Will the vinyl renaissance last?

I picked up Primal Scream - Give Out But Don’t Give Up vinyl original press from a charity shop for a tenner. My instincts told me £10 was a lot for charity shop vinyl but really couldn’t resist buying it. I must say I was pleasantly surprised how much it seems to be actually worth, but won’t be selling. I feel weirdly happy that vinyl is back but admit it’s not my go to listening format.

Will the vinyl renaissance last?

Seems unlikely, what with climate change and that. Everything will sound warmer soon.

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Reckon it’s a flash in the pan. My own personal resurgence has waned already, but the i was an old fart who collected it like mad in the 90s so it didn’t have that “new” feel.

It will always be niche but I reckon it will last as the format or choice for those of us saddos who like to have physical copies of music. There are probably just about enough of us to keep some kind of industry going.

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This might be what finally makes me mute you

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bloody hope so.

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That’s a good deal, charity shops have been too hot on vinyl if anything and trying to get silly prices. I can’t see the renaissance lasting in the way that you can pick up Adele records for £35 in supermarkets or clothes shops. A lot of people have been buying to put up on the wall or look at, that will get old fast. But there are enough collectors and music lovers to keep it ticking over, indie artists to press up vinyl and a second hand market to continue. I am hoping in a few years when people get bored of their £35 marbled vinyl edition of [whatever] that they’ll all be flogging them cheap. I do miss when charity and even record shops were a bit clueless, I got a Pavement LP for £3. Mogwai - Young Team as part of a 5 for £20 deal. Happy times.

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I only started paying for Spotify this year but find myself using it a lot. Essentially the player on Spotify I see as a free music player, and the sound is adequate mostly.

If one was coming fresh to vinyl, playing, collecting, etc you are looking at, a decent turntable £200, amp, £100, speakers, £100 to be looking at (listening to) a good sound. Then theses the vinyl cost, and that isn’t cheap. I steadily add to my vinyl collection like in the instance I give above.

Of course you can listen to vinyl much cheaper but suitcase players are largely awful and will wreck the records. 2nd hand you can get lucky or cherry pick at car boot sales, etc and some 80’s Technics (other brands also) Hi-Fi stack systems, etc can be found cheap.

I love vinyl, but seldom actually play it. I don’t see the records as trophies but I am surprised how versatile Spotify can be.

Honestly no but it won’t disappear completely. Should be able to get most stuff - even at its absolute commercial low point (y2k?) you could get most big releases.

People are still going to love their favourite albums, and I think it’s the done thing amongst kids now to buy the albums they really love, just to have a tangible totem of them there in their home mostly. So the big record collections I think will stay niche, but most people who are big fans of music will own like 5 or 6 records each, even if just as memorabilia that doesn’t get played.

As vinyl outsold CDs last year, I’d have to say: ‘no’

I remember a woman popping into the record shop I worked in, in the 90’s asking to buy Sheryl Crow - Tuesday Night Music Club, I grabbed a CD from the shelf and she said “no, on vinyl”, to which I could only reply it’s not available on vinyl. So she passed up buying it, which I always respected.

I discussed this with the Polygram rep and he at a later point went to a music conference thing and put it to whoever and a few months later said they were going to press 1000 copies as the CD (and cassette) had sold so well. He did a Pre-sell in and I ordered 2 copies. A few months down the line I asked him about this again and he said they didn’t meet the 1000 Pre-sale so had reversed the decision to release it on vinyl.

It has subsequently much later had a vinyl release but I do think around 1998 the format was actually dead in the water.

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I have a vinyl rack on my wall - they look pretty. Can spend quite an embarrassing amount of time trying to pick which albums to put up so that they look nice. Just another way for me to obsess about music really.

I suspect that for the type of music fan who likes to collect physical copies of stuff (like me) they will remain the preferred format just because they are nicer than CDs, which I don’t think I’ll ever buy again. Would be lying if I said that streaming & bandcamp downloads aren’t 90% of my listening though.

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This is a good one, to be fair.

It never really went away for specialist genres, house, techno etc. The only difference I’ve seen over the years is HMV sold loads, then stopped completely then jumped back on the bangwagon. I’ve always been able to buy what I want from my local record shop or online.

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To expand…

I think I’ve really made peace with the physical/digital divide in my listening and I think there’s a real joy and benefit to both. I’d be sad now if either streaming or the ability to get a nice vinyl copy disappeared.

I listen to spotify to try new releases out (mainly on my way to and from work) and to dip into things and see if I fancy them. It’s really liberating to be able to experience a much wider range of genres and bands and artists without having to take a 15 quid punt on a CD every time I want to listen to something new like I did when I was young.

The stuff that I end up loving and that really sticks with me I buy on vinyl.

Then in the evenings if I’m siting down with a drink at the end of the day I put one of the records I really love on the turntable and enjoy the actual process/ritual of playing the record (40 mins is about perfect for a little bit of non-screen based wind down time for me before I go to bed and suits two sides of a 33 perfectly).

I’m very privileged, I know, but I love streaming and vinyl together and wouldn’t want to do without either.

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Original pressings of good albums from that late 90s, early 00s dead era are hen’s teeth now.

Went to find relationship of command on discogs for my brother’s birthday and even the reissue goes for over £100

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It won’t last. Putting Ultra Mono out in 20 different variants shows that. I reckon another 2 years and I’ll be able to AD93 12” in a week rather than the 3 months of waiting after it has been preordered that it takes now.

Can’t wait to be honest.

I have Relationship of Command on vinyl, it must be the original one. I spent a lot of time in the mid 00s surfing Ebay and local record shops, so much slipped the net then which you never see now. It would be when people still did week long auctions on records, so could snipe in at the last moment and grab stuff like that, I certainly wouldn’t have paid more than £10-15. Around that time I sold a lot of CDs when they still had a bit of value, I probably even had mad results where the CD went for more than the LP replacement. I got a lot of results in record shops in Bristol who had mixed 5 for £20 type sections (Plastic Wax and Replay spring to mind), probably they didn’t really recognise it so it went there by default. They would be very well up on original Led Zeppelin or Beatles or whatever stuck up on the wall for hundreds. They are shit hot now though on anything new as it is so easy to have a scan of discogs or completed listings.

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+1 on the it will stay as a niche.

Also makes a nice present doesn’t it. Can buy my niece a favourite record and know she’ll love having it.

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