One thing first — at Good Stax, we love vinyl and the recent resurgence of sales in records is something we gleefully get excited about.
According to Neilsen Last year, vinyl unit sales totalled 9.2 million, up from 6.1 million in 2013. And album sales between January and March of this year (2015) were 53% higher than during the comparable period last year, driven by a 66% increase in catalog album sales (released at least 18 months prior) during the same period.
Whats good to know also is that not only are the reissued and catalogue classics getting snapped up but sales in current releases are up 37% for this year alone. Sweet!
The boasting about ‘the vinyl resurgence’ however is somewhat misleading. Yes we are up from the dreaded CD days where the lingering rumour that vinyl was dead flew around like hot press, but vinyl never went away in the first place.
There have always been people who wanted to buy vinyl and felt that they were not catered for, and now record labels are putting in more of an effort to release their catalogues on wax.
Pair that with the growing notion that many artists want to create more tangible and interactive ways for their fans to digest music (and fans reciprocate) and you have a recipe for a resurgence. But the enthusiasm that this resurgence is bound too was only dozing just below the surface, dormant but quietly and modestly still a living thing.
The community of vinyl enthusiasts is one that is wedded to the notion of music ownership — a notion that has never gone away. There’s something about the ritual, taking the time to listen to a whole album the way it is meant to be listened too whilst enjoying the intriguing artwork, reading the lyrics right off the sleeve and interacting with your beloved music to enrich your connection with it. We do not however get even close to representing the wider music market and take only a small percentage (around 2%) of the cake when it comes to music consumption mediums (streaming is up guys..).
Thats not all bad though, in a way it paints a picture of a tribe. It has been noted that new music fans under the age of 35 are helping to boost vinyl sales, so whilst audiophiles kept the tradition alive when it was down on its luck, a younger audience is helping to carry the torch in an overbearing digital age.
The true cog system of the resurgence in sales is the age old addiction to owning all your music in a tangible form and the collector mentality. The only difference in recent years is that more people want the same thing.
So why is everyone raving on about a comeback? Well, give a journalist a hot topic and some juicy statistics and you have yourself a bandwagon. Just kidding, and to be fair, the statistics are pretty damn juicy and it is true (and good) that more people are getting into the format.
One reason for a boost in vinyl sales could be attributed to sonic reasons. Maybe the real comeback here is ‘listening’, a sense that arguably has grown to be something of a distant cousin considering our increasing fancy towards visual stimuli. Listening, once an absolute imperative aspect of social architecture has all but lost its priority in the framework of our communities construction and no longer takes lead on maximising human interactions and productivity in the day-to-day social settings we share.
Also, as we all know, convenience of music media has changed the depth in which we listen to music and sometimes it feels like a musical attention deficit. Psychologically, when faced with an almost infinite amount of albums at your fingertips it is difficult to instil patience into your experience of music. And being that vinyl’s one true hold over all other formats is it’s insistence on a deeper listening experience, finding the subtle and understated features of an album is perhaps something more people are coming to cherish.
Record Store Day is feeding an ultra-fetishism too (also a great thing — yup we are on the thumbs up side of RSD). Limited edition represses of records, coloured vinyl; different covers are all aspects that lure in collectors, completists and conversationalists. These releases are hard to ignore in many ways and saddle our imposed musical pedigree. I for one bought 5 records on Record Store Day — I couldn’t afford too and it was a stupid decision considering I have bills and need to eat, but I was entranced by the hustle and pretty shiny coloured variants.
I love records, I love the art work, pulling the record out of its sleeve, sitting and listening to a record the whole way through and interacting with it. I adore it. It is great that sales of vinyl have risen and show promising growth and enthusiasm, we couldn’t be more happy about that at Good Stax. But that enthusiasm was always there; vinyl was always there. I think what is really making a comeback is a growing patience for an art form that suffers from continual compartmentalisation and repackaging to ease our needs for instant gratification.
