NEW YORK — For the first time since the iTunes Store launched in 2003, sales of digital tracks and albums declined last year, Billboard reports. Analysts blame the rise of streaming services like Spotify and Pandora. Sales of CDs also took a big hit, as did album sales overall.
Meanwhile, one format quietly posted huge gains: vinyl records. LP sales were up an amazing 32 percent from 2012, continuing an improbable growth trend that began in the early 1990s and took off around 2007. In fact, as The Oregonian’s David Greenwald points out, this was the sixth straight year in which vinyl long-players have recorded their highest sales mark since the advent of Soundscan in 1991. The absolute numbers are still small: 6 million units, or about 2 percent of all album sales in the United States. But the growth has been startling, as you can see in a chart from Statista, my favorite German statistics portal: http://bit.ly/19NoC7A
What’s going on here? The rise of vinyl is probably best understood against the backdrop of the simultaneous decline of the CD. As digital music has migrated from compact discs onto hard drives — and, increasingly, the cloud — collectors interested in a physical copy of their favorite albums no longer see a reason to prefer CDs to LPs. In fact, many prefer the latter, whether for the sound quality, the nostalgic appeal, or simply the beauty of the vinyl record as a design object.
CDs and cassettes had their virtues as media, but aesthetics was not among them.
More broadly, the vinyl boom can be seen as yet another manifestation of the societal fetishization of all things “vintage” and analog.
