Vinyl Records Becoming More Popular and Retain Value

CBS News
December 4, 2009

Music Fans Expected To Buy 1.6 Million LPs In 2008, Citing Desire For A Purer SoundMeet The Demand

(CBS) Remember turntables? They were used to play LP’s, those long-playing records developed by Dr. Peter Goldmark of CBS Labs. They spin at 33-and-a-third revolutions per minute. Even in these digital days, true believers have never given up on analog vinyl LPs, and today they’re enjoying some vindication. Thalia Assuras examines an audio counter-revolution:

Schoolkids at P.S. 8 may not know exactly what the large round black thing is.

“It’s, it’s, uh, I don’t know,” one said.

“A CD?” another asks.

“It’s a disk,” said another.

Hey, if you were born in the age of digital sound, you might not know exactly how this it works, either. But they threw out guesses:

“It’s something really old and it plays music.”

“And it’s so huge because in those days CDs hadn’t been invented and this is kinda what it was.”

“When you play it, it sings music out.”

“It’s a record!”

And … it’s coming back.

Vinyl records, yes, the same kind of LPs you listened to on a turntable, have become, well, cutting edge again.

True, the newer technology can put a thousand digital songs in your pocket, but for a growing number of music lovers, there’s nothing like a real groove.

Record labels are re-releasing vinyl LPs; Amazon has inaugurated a vinyl-only Web site; and the makers of vinyl records say sales are up, enough to keep them in the black.

When asked why he ventured into an analog music business, when vinyl is virtually non-existent in music stores, Thomas Bernich said, “There’s enough out there to, you know, have a little piece of the pie. I’m certainly not going to be driving a Ferrari tomorrow, There’s no question about that!”

Bernich is the founder of Brooklynphono, a tiny factory that presses records in small batches for artists who want the sound, and feel, of vinyl.

Why would an indie band want to put their album out on vinyl as opposed to what’s supposedly cool – you know, CDs?

“It’s a closed format,” said Bernich. “Not everyone can have access to it. So if you don’t want your music to go everywhere, it’s one way of having control over your product.”

With wife Fern and daughter Hazel, Bernich’s record factory is, quite literally, a mom-and-pop business.

“If the money’s green, we press the record,” said Fran.

Jason Durham runs the production line, where each record pressed is inspected. “Both sides, A and B. Every album. We’re very serious about quality control.”

To Durham, the difference between vinyl and digitized music is like comparing a formal dinner to fast food.

“I think it’s got to do not only with the sound but the ritual of playing the record,” he said, “and also just the whole packaging. It’s like a gift every time you open it.”

Our schoolkids had some idea of the history of vinyl.

“In the old ages they used this instead of a DVD player,” one said.

And just when were the old ages?

“In the 1960s!”

Actually, he’s right. The 1960s have been called the golden age of vinyl. That decade saw major advances in how the music was actually recorded, but it all ended up on a turntable. Steve Sheldon was a college student when he joined Rainbo Records in L.A., back when vinyl was king and “The King” was on vinyl.

“The busiest period for Rainbo was 1977, when Elvis died,” Sheldon said. “And within three days of his death, we had booked about a million and a half records to be pressed. Our capacity at the time was 60,000 pieces a day.”

But in the 1980s, CDs hit the market, and pure sound quality took a back seat to convenience. When computer downloads and MP3 players came a decade later, it would seem that vinyl LPs were on the fast-track to oblivion. But although demand for vinyl declined, it never disappeared, in part because digital recordings just don’t sound the same.

“It’s smooth, right?” Durham said. “It’s a groove, whereas a CD takes music, audio, chops it up. And it’s done in little packets of data. And the trick is that you listen to it, if the data is quick enough, your ear ‘makes up’ for the difference. Theoretically, they scientifically have proven that we can’t hear the difference. But there is something. There is something different.”

That old-fashioned sound requires an old fashioned, labor-intensive process.

Technicians create the metal master plates one by one. The raw vinyl pellets are hand-loaded into the pressing machine, and each LP is packaged (carefully) by a gloved employee.

Making compact discs is a different story: The process is high speed, and highly automated, with a lot of the work done by robots. At Rainbo, making a CD costs less than half of what it takes to press a record, but Steve Sheldon says he’s banking on the future of vinyl.

“In the next few years I’ll be pressing more vinyl records than CDs.”

“Here’s the bottom line question: Will vinyl ever die?” Assuras asked.

“No. Absolutely not,” Thomas Bernich said. “It’s too wonderful of a medium.”

And for true believers, a medium that will keep audiophiles happy for generations to come.

Vinyl LPs See A Rebirth In Modern Market

Music Fans Expected To Buy 1.6 Million LPs In 2008, Citing Desire For A Purer Sound

(AP) It was a fortuitous typo for the Fred Meyer retail chain. This spring, an employee intending to order a special CD-DVD edition of R.E.M.’s latest release “Accelerate” inadvertently entered the “LP” code instead. Soon boxes of the big, vinyl discs showed up at several stores.

Some sent them back. But a handful put them on the shelves, and 20 LPs sold the first day.

The Portland-based company, owned by The Kroger Co., realized the error might not be so bad after all. Fred Meyer is now testing vinyl sales at 60 of its stores in Oregon, Washington and Alaska. The company says, based on the response so far, it plans to roll out vinyl in July in all its stores that sell music.

