Vinyl Nation, a new documentary from directors Kevin Smokler and Christopher Boone, is, as the title may suggest, as much a chronicle about a growing community than it is about the medium of vinyl records. To be clear, the history of vinyl pressing, from its early market dominance to its later decline due to the […]
Blessed (and weird) are the record store saints, who save God-forsaken disks from ending up in landfill graveyards, finding them venerating homes, instead. Unlike most independent record retailers following today’s standard playbook, replacing compact discs and used vinyl in their bins with virgin 12-inch vinyl re-issues and contemporary pressings, a few shopkeepers still operate shrines […]
If 2020 brought anything good, it’s another high point in the unimaginable meteoric rise in record sales. Sales grew 46% from 2019, with 27.5 million LPs sold in the United States last year, vinyl outsold CDs for the first time since the 1980s — when vinyl started losing to its polycarbonate plastic counterpart. It’s clear […]
Considering the hyperactive mind of the modern music listener, the 50 million songs in Spotify’s catalog and Amazon’s universe of subpar listening devices, can anyone tell which music medium sounds best anymore? What does “sounds best” even mean? While we’re at it, what the hell is sound? Glad you asked because there’s a whole lotta […]
A new report from the RIAA (Record Industry Association of America) found that vinyl album revenues of $232 million accounted for 62% of total physical revenues (CDs, vinyl), marking the first time vinyl exceeded CD sales since the mid-1980s. By comparison, $129.9 million was spent on compact discs. That said, vinyl sales still only accounted […]