A revival has been in the recording booth for the vinyl industry with record sales reaching chart-topping highs in the 2020s. Despite the digital age bringing consumers copious ways to listen to music with a touch of their fingertips — at a much easier and low-effort degree nonetheless — a renewed attraction persists towards these clunky and vintage things. How did this happen? Why is a new generation discovering a recording medium that was considered dead for over a decade? Vinyl needs participation.
With the overwhelming development of technology, our lives have become hot-wired for convenience. For the past generation, music is something that solely existed on a phone or a computer due to streaming services grabbing the music industry by its neck.
Vinyl allows for a different experience that many young people have never had. It is not just opening an app and pressing play. You first have to sort through your collection, pick something out, place it onto the turntable, set the needle and then turn it over. It is something that compels you to interact. Listening to a record is a multisensory immersive experience. It is romantic.
It does not feel as fulfilling to collect digital MP3 files that appear on the other side of a computer screen. Its configuration is entirely made up of pixels. There is something novel about opening up an LP — a 12-inch, Long-Playing record — examining the cover art up close and opening up a double that holds photos of the band, lyric sheets and even goodies like posters or stickers.
There is a lot of thought surrounding the composition of an album — the artwork, the tracklist, the aesthetic components — and experiencing the physicality of it tells a story that you cannot get from a combination of ones and zeros in a digital scape.
The process of going out and purchasing a record in a record shop has a lot of merit to it as well. There is something to be enjoyed about digging in crates in a place plastered with posters and band flyers, a tune playing overhead. It is a favorite pastime for my dad and me. We pull out cover art that makes us laugh and point out each other’s least favorite albums to poke fun. He smiles at me when I put my Fugazi album on the counter. I laugh at him when he purchases his sixth copy of Led Zeppelin II because “It’s so good that he must buy it every time he sees one in good condition.”
In this sense, vinyl feels like a return to form. It can unite those who grew up with it with a younger generation experiencing something wholly new. It is necessary to talk about music and receive recommendations from people, rather than algorithms. When music becomes an event, you learn a lot about the people around you.
For many, vinyl is something that never went away. It has always been valuable and meaningful to its collectors. While the digital world presents us with amazing things such as access to millions of songs, or social media platforms that allow artists to put their music out there in an accessible way, it cannot be denied that something is lost when music is wholly consumed in this fashion.
Vinyl never should have left, but it is coming back.