'When was the last time you put a record on? The terminology matters: not “played”, not “cued”, definitely not “downloaded” or “streamed”. When did you last remove a fragile black disc from a crinkly translucent sleeve concealed inside a dog-eared cardboard cover, blow the dust off it, give it a wipe with a special cloth, lower it on to a revolving apparatus and carefully place a diamond stylus on its whirling outermost edge? And then actually sat down, with or without headphones, and listened to the thing?'
Readers who came of age as music fans earlier than the late Eighties may recall such proceedings with affectionate nostalgia. Readers who bought their first albums in the Nineties may remember seeing their parents enacting something of the sort. And any readers born after 1990 will find the description as arcane and incomprehensible as instructions for burning witches.
Nevertheless, vinyl refuses to go entirely the way of the eight-track cartridge, or the wax cylinder. The sales of vinyl records have more than doubled in the past year and increased sevenfold since 2007.
Some perspective is required. The 550,000 vinyl records bought in Britain so far in 2013 constitute just 0.8 per cent of UK album sales. The chances of our high streets ever again hosting neighbourhood emporia lined with racks of 12in sleeves are approximately nil. But something about vinyl – expensive, perishable, inconvenient vinyl – remains attractive, even in a world where, if you are equipped with broadband and signed up to a streaming site such as Spotify, or just unburdened by moral qualms about stealing copyrighted work, limitless quantities of music all but come out of the tap.
It is a safe assumption that the people responsible for this uptick in vinyl sales are unusually passionate music fans. Speaking as a music fan sufficiently unusually passionate that I’ve spent a lot of my life writing about the stuff, I kind of understand vinyl’s endurance. The 12in record sounds better, richer, warmer than any other format. And it looks better, too: the noble field of sleeve art was cruelly clipped by the CD, and rendered redundant by the MP3 player.
That said, I haven’t undertaken the ritual described in the opening paragraph for two decades, since I sold the record collection I had curated during my adolescence to pay for an air ticket. While acknowledging the decline in sonic quality, and the fact that you get less out of art the less you put into it, I’m as much a sucker for convenience as any other owner of an iPod. But I recognise that the ease of having 20,000 songs in my pocket has cost us: music has become something to be flicked through, or even irritably caught up with, rather than savoured.
There’s something admirable about people still willing to invest time and money in music. Certainly, musicians of my acquaintance can only hope that their numbers keep growing. For those artists, there is a twin appeal to vinyl. There is a base economic utility at least until three-dimensional printing becomes a reality: vinyl cannot be bootlegged and disseminated on the scale of digital files.
Releasing a record on vinyl also engenders the same gratification an author feels about publishing a book as a physical artefact; that you’re now part, however small, of the pantheon of those who came before you, who did this, and inspired you to do what you’re doing now. No other format could inspire the love and loyalty that underpin Record Store Day, launched in 2007 to encourage the record stores that remain.
Just as much to the point, almost since the first disc was pressed, vinyl has been inspiring songs in its own honour: Todd Snider’s Vinyl Records, Pearl Jam’s Spin the Black Circle, Dead Or Alive’s You Spin Me Round (Like a Record), Willie Nelson’s Mr Record Man, Aerosmith’s Big Ten Inch Record, to cite just a handful.
There have been few, if any, enduring affectionate classics yet written about compact discs, much less MP3s, still less Spotify. '
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