I understand the concept that vinyl has become quite popular. I get that. I’m not confused. I was in a music shop early in the morning and I saw a queue of middle aged people buying one or three albums on the format. It reminded me of an Open All Hours joke when Ronnie Barker lined up ten sets of cigarettes on the counter for his regulars who would be in as soon as the door opened.
Is vinyl proper big now? The shop had devoted a lot more prime real-estate to the format recently. Is it no longer a niche and a music shop can actual make real money selling the format?
NOTE: I do not, and have never, used vinyl so it’s a pointless, dated format to me.
Resident Music in Brighton have recently expanded their vinyl section although the whole place is only about half the size of Arkwright’s shop. HMV seem to be jumping on the bandwagon too although they seem content to scatter albums randomly on a couple of racks with no system in evidence.
It’s a fad, isn’t it?
I suppose it gets people back in the record shops instead of buying CDs in Tesco. I rarely buy new releases but if I did they would be on CD. I do buy tons of vinyl records from charity shops and car boot sales but the variety that probably never made it close to a CD release or reissue.
It’s still only a tiny fraction of overall music sales, but in terms of niche Indie record shops I presume it amounts to a sizable chunk of their revenue and second hand shops are springing up off the back of it. I’ve seen the prices dealers charge the shops though, the margins are pretty small and I can’t imagine anyone is getting rich off the whole Vinyl thing and I’m not aware of any shops that sell exclusively new Vinyl and nothing else.
I buy the odd vinyl as a fanboy purchase of bands I’m really into but for day to day stuff I’m happy with a CD or a download. Nice to have the choice and if the vinyl revival keeps record shops open so I can browse and make that choice then it’s all good but not sure I want to acquire loads of deluxe vinyl reissues or grandiose gatefold Iimited edition and pay 20 quid every time I want a new record so long live the reasonably priced, well packaged CD option!
Last year, combined vinyl LP sales were just over half of what Ed Sheeran has sold of his new album, around two thirds of Sam Smith’s album and about the same as the Arctic Monkeys sold of their last album.
So it’s not a big deal yet.
But, this has encouraged retailers to up their distribution and the first quarter of this year was up around another 70%.
It’s still relatively small numbers, though.
Isn’t it the case that almost all pressing plants have disappeared? No one is making any new vinyl pressing machines. So it’s a case of resurrecting old and still functional machines. The thing that stops me buying vinyl is that there seems to be no guarantee as to the quality of the pressing. 180gm vinyl means nothing if the machine that pressed the record is not up to, er, scratch. Sales would really have to improve to kickstart a revival of the pressing industry.
There’s only two companies in the world producing the acetate recording blanks used to cut records, and one of those is a chap in Japan who makes them at home.
The other process for cutting records, Direct Metal Mastering, which was used by EMI and WEA during the late 1980s, seems to have died out altogether.
Exactly, the lazy journalists that write about it talk about the percentage rise in sales. It’s pretty easy to achieve a 100% rise in sales when last year you sold one!
I would imagine though that the proportion of vinyl sales by actual real record shops with racks and everything, compared to the Internet (and Tesco!) is probably higher than their sales of CDs which, if true, might make concentrating on vinyl sales the thing to do.
I have a very tiny collection of vinyl which is almost entirely composed of albums I’ve loved forever. It’s purely there to accompany a nice drink of an evening, and I don’t have any liquid nitrogen cooled strontium speaker wire, a valve amplifier the size of a Fiat or a turntable that looks like a bit of HAL. It doesn’t sound better, or “warmer” or “fuller” or any of that confirmationbiasballs stuff, but I occasionally enjoy the ritual for mostly nostalgic reasons.
I’m the only person I know, outside of Afterword people, who owns a record player. It’s not in any way big, but it does seem to be growing – from negligible to small.
Did you get Now! 8 yet?
Weren’t you into cassettes a couple of years ago?
Perhaps not a “proper” music shop, but I worked in HMV a couple of years ago when I was a student. I remember a turning point where we would receive a vinyl copy for practically every release where it was available. From all of this stock, we were fortunate if we sold one vinyl record each month.
People like to look at them, and I’m sure quite a few enjoy the concept. It just never translated into any meaningful sales in my experience.
I would imagine independent record shops might sell a higher proportion of vinyl, but I doubt they would sell a much higher quantity.
But I think vinyl is silly so I’m biased.
When I started buying vinyl again (in the mid-naughties) it was a mega-cheap way of discovering and buying music, as I bought it all from boots/chazzas. When new releases and chart stuff began to be widely available on vinyl I was both gobsmacked and delighted as I never thought this would happen again. I don’t buy new vinyl very often, as both money and space are big limiting factors, but I’ve treated myself to a few this year. If I was wealthy and had a big house, I’d have a room full of the stuff, no doubt.
