Nostradamus', which was a concept album and it should have been played in one go. You have to step out of the real world and step into the land of 'Nostradamus', and I believe it's the same for most metal albums... [and] most albums in general. I listen to a lot of film themes, you know; I love the average piece of footage, average song, you put 'em together and you've got something beautiful or something very, very powerful. So I think the kids are getting it now and they're going back to vinyl, and it's like a little prize. And I hope it carries on coming back in a big way. The artwork and everything else looks… even on a CD, it's small. On an album cover, it's big and it's great to have… It doesn't take that much more room anyway. [The vinyl records] are slimmer [than CDs], actually, aren't they?"

JUDAS PRIEST's 17th studio album, "Redeemer Of Souls", sold around 32,000 copies in the United States in its first week of release to land at position No. 6 on The Billboard 200 chart.

On Black Friday "Record Store Day," November 28, 2014, JUDAS PRIEST released a limited-edition 10-inch vinyl, "5 Souls", containing the five bonus tracks from "Redeemer Of Souls".