Vinyl was the laughingstock of the music industry ever since sales of compact discs — CDs — took off in the late 1990s. The digital music format seemed to sound as good, if not better, than its analog counterparts. Tapes sounded terrible, and vinyl records just took up too much damn space. There was no way you were going to fit those things in your car or your Walkman.
This trend of neglect continued vinyl’s apparent descent into oblivion. Sales bottomed out between 2005 and 2006, and it looked as if vinyl was going to be the first organ of the music industry to die. An entire generation — ours — grew up without the presence of the format that carried the best music of the previous century.
But that was the bottom of vinyl’s slump. Since then, sales have increased at a rate nearly as steep as their decline. More than 9 million vinyl albums were sold in 2014, a 52 percent increase in copies sold the previous year. Granted, they still only make up a slim marketshare of music sales. But clearly, unlike punk, vinyl isn’t dead.
Why is it that suddenly, we love this antiquated thing again?
Our theory: Vinyl records are dope as all hell.
Sure, there’s the scientifically proven evidence — brought to us by the MythBusters, in case you were curious — that music sounds better when it’s played from a vinyl record. It’s better than tapes and better than digital audio files.
But that doesn’t really explain the comeback. The idea that the public would care for quality over convenience is totally negated by the existence of Taco Bell. All music everywhere is practically free now. Even services like Spotify, where you pay for the opportunity to stream unlimited amounts of music, do it dirt-cheap. Why would anybody choose to drop $50 on a hard copy of it?
Because there’s an incredible amount of sentimental value tied up in owning vinyl. Something about holding a physical copy of music you love, having stacks of music sitting around your room, is enough to make a person all fuzzy and emotional. It’s somewhere in the difference between streaming an album and holding an album that makes some weird, reptilian part of our brains go nuts. The ritual of removing a disc from its sleeve and listening to the pregnant silence — the one between the moment the needle drops and when the music starts — feels almost like witchcraft.
As far as physical copies go, vinyl looks and feels nicer than CDs. The album art is larger and more detailed, and usually includes some extra goodies — vinyl copies of Childish Gambino’s “Because the Internet” come with a screenplay — that you can’t get from CDs. But maybe the reason is that CDs aren’t a novelty for us; maybe students 30 years from now will discover the disk drives on their parents’ old laptops.
Until then, consider taking a trip to one of the local record stores and looking around. You might like what you find.
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 1/14/2015 under the headline “Vinyl made heroic comeback last year"]