“noughties” Ahem.
You were right the first time, missus.
Even my auto-correct* is a perv.
*I’m surprised it didn’t change that to auto-erotic.
“Auto-correct” is bad enough.
But don’t beat yourself up about it…
They now sell record decks in Tesco Extra, something I never thought I’d see. Crap ones, but nonetheless…
I walked around the centre of a major city last month, and two of the record stores I used to respect had branched out into selling those awful Steepletone record players.
Cynically I thought that vinyl has been getting more profile because a) there’s no point in going head to head with supermarkets and Amazon on CDs and b) there’s lots out there that can be picked up and I presume marked up.
Given how few shops there are that sell cds now it’s hard to judge the impact it’s had but I was taken aback on my last trip to Amoeba in LA to see how much floor space had been given to vinyl. My local indy record shop started to feature vinyl much more but it was mostly car boot stuff at bonkers prices (to my eye at least) and it’s now a grocery shop.
Amazing that some charity shops will try and charge bonkers prices for the most mundane vinyl LPs (Leo Sayer anyone?) and yet I was able to buy the double CD of The Essential Billy Bragg in mint condition for a mere 99 new pence at the weekend.
@davebigpicture Who me? Cassettes? Snort. No!
Not taking the P***. I was sure you mentioned doing a Disapointment Choir cassette release as they were popular amongst fledgling bands if they included a download code or did I imagine it?
Excuse the spelling error…….
I suppose you are all talking about the UK? (Sweden? Australia?)
In Germany there are quite a lot of record shops that sell “new” vinyl releases only. In the last three years the big shopping centers (Saturn and MediaMarkt) have expanded their vinyl departments (they now occupy more space than the CD sections), and these include not only pop/rock releases but jazz, classical and world music too.
They obviously make good business, and from what I heard people mostly buy their vinyl in actual shops because they can check the pressing and they don’t get the usual Amazon hassle with torn inner sleeves and other packaging issues.
Could the moral of that be, Fatima, that those few who are still buying music would prefer to buy vinyl than CDs?
Very good of the kids buy music. My 12 year old son owns one album. By Lordi!
At his age I had a small pile of singles. Then again he has a cupboard full of computer games.
I don’t get this referencing of “the few who are still buying music” – maybe you all subscribe to the Spotify newsletter and think those streaming services have already taken over…?
As one youngster told me recently, streaming music is like listening to the radio in a passing car. They all want to “have” their favorite songs or albums, whether via iTunes or a real store. And customers in record stores here aren’t just only fat balding blokes in their forties…
When I was 12 I owned precisely zero albums. In my day, most people started their album collections later. Why should that not start again?
I’m the OP.
FYI It was FOPP so it was all newly pressed discs, each retailing at £10 and over.
Fopp / HMV had a few exclusive pressings and dug out some of their old stock at the weekend so there was at least four people sighted outside a couple of their shops queuing.
It’s peak hipster.
I will fade again into the niche sidelines pretty soon.
There’s some truth in that, Six.
Great line from the movie While We’re Young
“It’s like their apartment is full of stuff we threw out – but it looks so good the way they have it”
Let us know when you fade into the niche sidelines and we’ll give you a proper sendoff.
We’re in a strange hinterland between the old model of flogging CDs in shops which is still generating enough revenue to keep a chain of HMVs open, knocking out cheap stuff on mail order, the deluxe vinyl option, illegal downloading and streaming.
Streaming is probably the future especially for younger, casual fans who would only have bought a handful of CDs a year but it’s not as clear cut as that and there are still millions £ of physical product being sold.
I think a more coherent pricing policy would really help. The price of new CDs should be much lower anyway to reflect their very low resale value. Downloads should be cheaper still to reflect the lack of physical printing, storage, distribution etc.
The pricing is all over the shop though (pardon the pun).
I like Everything Everything, and while I’m probably only a few mouse clicks away from downloading their new lp for free I’d like to give them a few quid for their efforts.
The options in my local shop are Vinyl for 17.99, bog standard CD in jewel case for £12. I was gonna get the CD but normally in the shop I’d expect to pay less than a tenner and usually have nice card backed packaging rather than a tacky old jewell case.
The alternative is a “deluxe” download for £9 which includes extra tracks not on any other format
Tempted to download for free and wait for a Fopp sale!
