Vinyl sees unlikely revival
A couple of weeks ago, an article entitled "All hail the analogue revolution" was published on C|Net UK's "Crave" blog. The article describes the resurgence in popularity that the seven-inch vinyl single is currently experiencing in Britain. "The last time things looked this good for vinyl was 1998," the article says.
While this article was written from a UK perspective, vinyl has seen a similar resurgence in the United States as well. I recall that one of the biggest complaints that music collectors had about replacing their vinyl records with CDs (and then having to eventually purchase CDs in lieu of vinyl) was that the album art was so small. There are also a handful of analog aficionados still around who will claim until their death that vinyl has a superior sound. Then, of course, there are those who are luddites of sorts, or maybe they're just overly-practical individuals, who never saw the point in "upgrading" their music collection when their records worked (and still work) just fine. All of these types are the people who have probably kept vinyl sales going all these years, even when it now seems that the CD is slowly becoming obsolete.
It is not these people, however, who are responsible for the resurgence in sales that vinyl is currently seeing. It's the iPod set, a generation in which a majority of members probably have no memory of a vinyl record being the primary medium for commercial music distribution. I personally am on the old end of this group, or maybe the young end of the one before it, and I only have vague, vague memories of the dominance of vinyl. Cassette tapes of various formats had their heyday as a commercial distribution format, but they too fizzled from dominance and found their own niche among the independent and DIY set. I certainly have vivid memories of that era and of the purchase of the first CD player in my house. The thing was ridiculously huge; Xbox huge, if you'll pardon the euphemism. As far as I know, though, the confounded machine is still sitting in the wall unit in my parents' living room, and it still works. But I digress.
As I was saying, it's "those damn kids" who are snatching up these vinyl records and causing this revival of a long-thought-obsolete format. So why has the vinyl format become so popular again? The "Crave" article briefly posits that maybe in these days of digital music downloads, there is still some joy in being able to possess a physical manifestation of that music. They don't really explore it too much, but I certainly have some ideas of my own about it.
Most of the music that this set is buying (or acquiring) is in digital format-MP3, iTunes...whatever. It's portable, it's recordable, it's transferrable (all for the most part, but I'll leave my gripes about DRM for another day); arguably it's better in a million and one ways than any format that has come before it. But it has one major shortcoming: it isn't tangible. Regardless of what music generation you come from, there is always that desire for the album-disc, art and all-to be one that you can touch, see, smell and get autographed by the band that created it.
I don't know the numbers, and for some reason I get the feeling they wouldn't be easy to find, but it seems to me that the music industry is seeing a lot of repeat and duplicate sales of albums in multiple formats-specifically, in digital and physical formats. Now let's think reasonably for a moment as to why these kids (and hip-to-tech grown-ups) are choosing vinyl over CDs when they purchase a physical version of the album they just downloaded. Even to those who have never used a vinyl record, the format still quintessentially illustrates recorded music itself. Not only that, but if you're buying something just for its physical qualities, you're going to buy the one that's bigger, the one that you can hold more of in your hands, the one that you can see and show off the best. By the nature of its somewhat archaic roots, the vinyl record wins this contest hands down.
Sure, the resurgence of the format isn't huge; there are still only a handful of new releases available on vinyl. But if the trend continues, we could even see a renaissance in album art-a medium that has suffered at the hands of the smaller size of the CD. I wouldn't mind seeing that happen. The revival seems to also point to another important fact, however-the 800-pound gorilla in the corner, if you will-that even I have been ignoring throughout the duration of this editorial so as not to pontificate on the recording industry's continual, intentional oversight of this fact: people are still buying music, even if they download it (without paying) first.
