“You have to be a specific kind of person to embrace all the crackles, skips and imperfections of music on vinyl.”
Several years ago, during his freshman year at Point Park University in Pittsburgh, 20-year-old James Eklin felt lost in the social circles on campus. But then he got to talking with a female student who shared some of his classes. She seemed unusual, and not only because of her appearance: thick-rimmed glasses, bangs and old-fashioned clothes. One rainy February day, the two skipped class and went to her apartment. As soon as she opened the door, his suspicions were confirmed: she had a turntable. So did he. They both spoke the language of vinyl.
Their connection was sealed as soon as she lowered the needle onto an album by the band Broken Social Scene, James writes.
“It was an instantaneous mutual recognition, as if we both understood each other’s preferences,” Eklin continued. He considers the Technics turntable from the 1980s, formerly owned by his aunt, a rare gift of fate.
“You have to be a specific kind of person to embrace all the crackles, skips and imperfections of the music on this turntable.”
The ranks of vinyl devotees are growing. Recently, the anachronistic vinyl record has experienced an unexpected sales revival, decades after the mainstream music industry wrote off the format as obsolete. Major labels are expanding their vinyl offerings for the first time since they left vinyl for dead nearly two decades ago.
While the niche may still be considered insignificant in terms of overall recorded-music sales, the surge of interest in vinyl—and especially its growing appeal among younger listeners—offers a glimmer of hope amid the music industry’s bleak situation.
“Even if the industry isn’t doing everything necessary to promote it, we could really make this a profitable area,” says Bill Gagnon, senior vice president of marketing at EMI, who is responsible for vinyl releases. He believes that people who buy vinyl today are fascinated by the format’s down-to-earth authenticity.
“It’s practically a return to nature,” Gagnon says. “It’s like the difference between growing your own vegetables and buying them frozen at the supermarket.”
The vinyl industry practically collapsed in the late 1980s with the arrival of the compact disc. And despite the efforts of subcultures (club DJs, music lovers, punks...) to bring vinyl back, sales kept falling, and in the last decade the MP3 format joined the CD. The RIAA reported that in 1998 approximately 3.4 million LP and EP releases were sold, while in 2006 the figure was just over 900,000. But sales jumped 37% in 2007, to nearly 1.3 million records. Three years earlier, Warner Bros. Records returned to the format, launching becausesoundmatters.com, an online vinyl store filled with reissues and new releases. At first, any vinyl release that sold 3,000 copies was considered a success, according to the company’s vinyl sales manager, Tom Beery. The album Wilco “Sky Blue Sky” sold more than 14,000 copies in 2007.
Vinyl suddenly became stylish, he said, even among people too young to be familiar with the crackle of a needle gliding across a record.
“I have friends whose children are 13, 15, even 10—and they all want turntables,” Beery says. “Their parents say: ‘Wait a minute, what are you talking about?’”
Virgin Megastore and small record shops such as Mondo Kim in Manhattan have recently been devoting more and more space to the antique 12-inch disc. Newbury Comics, a chain of 29 music and merchandise stores in New England, has sold 400 turntables since it began selling them in June, said Duncan Brown, the company’s manager.
Despite the growth, vinyl is still a speck in the music business as a whole. In 2007, for example, the industry sold 511 million CDs. But, given the declining interest in CDs, that half-billion represented a sales decline of more than 17% compared with the previous year, while executives had expected sales to grow.
This year, Capitol/EMI is undertaking its first significant reissue of its vinyl catalog in a decade. Some of the albums, such as “Pet Sounds” by the Beach Boys, are leviathans of classic rock aimed at nostalgic listeners. But there are also many albums by contemporary musicians, such as Radiohead and Coldplay, which appeal to younger music buyers, Gagnon said. Most are pressed on acoustically superior 180-gram vinyl, and many are packaged in gatefold sleeves to serve as collectible records for young fans who also own the music digitally.
With music now so abundant on the Internet, record-label owners have found it necessary to make physical copies of albums special, desirable objects that people will want to buy. Vinyl albums fit the bill: exotic in their blend of new and retro, and more imposing than CDs (their 12.5-inch album covers are ideal canvases for cover art).
Exclusive editions are a kind of trophy for devoted fans, Tom Beery says. In September, for example, Warner Bros. Records will begin selling Metallica’s new album “Death Magnetic” in a box set with five records—each of the 10 songs will have its own side—for approximately $115.
Many fans of the new vinyl generation see LPs not only as something to play but also as souvenir merchandise, like T-shirts or band posters, says Matt Vishnow, founder of Insound, an online music and merchandise company. Over the past two years, vinyl sales have grown from 20 to 50 percent of the company’s total business, he said. (The average age of its customers is 25, Vishnow added.)
In an era when everyone has the same music collection thanks to file sharing, collecting expensive, bulky LPs is a conspicuous way for super-fans to advertise their status as connoisseurs, he said.
“The buyer wants to see vinyl in their home just like books,” Vishnow says. His question to such a buyer is: “If I can already have all the world’s music at my fingertips, why should I pay $15 or $20 for this format, which is inconvenient to store and carry and easily damaged?”
Young vinyl collectors argue that digital technology has made it possible for everyone—even their parents—to possess a large, unique music collection. In this sense, nothing looks more absurd than old-fashioned inconvenience.
“The whole process of taking a record off the shelf, removing the disc from its sleeve and placing the needle on the groove creates a stronger and more individual connection with the music because it requires more effort,” says 21-year-old R. J. Crowder-Schaefer, a New York University student who says he became a serious vinyl devotee several years ago.
Meanwhile, devotees often cross paths with their parents, who are trying to catch up with audio technology. Megan Galewski, another New York University student, bought her 56-year-old father an iPod for his birthday. On her birthday, her father gave her a turntable.
“He thought it was silly to want this old technology,” says 21-year-old Galewski. She had to teach him how to use the player, then dug into his stacks of ’60s and ’70s records to claim treasures such as the original edition of the album “Woodstock”.
But for 17-year-old Corinne Monaco of Brooklyn, her interest in vinyl gives her a chance to grow closer to her parents. The moments when she sits on the couch with her father listening to albums by Jethro Tull and Jimi Hendrix, she says, give her “a chance to understand what he grew up with through the music of his youth.”
Indeed, vinyl records force children of the digital age to listen to music in the steadfast manner of previous generations, says 21-year-old Scott Caroli, a student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who recently turned to vinyl. They can no longer use a scroll wheel to play songs by Miley Cyrus, Nas, Black Sabbath, John Coltrane and Scissor Sisters in a matter of minutes. With vinyl, listeners surrender control to the artist. They let the music wash over them in the original song order, at the original pace.
“I have a ton of music on iTunes,” Caroli says, “but the music there wears me out pretty quickly. With my records, it’s like reading a book compared with flipping through articles on Yahoo.” “When you put on a record,” he adds, “it’s an event.”
Originally published by The New York Times (Alex Williams, 2008). Translated from the Russian translation by Dmitry Kutuzov, edited by r.dee.