The pricing is indeed all over the shop. Until yesterday I had never bought a cd from Sainsburys. I went in there to get a book for the Old Man for Fathers day. I browsed through the small selection of cd’s on display. The new Blur album was £6.99 which I thought was really cheap. Didn’t buy because the tracks I have heard didn’t grab me. However the complete Door albums (6 discs) was £12.99 which I snaffled up. I have bought new vinyl but it isn’t normal because of the high price – if I can get 2 new release cd’s for £20 as opposed to one new release lp for £20 then the cd’s will win every time – added bonus I can play them in the car. Occasionally there is an exception – the last Marianne Faithfull lp was £14.00 and including a free cd 9not mp3). I also saw the SUN RA collection on double vinyl for £18.00 including free cd but it was 2 weeks after my son had bought for me on cd.
It’s the majors (looks at Universal over top of glasses) who are jacking up the dealer prices for their big sellers that are to blame. A friend who works for a distributor says they got a call late on Friday saying that from now on the base price of several titles like Dark Side Of the Moon were £5 more.
Some shops just take the piss thou. Fopp selling Unknown Pleasure \ Closer for £25 a shot when the dealer is £11.
I think it will start to decline again but I really don’t mind. As long as it gets people keeping these shops open whatever they are buying then that’s fine. No gun to your head, no justification needed.
Universal dealer prices have plummeted over the last twelve months! For a long time they were the home of the thirty quid retail LP, now it’s more like twenty. Which is still about nineteen pounds fifty more than I would be prepared to pay for the new Mumford LP, but hey, the kids like them.
And speaking of kids, it’s worth pointing out that a massive proportion of the vinyl I sell is to people aged (I’d guess) between 16 and 25, the first generation that was supposed to never set foot in record shops because they hadn’t grown up buying physical singles. It’ll always find a way.
Yeah but they must be wearing grey wigs.
@davebigpicture Oh I see! Producing rather than consuming? Yeah, we very briefly considered it on the basis that people buying from merch tables generally want a physical thing, and it seemed like a cute gimmick. I wouldn’t consider buying on cassette, though.
I wonder if part of the boost for record shops comes from the fact that LPs are just too big to fit through the letter box? Amazon etc. seem a lot less convenient when you have to make a trek out to some depot in the middle of nowhere at the weekend to pick your LP up.
Nah the bastards frequently leave them on the doorstep or under the doormat whatever online retailer you use.
If you’re buying UK vinyl from the 80s, postie can easily fold it and get it through the letterbox.
If it gets damaged it doesn’t really matter as it’s probably some frightful record involving Pete Waterman.
This happened to a friend of mine (folded Rush album, not SAW). Incidentally, I now get Amazon purchases delivered to a Click+ address, usually a newsagent or similar and collect at my convenience.
Lots of good points made above by some of you. I have no bias towards either, although I do think a well pressed and mastered LP will always sound better to the CD/download equivalent, OOAA. Some of comments seem to be by people who clearly have never heard an LP played never mind owned one who are very derisory towards vinyl. Those people need have no fear you will not be forced to listen to an LP at any time. As for sales of vinyl why is it referred to as “a tiny percentage”, of what? Where do you get…oh bollocks can`t be bothered with this tosh anymore and I have to get up to change `Dark Side Of The Mule` over, ha ha.
Presumably a tiny percentage of total record sales?
From your comments you`ll be disappointed to know it`s not as tiny as some of the people above think. Go and look for the figures on yon tinternet for proof.
I suppose it depends on your definition of tiny, but vinyl sales appear to account for about 2-3% of album sales. And more than half of the biggest sellers are re-releases.
As an aside, most measures seem to be based on album sales. Whether the album has a long term future is a moot point. As is the impact any demise of the album would have on vinyl sales. Would enough people be prepared to pay £6 or whatever for singles for shops to remain viable ?
I have some vinyl. Partly, for aesthetic reasons, I’ll admit. Hell yeah, they look cool bro. And partly for sentimental reasons.
Otherwise, it’s all streaming (Spotify primarily) for me. i have no desire to possess music in a physical format any longer
Australian indie shops seem to be stocking more and more vinyl and fewer cds so one can only assume they are selling.
Most appear to be your classics of various genres rather than all new releases. Even saw a glass case full of pre recorded cassettes. Actually played some tapes of records done in the 70’s /80’s threat a beat box into the hi fi and sounded pretty good ….but I digress.
I asked a young bloke who was buying and why. he Said it was younger people broadening their music by going back in to classic albums and people sick of the whole MP3 /stream sound …just saying.
New vinyl is pretty
and those packages which have the cd & FLAC too tick all boxes – yes, we are being ripped off but I’m an addict
Amen brother, now retake your seat after you’ve taken a free beverage.
Vinyl Anonymous welcomes all
Can’t see me buying new vinyl in the way I buy CDs, price, as says Steve, being a great leveller, but I will avidly look thru old vinyl shops for 2nd hand, and have bought a deck specifically for that (and the 400 odd in the garage, sent there after digitising a decade or more ago.) And like Bob, I am enjoying the ritual of de-sleeving and lifting the needle to the groove.