Vinyl Gets Its Groove Back
Vinyl’s big comeback has gone mainstream. What began as a hipster revival in the early 2000s is now a major pop phenomenon, with both Adele and Taylor Swift breaking single-week vinyl sales records in late 2021. The vintage format has re-energized older fans, and inspired young fans to start building their collections. But after 15 consecutive years of growth, consumer demand for vinyl records now outpaces the industry’s ability to manufacture them. With expenses rising and vinyl-pressing delays dragging on for months at a time, the record business—though more lucrative than it’s been in decades—is feeling the cost of its own success.
Vinyl revenue grew more vigorously than any other format in 2021, according to the Recording Industry Association of America’s year-end data, released in March. With estimated retail sales totaling $1.04 billion—a benchmark figure not seen since 1986—the format had a banner year. And though vinyl sales make up a small percentage of industry revenue overall—just 7 percent compared to streaming’s 83 percent—last year its revenue growth outpaced streaming’s by a mile: 61 percent versus 23 percent.
And vinyl’s impact feels bigger. No other format can match the tactile pleasure of handling a record by its edges, placing it on the turntable, and watching it spin. Vinyl’s warm surface noise can evoke nostalgia even in listeners born long after the LP’s golden era. Above all, its collectibility as an object—a symbol of fandom—sparks the consumer impulse in music lovers who want to own a little piece of their favorite artist. So, while digital streaming meets listeners’ expectations of convenience, affordability, and access to vast libraries of music, vinyl satisfies their craving for something tangible.
With estimated retail sales totaling $1.04 billion—a benchmark figure not seen since 1986—the format had a banner year.
“Especially for the younger generations, we live in such an online world that having something physical is a big token of, ‘Wow, life is real again’,” says Nicole Otero M.M. '19, international marketing coordinator for Secretly Group, a family of independent labels whose artists include Phoebe Bridgers, Bon Iver, and Mitski.
As an indie label oriented toward a youngish fanbase, Secretly Group’s labels depend heavily on the vinyl market to reach listeners. “The pop acts rely more on other formats that are not necessarily physical, whereas for indie labels like Secretly, vinyl sales are still a big aspect of our charting,” Otero says. “The more vinyl you sell, the higher you position yourself.”
The market for vintage-style products extends beyond vinyl, Otero says. Secretly Group, like many other labels, focuses considerably on cassette manufacturing as well, and has some artists who elect to release cassettes exclusively. Because cassettes are cheaper to manufacture—and cheaper to purchase—many fans prefer the format, despite its reputation for poor audio quality and the scarcity of functioning cassette decks. What matters most to these fans isn’t how the product sounds but how it demonstrates allegiance to their favorite artist.
“If you just want to hear the music, you can definitely do that for free,” Otero says. “But if you’re really invested—that’s where the superfan comes into play.”
Celia Palau Lodge M.M. '17, senior international product manager at the U.K.-based label Cooking Vinyl, agrees with Otero. “I think that it’s really become, more than anything, a merch item rather than a way to listen to music,” she says.
A Scratch in the Record?
Cooking Vinyl’s roster reaches a very different demographic than does Secretly Group’s; it represents long-standing artists like Billy Bragg, Suzanne Vega, and Ron Sexsmith. But it still depends heavily on LP revenue for its continued success. Ongoing disruptions in vinyl manufacturing have made Palau Lodge’s job much more difficult.
“It’s just been a bit of a nightmare. It’s been crazy,” she says. “It’s up to us to try to make it work for the artist. We try to do our best.”
Industrywide, record labels shipped 16 million more vinyl units in 2021 than in 2020, according to RIAA data. While this has been great for revenue, there simply aren’t enough vinyl-pressing plants on the planet to keep up with fans’ appetite for LPs. Manufacturing turnaround times of six months or more are now the norm—and even this time frame often requires a fee to expedite the process. Because production capacity is so limited, labels must reserve time at vinyl plants long before they even know which albums they intend to press. What’s more, costs have shot upward in every category imaginable, from labor and shipping to PVC and cardboard, catching labels off guard, with no alternative but to pay more.
“The cost of manufacturing is going up by the week,” Palau Lodge says, citing her most recent project as an example. “We’ve just been told that if we don’t order a certain amount of vinyl by Wednesday, it’s going up 20 percent.”
In many cases, records are listed for online presale at a fixed price point, even as the label’s expenses continue to rise. Further complicating matters, artists must decide whether to release a recording digitally and then follow up with a physical product months later or to simply wait until all formats can be released simultaneously. In weighing this decision, artists have to wonder whether fans will lose interest if the wait drags on too long.
So far it appears that the answer is no. For the time being, fans are still eager to buy, which means labels are scrambling to get their records pressed and plants are fully booked through 2022. “Everybody has capacity booked for ages,” Otero says.
Popularity comes at a price. As manufacturing costs trickle down to consumers, Palau Lodge fears that many fans will be priced out of the vinyl market, and she wonders if vinyl’s extreme desirability may ultimately spell the end of the format.
“This is the human dilemma. We do have this instinct of having to own something. But I think it’s slowly going to become impossible—sustainably impossible, whether you look at it on a climate basis or you’re looking at it on a production basis,” Palau Lodge says. “For now, it’s working. But I have my doubts where this is going to go.”
Otero expressed her reservations this way: “I think there will be a shift at some point…. One of the things we studied at Berklee was the idea that vinyl became so expensive back in the day, that’s when the format kind of died.”
But, she added, “Fans will be fans.”
High Fidelity
These days, vinyl’s fanbase ranges all the way from Generation Z to baby boomers with decades-old record collections (now worth thousands of dollars). The Boston-based chain Newbury Comics has been selling records to this entire spectrum of buyers since before vinyl was considered vintage. Other stores have come and gone over the years, but Newbury Comics has been Berklee’s neighborhood record shop for generations of students, having weathered industry turmoil for more than four decades.
Carl Mello, director of brand engagement at Newbury Comics, says vinyl sales are definitely going up; but disruptions in supply have made it difficult to know exactly how good sales really are—or could be.
“The question is: If all of the vinyl that people wanted to buy was able to be pressed in time, would we be running up 75 percent? Two hundred percent? It’s impossible to tell because at every moment so much of the vinyl catalog is unavailable,” he says.
Gen Z buyers are having a huge impact on vinyl revenue, according to Mello. And he thinks it’s crucial that labels and record stores pivot toward this growing market, making sure that stores are stocked with products that appeal to young fans just beginning to cultivate their own taste in music. Newbury Comics, he says, communicates with a younger audience and hasn’t aged just in place for 44 years. “If we had done that we would have been shutting down all the stores 10 years ago, after we sold the last Creedence Clearwater Revival CD.”
The age of the format notwithstanding, vinyl still appeals to young fans who want a badge of kinship with their favorite artists—something to own and handle and display on a shelf.
“It’s another way to tell your story. You have somebody come over to your dorm room and you’re like, ‘This is who I am. I have these books, I have these records,’” Mello says. “That’s always the way it was. And we kind of got away from that for a minute with Napster and Spotify, where nothing is visible. I just have these zeros and ones on my computer.”
This article appeared in the spring/summer 2022 issue of Berklee Today.