Vinyl Sales Growing, National Retailers like Best Buy Take Notice

It seems that for the last 10 years, the Music Industry has been believing some serious Conan O’Brien “In the Year 2000” hype about what consumers will be consuming and how they will be consuming it. While a lot of industrial analysts and think-tankers have taken a Warren Ellis Transmetropolitan route and predicted the next emerging trend in musical consumption to come in the form of subscription services powered by cloud-coordinated servers that would enable access to virtually all music ever recorded, few (if any) could have foreseen the growing trend straight from the year 1900: vinyl records.



New York post reported that in 2007 sales of vinyl records increased by 15% and, in 2008, by an additional 89%. 89%! This is certainly good news for the record stores that anchor college towns and cities with, you know, opinionated young folk that have free time to be cool and intimidating, attend concerts, take risks with clothing and hairstyles and, moreover, frequent said record stores and sustain their solvency. With increased vinyl sales, record companies/conglomerates like EMI are beginning to release more titles in vinyl format, including older titles like Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, making even more title available to tote-bag wearing record collectors that want classics sans the thrift store dust and worn album covers. Oh, and swine flu; terrible, sensational swine flu.

But, independent record stores, not so fast with the building repairs and increased hours for part-time employees. National retailers like Best Buy and Walmart are also taking notice of the growing trend and allocating store space to this futurist-retro, primitive novelty made out of the curious substance known as “vinyl”. In fact, according to the same New York Post article, Best Buy is starting a pilot program that will bring vinyl titles to 100 stores. And, if they prove successful, vinyl records will be available in even more stores, as in, like, all of them. Walmart is also considering a similar move and even entertaining allocating 8 square ft. of retail space for vinyl records in each of its 1,000+ stores. However, they might not be able to secure any exclusive distribution rights agreements for previous Guns ‘N’ Roses releases. Oh, well.

All of this vinyl sales growth is taking place at a time when CD sales are continuing to drift even further away from their high-water mark achieved in the late-90s. So, why are people retreating from the future-is-now, Max Headroom meets TNG world of music to primitive technologies that don’t even use lasers or intriguing sounding processes like “cloud computing” to work? Attribute it to “cult” appeal or audiophile sensibilities, but the more likely answer seems to be somewhere between the two. Perhaps, in an era where music has become abstracted nearly to the point of utter ethereality, people are seeking a physical relationship with their music, futurist cloud-computing subscription not required.

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