Just down the road from me in Dalston there’s a new vinyl-only record shop. It’s sparsely furnished, with plain wooden racks. And there’s never anyone in there.
Every time I walk past, I feel an urge to stick my head in the door and say “All those hipsters who claim to be buying vinyl – they’re lying! They’re just saying they do it because it’s cool! It’s just part of the image, like craft beer and beards!”
But it seems I’m wrong. On Record Store Day this weekend, it’s likely that more vinyl will be bought than any other music format. Vinyl sales on Record Store Day are pretty much doubling year-on-year.
Vinyl reached its nadir in 2006. Since then, sales have been increasing- steadily at first, then strongly. In 2014, we bought over 1 million vinyl albums in the UK – more than in any year since 1996. Vinyl is still tiny – no more than three per cent of all music sales – but its growth has gone way beyond a hipster fad or curious quirk.
Trends don’t just pull in one direction. Every societal or cultural trend brings with it its own built in counter-trend. The more virtual our lives become, the more we hanker for the solidity of the real world, to literally ground ourselves. The CD is on the way out, replaced for the most part by mp3 and streaming digital. If music matters to us, we want to see it as more than a file on a screen. Digital may be great for getting our entire record collections onto our phones, taking it anywhere, but music that matters requires a physical form.
And there are some interesting quirks in the vinyl revival that reveal its true nature.
Firstly, most of the people buying vinyl are relatively young. They’re not hankering back to pre-CD days of dusty record fairs – they’re buying a format that is new to them.
But secondly, most of the music being bought on vinyl is reissues of old LPs rather than new releases. Digital may have turned music history into an always available pick and mix, but twenty-somethings discovering Joy Division or Led Zeppelin, when they finally fall in love, want the physical artefact – what they consider to be the appropriate format for the album.
In the 1990s, old reissues on CD allowed my generation to get hold of classic albums that had been unavailable for years, or found only in charity shops. Now, with all music readily available, we’re seeing behaviour that’s at once very similar and quite different. Both are/were reissues on a different format for people who care. But my old CD reissues were bargain-priced ways of getting music that had been scarce until that point. These vinyl reissues are often eye-wateringly expensive, for music that’s cheap or even free elsewhere.
Many fans will insist that vinyl is the best format because the sound quality is better. It’s easy to dispute this – CD established itself as a better quality format because it got rid of the hiss and crackle and presented sound across a broader range of frequencies, revealing wrinkles in the songs you hadn’t noticed before.
Ah, says the vinyl fan, but now we’re talking about mp3s rather than CDs, and you lose so much of the information as songs are compressed to smaller files. Well, yes and no – it depends upon the file size how much information is lost. Digital sound files are capable of incredible quality, even if they rarely offer it.
And anyway, it’s hard to tell if your vinyl is really vinyl. It’s lovely to imagine these cherished re-releases being remastered from the original tapes, but many in the industry suspect that vinyl is often cut from a CD – all it can do is work with what was on this supposedly diminished format.
But how much does this really matter? Are we really buying vinyl for its technical precision? Fans love it for its ‘warmth’ – the deeper bass frequencies it gives, which are perfect for genres such as rock or reggae. It’s not necessarily better in a sound engineering sense, but it feels more appropriate and pleasing to the listener.
And that’s the key: in the end, it’s all about the listener’s experience, which is always subjective and multi-sensory. Vinyl makes you more involved with the music. You have to take the record from its sleeve – often an artefact in its own right – check it for scratches or dust, carefully place it on the turntable and gently apply the needle. The soft crump as the needle hits the groove builds the anticipation. And then the album is playing, the sequencing of the tracks telling its story, immune to shuffling, until the end of side one and the pause while you turn it over and repeat the routine.
Vinyl brings us closer to the music. It makes the relationship more alive. That has to appeal to anyone who loves music, of any age. It has nothing to do with frequencies or signal to noise ratios, and everything to do with love
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