Analog Corner

Vinyl sales in America rose 30% in 2013, according to Nielsen SoundScan, which keeps a tally of recorded media sales. Because Nielsen SoundScan only skims the surface of the record retailing picture, missing considerable "nook and cranny" sales, the real number is probably far greater. The SoundScan numbers also omit sales of used vinyl, which are considerable.

By the time you read this, I will have posted on Analogplanet.com worldwide record-pressing totals, from information I've obtained direct from the pressing plants. These plants press only as many LPs as they've contracted for—and those orders are for the numbers the record labels estimate they can sell. Because labels tend to be conservative in these matters, I think the number of actual records pressed will prove truly informative.

Most of the plants have replied, but a few stragglers—including two majors—are still missing. In addition, I'll be posting the numbers of turntables and cartridges manufactured . They're eye-poppers, especially considering that, only a few years ago, the entire field was given up for dead.

30% of what ?
Of course, 30% of a small number is an even smaller number. "Instead of selling two LPs in 2013, they sold three," skeptics might say. But such skepticism was more meaningful a few years ago than it is today.

Worldwide vinyl sales are at their highest level since 1997. That was 17 years ago—the difference between 1950 and 1967. You'd have thought the world could have forgotten about vinyl in the length of time it took pop music to go from Patti Page to the Beatles (not that there was anything wrong with Patti Page).

In 2013, according to Nielsen SoundScan, some six million LPs were sold in the US—more than 500% more than were sold five years earlier. Sales around the world show equal growth and strength. Britain saw a 50% increase last year, to around 400,000 LPs.

Last year, the revenue from worldwide sales of LPs totaled more than $171,000,000, compared to about $55,000,000 in 2008, according to one source. For the reasons I outline above, I think it's safe to say that the real figure is closer to $200,000,000—not chump change in anyone's pocket.

"That's a tiny percentage of overall music sales—a couple of percent," skeptics say. "It won't save the music business." They keep moving the goalposts and changing the subject: from "dead and gone" to "won't save the business." When foodies point out how well Whole Foods and the organic-foods movement is doing, or the increased interest in gourmet cooking and dining, do people say, "Yeah, but in the context of the big supermarket chains and the fast-food business, fine cooking and dining is a tiny percentage of the overall food business"? I don't think they do, because they understand that mass-market appeal and specialty appeal are different things, and that comparing one to the other is useless—like comparing the Gap's products or sales numbers with those of John Varvatos.

No one suggests that vinyl will save the music business. Nor will the CD, which in 2013 saw yet another decrease in sales. Who thinks that, 17 years from now, CDs will have their strongest sales year since 2014?

Have you read online any of the recent "Vinyl Is Back" stories? I've read just about all of them—readers send me links from around the world. The stories are occasionally sympathetic or even uplifting, but more often they're dismissive or rudderless, as the writer—usually a young tech journalist—grapples with a phenomenon that defies his or her assumptions about inevitable technological advancement. Before writing these pieces, few have bothered to listen to a record.

The comment sections accompanying these articles are rife with hate—not too strong a word. I won't fill this column with the things I've been called when I respond, but the nicest example is "Luddite!" People who listen to LPs, the negative commenters charge, are "hipsters" who will soon abandon this absurd fixation and move on to the next trend. That one's been predicted for years now, but the number of people who appreciate LPs keeps growing. Or they say, "Yes, records are great if you like noise and distortion," or "They wear out after a few plays," or "The 'warmth' is a distortion"—or you hear about ticks and pops from the older disorderlies who never took care of their LPs in the first place.

The on-line debate
A recent post on Slate.com provides a good example of the media confusion and the snarky responses (footnote 1). Taking an outsider's perspective, staff writer Will Oremus first asks, in reaction to the 2013 uptick in LP sales, "What's going on here?" He quotes a Slate colleague who asserts that the vinyl resurgence is best understood "against the backdrop of the simultaneous decline in the CD," but the case he makes for tying together the two phenomena is, in my opinion, weak. Yes, CD sales continue to decline as low-resolution streaming services proliferate and files migrate to the cloud or to music servers, but that in no way explains the rise of the LP. As possible contributors to that rise, Oremus mentions vinyl's sound quality, nostalgic appeal, and physical beauty.

Those qualities of vinyl are as attractive today as they've always been, from the sale of the first CD in the early 1980s. It's more than a stretch to contend that people deprived of CDs are now, in their search for the comforting feel of a physical medium, gravitating toward a substitute that's larger, more fragile, more difficult to use, and more expensive.

Oremus then casts a wider net, positing that "the vinyl boom can be seen as yet another manifestation of the societal fetishization of all things 'vintage' and analog, which is pretty clearly a response to digitization, corporatization, globalization, and probably some other izations." I don't see it as that either, particularly because corporations today are also pushing vinyl, and I don't see the march back to cathode-ray-tube TVs.

Slate chose as the "Top Comment" one from a guy who begins: "As a dyed-in-the-wool vinyl fetishist, I will completely own up to the fact that the vinyl 'revival' is totally irrational." He goes on to explain in great detail why today's LPs don't sound better than CDs, how vinyl is inherently loaded with defects, how vinyl is not more "engaging," how it requires extra effort, and how even the superior-sleeve-art argument is "utterly dwarfed" by the possibilities of "digital art." He concludes by saying, "I have seen many a hipster start a record collection and then lose interest pretty quickly, the appeal of all things 'vintage' quickly losing its luster when the needle starts skipping. Thus, I anticipate that vinyl sales will plateau as the industry reaches all of the limited subset of true believers. And I, to be clear, am happy to be among them."

I conclude that this correspondent was full of it. I responded with a comment that began, "I don't believe you are an LP collector at all. If you are, you are 100% self-loathing. I feel sorry for you."