At first, it looked like it might be a momentary revolt against the digital future that would inevitably fade away: a rebellion based on plastic, cardboard and century-old technology that was simply too quaint to last. But after at least 15 years of growth, the renaissance of old-fashioned vinyl still seems to be alive and well. This Christmas was surely a case in point: thousands of us will have unwrapped records, the hardware that plays them, or both.
In 2022, 5.5m vinyl records were bought in the UK, the largest volume of sales since 1990. Over the first nine months of last year, British vinyl sales increased 13% year on year. The retail chain HMV has just returned to its famous premises on Oxford Street in central London: ceremonially opened in 1921 by Sir Edward Elgar, recently occupied by one of those irksome faux-American sweet shops, but now back in business as an updated version of its former self. It sells a lot more than records, but has set aside space for a mountain of vinyl, marketed “to a younger customer base” rather than the stereotype of nostalgic dads with money to burn.
Just to be clear: the seemingly endless growth of Spotify – not to mention TikTok and YouTube – now reflects the dominant way that most people listen to music, and the pre-eminence of those platforms inevitably dwarfs the revived interest in old-fashioned records. One of the most curious features of vinyl’s rebirth is that many albums are bought by people who don’t even own record-players; the point, it seems, is to play the music on your phone while swooning over the sleeve, as if the record is an objet d’art. Still, a growing number of people are clearly wary of the distracted, frantic, random kind of music experience ushered in by the digital age, and see vinyl as a very satisfactory alternative. I speak as someone whose habit was revived around 11 years ago – making a cup of tea and putting a record on is now a daily ritual that seems almost medicinal.
The industry that provides such pleasures, unfortunately, is in a mess. Back in 2015, as the vinyl renaissance gained pace, the Guardian sent me to one of Europe’s biggest vinyl-pressing plants – in the former East Germany, where Communist-era machinery had been refurbished, and ex-citizens of the GDR put back to work. It was quite something to see: a business founded on old-fashioned technology, precision and expertise, which was now trusted to press records by such icons as Kraftwerk and the Beatles. But the factory’s revival, I was told, was reaching the outer limits: no one anywhere in the world had built a new vinyl-pressing machine since the 1980s, so production bottlenecks were becoming an in-built part of the business, and any meaningful expansion seemed out of the question.
Now, new presses have finally been made, factories have grown, and vinyl-producing startups have opened, all over the world. The problem is, as the music industry stokes demand for records (witness, for example, the current ubiquity of hyped-up, limited-edition coloured pressings), the total capacity of vinyl manufacturers still lags far behind. That has played its part in pushing up costs, and hardening up a hierarchy that tends to put the kind of independent record labels that first sparked the vinyl revival at the back of the queue.
Just before Christmas, I had a long and fascinating conversation with Jack Clothier, the co-founder of independent British label Alcopop! Records, whose speciality is the kind of rough-edged, spirited alt-rock that has long defined itself against the mainstream. He gets his records pressed in the Czech Republic. Between 2019 and this year, he reckons, the cost has gone up by 85%. Worse still, major labels that come to pressing plants with vast orders for records by such modern titans as Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift – whose 2022 album Midnights sold nearly a million vinyl copies in the US alone – often push small fry like him out of the way, which has led to lead times of up to nine months.
Rock and pop music, older readers may recall, is meant to be about quick turnarounds and the shock of the new. “There needs to be a bit of passion with vinyl, because that’s what makes it such a brilliant format,” he told me. “But when you’ve got millions of records being sent through, it’s like, ‘We don’t have time for your little order, because it doesn’t bring the revenue in.’ When we lose that, vinyl becomes less exciting. It starts to lose its charm.”
Major labels have another case to answer. Notwithstanding rises in production costs, albums put out by the big corporates are often priced about £5 higher than many records on independent labels, and reissued classics sometimes edge close to £40, or even more. If you want a good example of the luxury economics at work, try this: with the help of Sony Music, the former Outkast rapper André 3000 has just put out a new album of instrumental music, on which he showcases the results of having spent some of the past five years learning the flute. According to the accompanying promotional blurb, it is the work of “an auteur whose work in music, film, fine arts and fashion continues to influence the cultural landscape on a global scale”. This seems to be partly intended as a justification of how much the triple-vinyl edition is likely to set you back when it is released later this month: depending on which seller you choose, somewhere between £85 and £100.
People who run record shops worry that all this sends out the message that vinyl is an impossibly expensive product, of no interest to the younger music devotees who the music industry will, sooner or later, need to keep the current revival going. But the most pernicious effect of all this profiteering is that it warps and distorts the fond, loving culture that surrounds vinyl records, and leaves people feeling they have been played, something that rather brings to mind a catchphrase beloved of the market traders of the West Midlands: “Never make a mug of your punter.”
The mainstream music business ought to be opening its own factories, and vigilantly keeping its prices down. What it seems to be doing is wringing out as much cash as it can, pushing small companies out of the way, and threatening the miraculous growth of a format that endears people to music far more deeply than anything digital. Nostalgic record-buyers of a certain age will recognise the basic story: of an industry that has given the world no end of happiness but is as addicted as ever to short-term windfalls and a grim cycle of boom and bust – which, appropriately enough, goes round and round again.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
