Vinyl Revival

Journal of Popular Music Studies

Vol. 33, no. 3: pp. 73–77 (2021)

To celebrate JPMS’s 33.3 issue, the editors solicited proposals for keyword-style essays addressing the record album. My brief piece on the “vinyl revival” joins similarly brief—but no less engaging and insightful—works on the album cover, beats per minute, groove, heritage, marketing, race records, ritual, and many more. Check out the entire issue.

Before reading my vinyl revival article, it would be helpful to have a working knowledge of over a century of recording format shifts. Greg Milner’s Perfecting Sound Forever (2010) details the major ones, from the first commercially-produced wax cylinders to shellac 10” 78 rpm discs in the early 20th century, followed by the introduction of microgroove 12” 33⅓ LPs and 7” 45 rpm discs in the late 1940s, and then the consumer releases of the compact cassette tape in the 1960s and the CD in the 1980s. Throughout all of these format shifts—and including several failed ones (reel-to-reel tape, DAT, SACD)—the recording industry promoted the new format’s superior audio quality over older formats. This marketing strategy was so successful when the CD was introduced that the record labels’ revenue peaked substantially in the late 1990s, driven largely by consumers replacing their record collections with CDs.

One way to tell the story of the recording industry’s disruption in the early 21st century is that major record label executives, wholly believing their own propaganda that consumers always prefer better-sounding recordings, simply did not foresee that many would willingly sacrifice audio quality for convenience of use and access. Indeed, in hindsight it is clear that although recording format shifts improved upon audio quality, each also improved upon convenience. It seems likely that, in addition to CDs ostensibly sounding better than LPs, consumers also preferred that they were smaller, lighter, less susceptible to scratching and breaking, and recordable, and that their players were programmable and also portable. MP3s and streaming services improved on all of these aspects of convenience, at times dramatically so. The vinyl revival isn’t really a format shift—LPs are not on pace to overtake streaming audio by any measure—but it is another example, following the shift from CDs to digital formats, of a consumer-driven change in music consumption that has surprised music industry observers.

I have been threatening to write about the 21st-century vinyl revival since record sales and collecting started takinig off again during my PhD program in the second half of the ’00s. In Chicago, I was fortunate to volunteer for WLUW, WHPK, and CHIRP, three prominent college/community radio stations, each of which supported a deep vinyl culture among its DJs. WHPK’s record room is round, with 12ft ceilings, and albums shelved all the way to the top, complete with a rolling ladder attached to the shelves—it’s like something out of a movie! I started volunteering at annual record fairs, first organized by WLUW and then by CHIRP, which included an annual stand-alone record fair in a giant auditorium (one of the largest in the country, although not quite as big as WFMU’s record fair held in New York City or the Austin Record Convention) and a smaller version held at the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago. I followed my favorite vinyl dealers to smaller, hotel ballroom record fairs, which were usually held monthly out in the suburbs. I surveyed and interviewed them for a seminar paper, and one year I also surveyed collectors who came to the CHIRP record fair. Before my wedding, I was chatting with one dealer about using records as part of the decorating theme for our reception; he invited me out to his garage where he gifted me several boxes of albums he couldn’t sell to use for that purpose. Many of my friends in Chicago during those years were also avid record collectors, and nerding out over our finds and playing music for each other was a common part of hanging out.

In my earliest academic job application materials, I kept promising to turn these experiences and data into an article that addressed the growing vinyl revival from a “values” perspective that challenged Marx’s (relatively) simple bifurcation between use- and exchange-value, particularly from the perspective of record dealers who (a) are huge collectors and vinyl superfans, but also (b) make a part of their living reselling used vinyl. That piece never materialized, and the discourse about vinyl records has shifted as the vinyl revival has continued over the last many years. Vinyl records now easily outsell CDs in the US, and buying LPs is no longer a niche or specialized activity. Hell, you can buy records at Target. After Amazon, Urban Outfitters is the largest vinyl retailer in the country. My short piece about the vinyl revival in JPMS 33.3 puts some of these issues in context from the perspective of a music industry scholar. It will have to suffice for now, although I imagine I still have more to say/write about buying, selling, and collecting vinyl records.

After a several-year hiatus when I barely bought new records or even listened to my existing collection, in 2020 I jumped back in: I was listening to my records while working from home and fell in love again with their sound and materiality. Now, new records arrive via mail-order almost weekly, I go record shopping at stores regularly (the one at Tres Gatos in JP is a fave), and my Discogs account tells me that my collection is worth more than a used car. I have not been to a record fair in ages, but I am looking forward to it. Viva la vinyl!

My two turntables (U-Turn Audio’s Orbit Basic and a vintage Technics SL-1200 MK2) and some of my record collection, housed in a trusty IKEA Expedit (since replaced by the Kallax).

Abstract

At the turn of the twenty-first century, vinyl records had remained a steady if unsubstantial component of recorded music revenue in the United States. But sales of physical media started declining steadily in 2001 in a seemingly unstoppable slide the RIAA attributed to digital piracy. Then a funny thing happened: although CD sales continued to shrink, by the end of the decade vinyl record sales had started growing, reaching $88.9 million in 2010—a revenue level not seen in two decades. As vinyl record sales kept increasing, industry observers and journalists treated the “vinyl revival” as a quirky fad, driven by a nostalgic fetishization of the supposedly dead medium. And yet, the revival showed no signs of abating. The few remaining vinyl pressing plants added a third shift to keep up with demand; record stores increased the shelf space for records at the expense of CDs; turntable sales grew; books and documentaries celebrated vinyl culture; vinyl record fairs attracted well-healed collectors and more pedestrian fans of modest means alike. The RIAA’s data show that vinyl records outsold CDs in 2020 for the first time since 1986; the vinyl revival, it seems, is here to stay. In this article I trace these trajectories in more detail. Using data provided by the RIAA, I consider how the trajectory of vinyl record sales in the twenty-first century both confirm and frustrate concepts of revival.

I use data publicly available from the Recording Industry Association of America, specifically their US Sales Database and their semi-annual music industry revenue reports. According to new data made available after I finished this piece, vinyl sales have continued growing in the first six months of 2021, outpacing the same period in 2020 by 94%.