B2 reading: Why vinyl came back

1 Twenty years ago, the vinyl record looked finished. CDs had replaced it in the 1990s, and then downloads and streaming seemed set to replace CDs. Record factories closed, and many people gave their old collections away or left them to gather dust in the attic. Today, however, vinyl sales in several countries are at their highest level for decades, and in some of them more money is now spent on records than on CDs. Supermarkets that once sold no music at all now have a shelf of records.

2 What makes this revival surprising is that, by most practical measures, vinyl is the inferior format. A single album on vinyl often costs two or three times as much as a monthly streaming subscription. Records are heavy, they scratch easily, and you have to turn them over halfway through. Streaming, by contrast, offers almost every song ever recorded, instantly, on a device that fits in your pocket.

3 So why are people buying them? Part of the answer is that a record is a physical object in a world where much of what we own has become digital. Buyers talk about the pleasure of the large cover artwork, of reading the notes inside, and of seeing a collection grow on the shelf. A streaming library, however large, cannot be held in your hands or passed on to your children.

4 Another reason has to do with the way people listen. Putting on a record requires a small ritual: taking it out of its sleeve, placing it on the turntable, lowering the needle. Once it is playing, skipping a song is awkward, so listeners tend to hear an album from beginning to end, as the artist intended. For many fans, this kind of attention is exactly what is missing from a life of endless playlists and constant notifications.

5 Sound quality is often mentioned too, though this is more controversial. Some listeners describe vinyl as "warmer" than digital audio, while many audio engineers argue that a high-quality digital file is technically more accurate. What seems clear is that the experience of listening, rather than the measurable sound, is what most buyers value.

6 Interestingly, a large proportion of vinyl buyers are young people who grew up with streaming, and surveys suggest that some of them do not even own a record player. For these buyers, a record seems to be partly a way of supporting an artist they love and partly a piece of decoration.

7 The revival has its limits. Vinyl still represents only a small share of the money the music industry earns, most of which comes from streaming. But its return shows that convenience is not the only thing people want from music. Sometimes they want something they can hold, and a reason to sit down and listen.