Record rise
LP sales have now overtaken those of CDs in this country, from a starting point of about zero sales nine years ago, according to Damian Vaughan, before he retired as chief executive of Recorded Music New Zealand. “We are the trade body for the record industry. We represent companies and artists and anyone who makes a recorded version of a song that gets consumed in New Zealand. Spotify, YouTube videos, CD or vinyl, broadcast – they all attract a royalty to rights holders and we represent them.”
Last year, recorded music sales here totalled $124 million. That’s nearly double the low point of $67 million in 2013. And it’s back up to the previous peak of about $125 million last reached in 2001.
That year, CDs accounted for 95% of all recorded music sales. Last year, streaming counted for 77% of recorded music consumption in this country.
The proportion of streaming shows that even though vinyl is attracting a lot of new fans and has now overtaken CD sales, physical recordings are only a small part of the overall market.
Somewhere in those years, iTunes and downloading came and pretty much went, not making a significant dent in the overall revenue picture. People could as easily pirate music as download it officially.
Streaming put an end to that practice by making music easier to obtain and providing access to an even greater variety.
Last year, sales of physical music fell from $13.7 million in 2020, when vinyl constituted $4.4 million (32%) of the total, to $9.3 million. Vinyl sales in that year, however, grew to $5.9 million, representing 63% of all physical music sold in this country. warmer, I like the imperfection of the crackle.” Some producers even add such distortion to their pristine recordings – like the takeaway bar that puts sauce on your chips without you asking.
Bourke also voices a common complaint about other formats. “There’s a sharpness to digital music that makes it tiring and unpleasant to listen to at length. This is MP3s or streaming: the binary nature of digital doesn’t have a human, natural element – which vinyl recordings have, due to the flawed nature of how the music gets from the grooves, through the stylus, through the amplifier to the speakers … But the imperfection of vinyl was why engineers were so keen to champion the CD when it arrived.”
Haver believes the replacement of the LP, first by the CD and then by streaming, has encouraged bad habits.
“When CDs came in, people made overly long albums with some average songs on – ones you would often reject at an early stage because they didn’t pass muster. Anything that focuses an artist on being self-critical is positive. Vinyl does that. You can’t have more than 22 minutes on a side because the quality drops with every extra minute.”
PHYSICAL RECORDINGS
Retail chains have cut through the conundrum by ceasing to sell LPs or CDs.
The Warehouse dropped the latter from its inventory last year, leaving JB Hi-Fi the only chain still stocking physical recordings. “I was in a couple of weeks ago,” says Damian Vaughan, former chief executive of Recorded Music New Zealand, “and the vinyl portion of their offering was way bigger than CDs.”
Physical sales are almost exclusively being driven by some 30 specialist independent music retailers around the country.
And, aficionados will tell you, that is the way it should be. From the fiction of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity to the almost religious status afforded to Jack White’s Third Man Records store in Nashville, the independent outlet is seen as the natural home of music lovers. It helps explain why customers are referred to as “vinyl collectors” rather than, well, “customers”. Wellington’s 37-year-old Slow Boat Records is a sacred space for this congregation.
Like more traditional sacred spaces, it creates its own community. “A physical music store is where you are likely to meet other people who share your interests,” Taylor notes.
“One of the functions a store like Slow Boat now serves,” he says, “is helping steer people to a choice. All of music is sitting on a buffet table and no one knows what’s good and it doesn’t make sense.” Which is where the helpful, friendly staff come in.
But surely a demographic raised on online
point-and-click shopping by algorithm doesn’t need other humans, let alone bricks and mortar, to help them choose?
“There is a ritualistic, almost fetishistic quality to the whole thing,” says Taylor. “Flipping through bins was one of the things that people seemed to miss when we had to shut the doors during lockdown. I started posting videos of flipping through our records on Facebook, and people online would rush to get the record they had seen. Within minutes, there would be 10 people wanting that Slayer record.”
There’s no denying that vinyl is about much more than sound. LPs’ very size, while making storage and transport difficult, brings other advantages.
Having something to hold that looks good and is an artwork in its own right is definitely part of the vinyl resurgence. There was no way a 10 x 10cm CD booklet could ever match the visual and tactile impact of the 30 x 30cm LP equivalent. Cover – and insert – art has been responsible for some of the best designs of the LP era, attracting the international talents of artists from Andy Warhol to Keith Haring and Damien Hirst. Locally, Joe Wylie, Dick Frizzell and Jenny Doležel are just some of the respected artists who have produced great cover designs.
Then there are LPs’ intriguingly titled epistemic features, or, as most of us grew up knowing them, the lyric sheets. Thanks to the LPs’ size, these will feature the words in a type that is big enough to be read. There will also be ample room to namecheck everyone involved.
Click through to the credits link on a steaming service such as Spotify and the results are spotty at best. Sometimes, there is full information; equally often, the data is missing or incomplete. Of course, this can usually be found online, somewhere, but it requires all that clicking.
Dobbyn talks about some more of the tactile and visual pleasures that an LP gives before you hear a note: “There was the trophy stage when you opened it up, looked at the artwork and then all you wanted to do was listen to it.”
And this is something that was shared in a way that just doesn’t happen with streaming. In those good old days, when the latest album by your current fave came out, you rushed to the home of the first of your friends to acquire a copy, and everyone listened to it together. You didn’t just email your mate a link that quite possibly they would not even get around to playing.
In part, you were sharing the miracle of just how that sound happens. “Records, in particular, are a bit magical,” says Taylor, marvelling at “the idea you drop a needle on to a piece of plastic with stuff cut into it and it produces not just a sound but a good sound.”
Bourke describes the beauty of the ritual: “Taking a record out by its edges. Regretting that flatmate who played it 30 years ago and has left peanut-butter finger marks in the outer grooves. Cleaning the dust and static electricity off. Placing the stylus down and it finds its groove. It’s about respect for the music, like settling into a concert. A voyage to another world for 22 minutes before you have to get up, turn it over, and settle back in.”
LIFE-CHANGING JOY
To return to our original question: does vinyl sound better? The answer is a definite “occasionally” – if a lot of other factors are in place – but not often or reliably enough for most people to notice. It also loses points for convenience, durability and portability. Is it more fun, however? Probably.
“‘I started collecting vinyl in the 70s when I was about 14, and since then, I have accumulated several thousand albums,” says singer-songwriter Martin Phillipps, describing his relationship with records. “I have sold about a third of those and I seldom buy new vinyl. I switched to CDs in the late 80s because I was touring a lot and they were easier to transport. Vinyl was often warped in transit or wore out quickly because pressing qualities were being compromised. Then I had to shift house a few times in a row and I vowed never to have to shift my vinyl collection again.
“But the bottom line is that I have experienced the life-changing joy and exhilaration of hearing new songs (or old favourites) on scratchy old cassettes, on transistor radios, on crappy car stereos and even from my cheap, battery-powered portable turntable.
“I can hear the difference between a beautiful mastering and pressing compared with a cheaper one, but I will never be on that endless quest to find the highest fidelity. To me, within reason, it is about the content of the music and its intention.” ▮
“Having something to hold that looks good and is an artwork in its own right is definitely part of the vinyl resurgence.”
Record Store Day is April 23.