The Rise In Popularity of Vinyl Records

Here’s the Cliff’s Notes: You ruined it for us, but it's not your fault.

7/12/2023 - Dan

Vinyl Records, PVC, analogue music. It’s a format for listening to music that has existed since the dawn of man. Well, not really, it started with the phonograph in the late 19th century and moved onto 78rpm shellac records towards the end of the century. We didn’t see environmentally disastrous polyvinyl chloride record until way later. So while this hasn’t existed “since the days of the cave man” one could argue that the acoustics of taking in sound waves through the ear canal and ear drums from environmental noise was sort of of nature’s own “analogue music,” although that may be a stretch, so please feel free to provide email feedback if you object.

Now that I’ve wasted your time with the opening paragraph to this important article, I’d like to skip over the 78rpm shellac stuff and get right into 12” 33rpm and 45rpm, 7” records as well as the rise and fall of the record from the time I pinpointed to in the first bullshit paragraph to 1979, when digital mastering became a thing and records were no longer guaranteed Analogue to Analogue to Analogue (AAA) presses and became ADA (not like an Assistant District Attorney, although ex ADA, VP Kamala Harris was spotted buying really expensive records, that I want but can't afford, in what looked like a pretty staged photo-op) or DDA (digital to digital to analogue) presses.

Here's how to decode those three letter arcronyms: The first letter refers to the recording source (whether they used analogue tapes or digital sources which as well were pioneered and used by Moog collaborator and A Clockwork Orange composer Wendy Carlos in the 70s.) The second letter refers to the format of the master( reel-to-reel, DAT and so on.) The last letter refers to the format it is packaged and sold as (vinyl, CD, files like flac, etc). With those exceptions, the general rule of thumb is before 1979 = probably analogue in every stage, after that it varies.

Some records put out in the 90s were AAA; you might be surprised (or not, if you’re cool) to know that rap legend and activist Tupac Shakur had broad tastes in music and enjoyed reel-to-reel as a listening format; also his top-grossing and critically acclaimed 2xLP All Eyez On Me’s first run was an AAA press. So was Nirvana’s Nevermind, and Rage Against the Machine’s self titled album.

To quickly explain the general difference between analogue and digital, analogue is a continuous frequency that does not represent a binary value the same way digital frequencies do by varying voltages in the frequency current. What this means is that analogue requires less bandwidth and will naturally produce even harmonic distortion. This is the kind of “audio distortion” that sounds organic and pleasing to the ear. Digital on the other hand offers a higher decibel value of frequency range and is more precise, but is not a continuous signal in the same way analogue is considered to be, requires more bandwidth and the sort of harmonic distortion can range from odd harmonic (which sounds harsh) to even (which has that “warm” sound) to almost none (which will have a very precise and clinical sound) -- depending on the hardware used to decode that digital signal into an analogue output for the speakers.

So why’d we do away with analogue? Well at first we moved onto magnetic cassette tapes which were less of a pain to deal with than records (I’m skipping over 8 tracks!) and you could pop them in your car or use them with walk men. That’s still technically an analogue format of media. Eventually the compact disc over took both in sales, offering the capacity for more audio detail at 16-bits and 44khz “red book” encoding — but most importantly, the ability to skip to whatever track you wanted: something which cassettes lacked entirely, and record players could accommodate in a more cumbersome and not at all portable fashion. So again, CD it became.

While Vinyl never truly went out of fashion, record players in the 80s became an afterthought when incorporated into comprehensive stereo systems and the quality and design of turntable manufacturing plummeted. Even the famed Technics put out some of their worst turntables in the early to mid 80s, until they got their shit together with the "MK3" in 1989 again.

In DJ culture -- largely hip-hop and house -- vinyl, reel-to-reel and cassette never died. Vinyl remained dominant for its acoustics and the popularity of 45 rpm breakbeat records, used with dual-table DJ setups that facilitated beat-matching and scratching with a DJ needle on a felt slip mat. For consumers, no less, it was history and cassette tapes were also on their way out.

Still, vinyl became cool again and "indie" in the 90s when Eddie Vedder put out Pearl Jam’s Vitalogy on vinyl and encouraged his fans to buy the record over the cd. They even made the CD packaging look like a record gatefold.

Then there’s the iconic scene in “The Rock” with Nicholas Cage where he’s boning his fiancee while rifling through presumably AAA Beatles presses he received, announcing to his balls deep partner that they sound better than CDs. He didn’t really explain how or why, but given that it was produced by Michael Bay, the explanation probably would have been “Didn’t you see what Eddie Vedder said?”

Anyways, us Schroeder Zine nerds started buying vinyl around 1995 or so with our after school job income, at a store in NY tastelessly named Vinyl Solution. My first record was a direct metal, analogue pressing of Coltrane’s Blue Train which I was able to play on my mom’s 1979 turntable. Soon after that, beginning our zine, we would receive a flood of promotional punk presses in the mail at our PO Box and it went from there. Vinyl was not only a fun pastime, but in its used format, it was often cheaper than a CD; plus Nick Cage from the Rock had said it was good and so did Eddie Vedder's pal Neil Young.

