I thought I was a dinosaur for holding on to all my old CDs and still buying new ones

 But apparently, what was once old is new again. 


The triumph of vinyl: 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.

 But why? Records scratch, they take up space? What is up with this revival?


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.

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.



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-to-noise ratio and frequency response, vinyl provides a distinctive aural feel for the music and a qualitatively different (some might say superior) sonic experience.

IS that True? Any vinyl collectors here that can attest to this?

More here:

https://theconversation.com/the-triumph-of-vinyl-vintage-is-back-as-lp-sales-continue-to-skyrocket-225662









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