For a lot of the 20th century, vinyl was the dominant medium through which people everywhere enjoyed their favourite music. It’s the medium that defined baby boomers’ love of the century’s most iconic music and art. Yet, newer technologies in the 80’s and 90’s almost did away with vinyl for good. So you might be wondering why vinyl records are having a resurgence?
Today, music lovers can find their favourite album, LPs, and EPs in almost any medium they want, with vinyl making up a significant amount of the profits surrounding music sales today, over 140 years after it was even invented. So, what’s fueling vinyl’s return?
Why Vinyl Records are Back (and Here to Stay)
These are the top reasons music lovers are getting back into vinyl:
- Streaming music has introduced younger listeners to older music they’d likely be into.
- Vinyl records are tangible and promote active listening.
- Collecting records is a fun hobby.
- Sound quality is arguably better than other, newer mediums.
Digital Access to Entire Histories of Music
Ironically, a lot of the renewed interest in vinyl records comes from the rapid growth of cloud-based music apps like Spotify and Apple Music in the past decade.
Let’s say a teenager in the late 90’s is just beginning to discover their favourite music and wants to explore new stuff that aligns with their tastes.
This is what they would have had to do:
- Read music magazines or relatively new blogs and forums for recommendations. MP3s were only patented in 1996, so it’s not likely that popular blogs and forums at the time would have had these files available to download. The average music lover in the late 90’s also wouldn’t likely have access to technology that’d parse and download music files.
- Go to a music store, which at the time, would have been full of CDs and cassette tapes.
- Listen to CDs and/or cassettes individually to find their favourites. Then, purchase them at an estimated cost of $16.00 per CD if they’re new releases. If they got lucky with used CDs, these costs per CD could go as low as $0.99, but it’d still be fairly expensive to cultivate an entire music library.
- If they wanted to share music, this would involve the relatively laborious task of either making a physical mixtape, burning a CD, or using illegal file-sharing apps.
As a result, fewer options for older or less commercially-available music made it into the hands of Gen X-ers unless they devoted serious amounts of time and money on curating their music collections.
For comparison, a teenager in 2019 just getting into their favourite music has access to entire centuries’ worth of music from every corner of the world through an app like Spotify or Apple Music.
Streaming services gained much of their popularity due to low consumer costs and high degrees of personalization, with seemingly endless listening options. Entire playlists and recommended artist radios algorithmically pinpoint what a listener would like. Digital music might lose out on the nuances of vinyl (more on this in a bit), but it’s definitely been a driving factor in introducing new generations of music lovers to genres and artists they may have otherwise been completely unaware of.
It’s Tangible and Active
While MP3s and streaming services offer nearly-limitless options, vinyl lovers tend to appreciate how record collecting is a tangible practise in active listening and enjoyment. Think about all the times you put on a playlist or podcast and zone out versus the times you go to the effort of deliberately putting your favourite record on. Which one do you pay attention to more?
It may take some minor effort to literally handle a piece of music, but serious audiophiles out there tend to appreciate the tactile nature of vinyl, from the iconic cover art to the entire album being timed and curated based on what the artist intended.
Collecting is Fun
For a lot of vinyl lovers, collecting and maintaining records is a hobby in its own right. Collectors tend to go wherever they can get those hard-to-find treasures, whether they’re flea markets, yard and estate sales, and local record stores.
Along with physical sales, vinyl lovers tend to go online these days, trading, buying and bartering on user-run sites and forums. Today, forums like Discogs and ReverbLP connect audiophiles from all over the world. And while digital marketplaces are generally the main areas of focus on these sites, collectors can also discuss their favourite albums, share tips and recommendations, and plan meet-ups, listening parties or events. This just goes to show that collecting still furthers the sense of community a lot of audiophiles generally enjoyed on a much smaller scale during vinyl’s first heyday in the 60’s and 70’s.
Sound Quality is Arguably Better
This is by far the strongest argument that vinyl music lovers make for the medium’s continued popularity. While lots of audiophiles may use terms like “full” or “lossless” when it comes to sound, there are a few elements at play here:
- Vinyl Sound Quality: Vinyl still has the widest range of frequencies because of the analog-to-analog production used to create records.
- Digital Sound Quality: Digital music is the result of file compression. This keeps individual files manageable, easy-to-store and access, but it doesn’t retain much of the nuances that vinyl has.
Vinyl’s Big Comeback
Regardless of the reasons for vinyl’s renewed popularity, there’s no denying that it’s simply something fun, social, and weirdly comforting. People everywhere are finding new ways to bridge those traditional generational gaps and bond over something real and tangible.
GUEST POST: Chris Scallise