Blah blah blah, MP3 happened and then Y2K. 128kbit was considered good, 192 great, 320kbit a bit overkill for hard drive storage and download speeds. By 2005 or so, CD resale value was garbage and there was a growing detachment to physical media with piracy at large and MP3 players storing more music than possible in a CD binder (that may or may not have been stolen out of the back of your car in 2002.)

Cheaper, larger storage options made collecting high-VBR or 320kbit mp3 and lossless codecs like "FLAC" more practical. The all time greatest music torrenting site, what.cd, an invite only tracker hosted so many releases catalogued by format, year of release, mastering job, and so forth that it may as well have been the library of congress. Records were dirt cheap, $1-$8 could get you a VG+ copy of an OG AAA press. Your digital could now sit on an MP3 player and the tangible, physical format of music that collectors have a fondness for could now be purchased cheaply and cherished as the beaten up, ring wear heavy, obscure press you’d bring home and dust off.

For awhile, vinyl sales laid pretty dormant outside of metropolitan areas. There seemed to be less incentive to buy CDs when digital is just digital, the sound is affected by the playback hardware, not where you store it. Vinyl, on the other hand, was the only way outside of Reel to Reel and some cassettes to get an all-analogue experience. One has to be in a physical format, the other one can be in an iPod nano stuffed up your ass. See the difference?

Things were gravy until the RIAA and Interpol squashed torrenting and what.cd was no more, much to Trent Reznor's, a frequent patron of oink's palace, what.cd and apparent fan of piracy, dismay.** Digital sales became infrequent and consumers shifted to the convenience of compressed digital streaming services played out of mediocre hardware components with mediocre ear buds (Mine were $7 panasonics.) Compared to that, a record played on a decent setup would be a massive breath of fresh air.

So what am I getting at here? I need to wrap this up because no one is going to keep reading this as I’ve made a lot of rather boring points: vinyl is no longer a cheap listening solution. Physical media is extremely popular now, and there may be many reasons why.

The sociological: In a post pandemic, accelerated culture of internet isolation, we are no longer as communal as we once were and the bonds we once shared within our communities have weakened and transformed. The ephemeral nature of digital for many only adds to the dissociative quality of living “in the cloud” and a growing desire for grounding, tangible objects has not only made records more appealing, but cassettes and even CDs. Whether this "grounding" technique works or only further engenders materialistic consumerism remains to be seen. Ultimately, this means that people will buy records mastered from compact discs that sound worse than the digital source, so they can have a pizza sized version of a badly mastered CD, to grip tightly for comfort. It’s understandable, but it’s also an RIAA cash grab and environmentally unfriendly.

The technical: many people have had it with the shitty, tinny sound pumping out from Spotify into their earbuds and enjoy the even harmonic distortion and warmth that AAA vinyl or even modern, audiophile grade vinyl has to offer. They may even just prefer music from those older, pre 1980s eras. Even if a record is digitally sourced, the masters the lacquer is cut from can be so high bit rate and frequency responsive that the album would could be a terabyte, and then you’d still need the right hardware for it to sound right. That’s why you can look at MFSL presses, which often use analogue to digital to analogue, as large platters that play what would have been insanely huge files.

The header graph demonstrates this steep rise in vinyl sales, which of course boosts the price due to good ole supply and demand (sadly, there's no time machine to go back and make Relatively Clean Rivers print more copies of their 1976 self titled record whose masters are now destroyed.) Online databases and marketplaces like discogs now dictate the fair market value of vinyl, which is 3x to 10x the price of what it in 2010. This is particularly true of those audiophile grade presses or the shrinking number of for sale, pre-1979 AAA pressings.

Basically, it’s a bad time to collect vinyl from a cost basis -- as it seems like a bubble that could burst at any moment. Still: will finite, decreasingly available classics like an OG UK Pressing of Dark Side of the Moon diminish in value any time soon, vs say, an audiophile grade copy of The Smashing Pumpkin’s Siamese Dream? Time will tell.

It is a strange time for audiophile culture to be booming so hard, not merely in terms of pricey records and expensive setups, but components for digital as well. Are the members of the "elite" audiophile community wealthy with disposable income, or going into debt over gear they can't afford, or simply looking for comfort? Likely all. As we face the precipice of economic collapse, global conflict and what seems like a somewhat stochastic but no less causality based chain of events leading us into darker and darker times, will that 1998, “500 copies printed” indie rock record still sell for $400 in a couple of years, or will people be spending the money on medical bills and just trying to survive in an ever harsh, reality-facing, nickel and dime economy?

**Since the take down of what.cd in Nov 2016, locally stored music has been sidelined by streaming and diminished at a predictably accelerated rate. Just shy of 7 years later, much of it is considered "lost media." RIPs of compact discs, not the actual disc itself, will sell for $50 or higher -- piracy for profit; driven by desperation or greed -- the very antithesis of "community," which, in whatever achievable form, is something we need now.