Vinyl Comeback!

I am not so sure if the title of this post is a hopeful plea or the mark of a current change in the music industry. The former comes from my own lips, "Vinyl come back!" or maybe "Vinyl please come back!"

The latter comes from all over the nation with individuals noticing the resurgence in this medium and recognizing the reasons why it makes sense, even from a business point of view.

Way back in 2008, TIME Magazine published an article, "Vinyl Gets Its Groove Back," to call attention to the comeback of vinyl. The article explains the appeal of vinyl to young and old music lovers:

"Like the comeback of Puma sneakers or vintage T shirts, vinyl's resurgence has benefited from its retro-rock aura. Many young listeners discovered LPs after they rifled through their parents' collections looking for oldies and found that they liked the warmer sound quality of records, the more elaborate album covers and liner notes that come with them, and the experience of putting one on and sharing it with friends, as opposed to plugging in some earbuds and listening alone. "Bad sound on an iPod has had an impact on a lot of people going back to vinyl," says David MacRunnel, a 15-year-old high school sophomore from Creve Coeur, Mo., who owns more than 1,000 records.”

I like how the article compared the experience of listening to music on vinyl with an ipod. I love my ipod, and I use it all the time to listen to music on-the-go and to keep all my music in one place. However, there is nothing better than when my friends and I sit around a record player with the vinyl spinning around the needle in the same way it did when Clapton or The Temptations or Neil Diamond first made the pressing. Music has the power to connect with people on very deep levels, and next to live music, I haven't found anything as pure as vinyl.

Q13 FOX News in Seattle did a report on the market for vinyl records that wasn't too kind toward CDs, but reasonably so:

"CD sales are falling by the millions to MP-3 downloads and other formats. Shipments of CD's are down by 17%, and the future of that format is not bright for the recording industry.”

(Perhaps not as bright as the future of that format is for the mixtape enthusiasts.)

Q13 also notes, “The market for LP's is strong in Seattle...a new report shows shipments of records here and across the U.S. are up by 36 percent.” And when has Seattle's music culture led us astray before?

Adding to the list, The Los Angeles Times decided to call some attention to the comeback of vinyl early in 2009 in an article called "In a Digital Age, Vinyl's Making a Comeback":

“SoundScan reported 1.88 million sales of new LPs last year, an 89% increase over 2007. And that figure is almost certainly conservative, as many independent retailers do not report their sales to SoundScan; the service says that more than two-thirds of vinyl albums are sold at indie operations.”

The article could not be more right about the overwhelming presence of vinyl being bought, sold, listened to, talked about and generally loved at indie operations. This passion exists so much so that one organization declared the third Saturday of every April "Record Store Day." The organization, of the same name, promotes this day as "one day that all of the independently owned record stores come together with artists to celebrate the art of music."


Their website is worth checking out, even if you don't immediately grasp the importance of independently owned record stores. I found this quote from Paul McCartney (yes, the Paul McCartney) on the site:

“There’s nothing as glamorous to me as a record store. When I recently played Amoeba in LA, I realised what fantastic memories such a collection of music brings back when you see it all in one place. This is why I’m more than happy to support Record Store Day and I hope that these kinds of stores will be there for us all for many years to come. Cheers!”

Another thing the site has to offer is a list of participating record stores, which is useful way to begin sharing in the experience Paul McCartney describes as "glamorous." Searching by state, I found five record stores in Pittsburgh I have been to or heard a lot about. There are many more, but here are some good places to start:

1. Dave's Music Mine, Southside
2. Eide's Entertainment, Downtown
3. Jerry's Records, Squirrel Hill
4. Paul's CDs, Bloomfield
5. Wicked Discs, Oakland

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a more thorough list on their website. I tried to limit the list to places a University of Pittsburgh student can easily get to since this is where most of my readership comes from, but I would love to hear about any other places worth checking out.