Vintage is back as LP sales continue to skyrocket
Previously relegated to the dustbin of media history, the vinyl LP has undergone a revival during the past decade to once again become the best selling physical format for recorded music today.
Where barely one million new vinyl albums were sold in the United States in 2006, that figure has grown every year since, soaring to just over 49 million units in 2023. One in every 15 vinyl albums sold last year — approximately seven per cent of all sales (more than three million units) — were by Taylor Swift.
This is a global media comeback story. It is so significant the BBC recently reported that after a 30-year absence Britain’s Office of National Statistics has placed vinyl records back into the basket of goods it uses for tracking consumer pricing and measuring inflation.
How is it that a media format as clunky, costly and fragile as vinyl would become so popular in an age of ubiquitous digital content? How is it that of all forms of recorded music, vinyl is the first to return to dominance from a state of near extinction? Why is it that an artist like Taylor Swift, whose core fan base is more familiar with companies like Apple or Spotify than high-end record turntables made by Thorens or VPI, would be the biggest selling artist of vinyl music?
There is no single reason behind this vinyl revival. One thing is clear, however: the massive growth in demand is a marketing triumph that is being driven by promotional culture. Old media is new again, vinyl is vintage and advertisers are adept at repackaging the past and selling it back to us for profit in the present.
From apocalyptic thrillers like Leave the World Behind to period music dramas like the criminally underrated The Get Down, and popular TV shows situated in the present — like Hijack, Suits, Transparent and Bosch — the presence of turntables and vinyl collections in their respective set designs delight vintage hi-fi enthusiasts and vinyl nerds. Vinyl albums and retro stereo gear have also appeared in ads for companies like IKEA, Whole Foods, Beck’s beer and Durex condoms.
SATURATED IN NOSTALGIA
As these examples illustrate, today’s pop culture mediascape is saturated in nostalgia. Media companies, brands, marketers and even artists themselves are skilled at turning our longing for the past into desire in the present that can be satiated with consumer goods. We immerse ourselves in reconstructions of bygone eras and enact the sociocultural imaginaries of earlier times by latching to their products and incorporating them into our everyday lives.
Beyond the culture shaping influence of the promotion industries, there are also compelling sociological reasons for why vinyl is back in such a big way.
As a media sociologist I’m compelled to think about how seeking, acquiring, collecting and displaying one’s music collection — and one’s vinyl collection, in particular — are sociocultural activities that enable the creation and expression of identity.
One doesn’t simply become a vinyl collector automatically. The process of becoming a collector is a communicative phenomenon requiring the enactment of various ritual ordeals that are performed to convey authority, expertise and specialized knowledge about the distinctions between first pressings and reissues, the best techniques for cleaning and maintaining one’s collection, the backstory behind The Beatles infamous “butcher cover” artwork on their 1966 studio album Yesterday and Today, and other issues.
COLLECTING RECORDS IS A FORM OF IDENTITY
Considered in this way, our record collections (no matter how voluminous or sparse, rare or mainstream) and how we talk about them both shape and are shaped by the identity cocoons that form how we see ourselves and how we want others to see us.
For many audiophiles — those who prioritize sound quality, the provenance of sound recordings and the science of sound reproduction above all else — vinyl is considered an essential medium because of its allegedly superior sonic properties.
A clean pressing of my favourite Herbie Hancock album played through a quality hi-fi system arguably offers a warmer, fuller, more transparent reproduction of the original studio performance than can be provided by a CD or streaming service.
Although digitally encoded music delivers technically better signal-tonoise ratio and frequency response, vinyl provides a distinctive aural feel for the music and a qualitatively different (some might say superior) sonic experience.