Zulu Records, a repeat winner in WE's Best of the City readers poll, has witnessed a resurgence in the popularity of vinyl among both young and old music fans.

Credit: Michael White

MUSIC: A new spin on an old format

A funny thing happened on the way to the demise of the music industry: Vinyl started selling again.

Well, in truth, it never really stopped selling, although its steadily increasing popularity isn’t about to reverse the decline in record-company fortunes that has been unfolding for the better part of the decade. (As of last week, sales of recorded music in the U.S. were down almost 13 per cent compared to the same week in 2008, according to Billboard.)

But at a time when even the music press can’t seem to help but morbidly obsess about the closure of yet another long-standing CD retailer or previously flourishing label, the knowledge of anything related to music being on an upward trajectory (other than illegal downloads and iPod sales, of course) is cause for closer inspection.

Nielsen SoundScan, which tracks retail sales of music in the U.S., found that more vinyl LPs were purchased in that country in 2008 than in any year since SoundScan began in 1991 — 89 per cent more than in 2007. (Statistics for Canada were unavailable, but it’s widely acknowledged that we tend to follow the sales trends of our next-door neighbours closely.)

To the employees at Zulu Records — once again Best of the City voters’ top choice for Independent Music Store and Music Store for Vinyl — this comes as no surprise. Zulu has been buying and selling new and second-hand vinyl since its beginnings in 1981, even sticking with it through the format’s lowest ebb in the mid- to late ’80s, when the then-new compact disc and still-popular cassette combined forces to try to bury it forever.

As Zulu’s primary vinyl buyer, Josh Rose has had a frontline view of vinyl’s resurgence, which he started to really notice in the past 18 months. “It’s been hard not to notice,” he says. “It seems like both a lot of young people and a lot of women are buying records, but also a lot of older men who, at some point, had gotten out of music or stopped collecting or had moved to CD — all of a sudden, they’ve become interested again.”

While Rose isn’t in the habit of subjecting customers to a questionnaire about their reasons for rediscovering vinyl, casual conversations and the observation of buying patterns have revealed a variety of motives. Among older demographics, purchases tend toward classic rock from the ’60s and ’70s: the Beatles, the Stones, Led Zeppelin, or equally seminal but more underground artists like the Velvet Underground. Rose suspects — and, in some cases, has been told — that the people who grew up with records, only to cast them off for ostensibly superior CD versions, slowly realized that vinyl was the superior format all along — an opinion hardcore audiophiles have been putting forward for years (including Neil Young, who once called CDs “an insult to the human eardrum”).

Rose also sees the return of vinyl as part and parcel of “a shift back to listening to music on nice big speakers and having it sound good.

“The hi-fi has been systematically dismantled in the past 10 years by things like computers and iPods and satellite radio,” Rose says. “It’s made it more about the hardware than the software. When people would get rid of their record collections to change to CD, it was because they bought some new, fancy piece of equipment. Now everybody’s listening on little crappy computer speakers most of the time.”

There’s also the inarguable aesthetic superiority of a record. Despite the many great claims made about CDs when they were introduced (it was erroneously stated that scratches wouldn’t affect their performance), no one ever said they were pretty. Indeed, the miniscule dimensions of the CD booklet — with their tiny photos and even tinier print — has been a primary complaint even among those who prefer the CD as a format. Nowadays, in the age of the intangible MP3, the tactile pleasure of a large, thoughtfully designed LP sleeve has never seemed so cherishable.

“It’s got weight, it’s got presence,” Rose says of the LP. “If you’re going to own something, it may as well be the status-elevating vinyl record rather than the CD. Records are something you put on a shelf and it looks good and people flip through them. People don’t really flip through other people’s CD collections.”

Music buyers closer to Rose’s own age — those in their late teens and twenties — might not even have been alive when vinyl was still a widely available format, but they’ve been coming around to it in a big way. As well as buying LPs by the aforementioned classic-rock artists (either second-hand or as newly manufactured reissues), Rose notes that titles by new, up-and-coming acts sell well on vinyl, too. Panda Bear’s 2007 album, Person Pitch, consistently sells out on vinyl, as does last year’s debut album by Seattle indie-rock buzz band Fleet Foxes (whose label, Sub Pop, issued it in a luxurious gatefold sleeve).

Best of all, as vinyl’s popularity continues to rise, so does the quality and value of its pressings. Indie labels such as Matador, Merge, and reissue specialist 4 Men With Beards regularly press their releases on 180-gram heavyweight vinyl. Some of them even include a coupon for a one-time-only download of the very album you’ve just bought, so you can listen to it on your iPod, computer or CD player, too.

In a way, vinyl has become the music world’s equivalent of an artisan cottage industry. The few manufacturing plants that remain tend to take their craft very seriously, so the warm sound and aesthetic detail that make the LP so special are presided over with greater care than ever before. “The generation of people that are [manufacturing] records now, they’ve been doing it for 30 years or more, and they learned from people who had been doing it since the dawn of mass-produced vinyl,” Rose says. “For the most part, quality is high, and it’s going to only continue to get better as people demand more.”