Other mainstream retailers are giving vinyl a spin too. Best Buy is testing sales at some stores. And online music giant Amazon.com, which has sold vinyl for most of the 13 years it has been in business online, created a special vinyl-only section last fall.

The best-seller so far at Fred Meyer is The Beatles album “Abbey Road.” But musicians from the White Stripes and the Foo Fighters to Metallica and Pink Floyd are selling well, the company says.

“It’s not just a nostalgia thing,” said Melinda Merrill, spokeswoman for Fred Meyer. “The response from customers has just been that they like it, they feel like it has a better sound.”

According to the Recording Industry Association of America, manufacturers’ shipments of LPs jumped more than 36 percent from 2006 to 2007 to more than 1.3 million. Shipments of CDs dropped more than 17 percent during the same period to 511 million, as they lost some ground to digital formats.

The resurgence of vinyl centers on a long-standing debate over analog versus digital sound. Digital recordings capture samples of sound and place them very close together as a complete package that sounds nearly identical to continuous sound to many people.

Analog recordings on most LPs are continuous, which produces a truer sound – though, paradoxically, some new LP releases are being recorded and mixed digitally but delivered analog.

Some purists also argue that the compression required to allow loudness in some digital formats weakens the quality as well.

But it’s not just about the sound. Audiophiles say they also want the format’s overall experience – the sensory experience of putting the needle on the record, the feeling of side A and side B and the joy of lingering over the liner notes.

“I think music products should be more than just music,” said Isaac Hudson, a 28-year-old vinyl fan standing outside one of Portland’s larger independent music stores.

The interest seems to be catching on. Turntable sales are picking up and the few remaining record pressers say business is booming.

But the LP isn’t going to muscle out CDs or iPod soon.

Nearly 450 million CDs were sold last year, versus just under 1 million LPs, according to Nielsen SoundScan. Based on the first three months of this year, Nielsen says vinyl album sales could reach 1.6 million in 2008.

“I don’t think vinyl is for everyone; it’s for the die-hard music consumer,” said Jay Millar, director of marketing at United Record Pressing, a Nashville based company that is the nation’s largest record pressing plant.

Many major artists – Elvis Costello, the Raconteurs and others – are issuing LPs and encouraging fans to check out their albums on vinyl. On Amazon.com, one of the best-selling LPs is Madonna’s latest album, “Hard Candy”.

Some artists package vinyl and digital versions of their music together, including offers for free digital downloads along with the record.

“We’ve definitely had some talks with the major retailers about exclusives on the manufacturing end,” Millar said of United Record Pressing, which focuses primarily on independent recordings.

An avid music fan himself, Millar says he has moved to vinyl in recent years.

“Once I got my first iPod … I’m looking at my wall of CDs and trying to justify it,” Millar said. “The things I like – the artwork, the liner notes, the sound quality – it dawns on me, those are things I like better on vinyl.” He welcomed back the pops and clicks, even some of the scratches.

“I like that fact that it’s imperfect in a lot of ways, live music is imperfect too,” Millar said.

Independent music stores, which have been the primary source of LPs in recent years, say many fans never left the medium.

“People have been buying vinyl all along,” said Cathy Hagen, manager at 2nd Avenue Records in Portland. “There was a fairly good supply from independent labels on vinyl all these years. As far as a resurgence, the major labels are just pressing more now.”

In this game, big retailers aren’t necessarily competing head to head with independent sellers’ regular clientele of nostalgic baby boomers, independent label fans and turntable DJs.

“I cannot see that Best Buy or Fred Meyer would order the same things we would,” Hagen said. “They aren’t going to be ordering the reggae, funk, punk or industrial music.”

How Vinyl Got Its Groove Back

In This Digital Age, Vinyl Records Are Making A Comeback

(CBS) Sixteen-year-old David MacRunnel loves his record collection.

“I have approximately 1,200,” he said.

They’re all vinyl LPs. Scratch the iPod.

“You experience the music versus hearing the music,” MacRunnel said.

For 18-year-old Lukas Glickman, LPs have become an obsession.

“I spend all my money on it. It’s a problem,” he said.

They’re true believers in a vinyl revival. Yes, in this digital age, the LP is coming back from the dead,

The group REM released its latest album on vinyl. So did Bruce Springsteen with his album, “Magic.” Madonna’s “Hard Candy” came out on vinyl and Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” as well. A new LP costs about $20.

“It’s a business decision. The major labels are doing it, because there’s a lotta demand for it,” said Matt Wishnow, president of Insound, an online indie music store.

Vinyl records now account for nearly half of Insound’s sales.

“If you’re a music fan and you want to have music ‘stuff,’ this is the most prized ‘stuff’ you can have in your music collection,” Wishnow said.

The vinyl plastic LP was created in the 1940s.

But by the 1990s, CDs had made LPs all but obsolete.

Two years ago, only 850,000 vinyl albums were sold in the United States. This year that’s expected to nearly double.

Record Technology, a California vinyl plant, has a nearly 4-month backlog of orders.

“Have you actually played your album on vinyl?” Mason asked Grammy-Award winning vocalist Shelby Lynne.

“Shoot, yeah!” she said.

Lynne was thrilled when her 10th album was her first to come out on vinyl.

“Because look how big that picture is!” she said. “It’s just the whole thing. The touchin’ it. The puttin’ the needle down.”

Wishnow calls it the avid music fan’s response to the fleeting nature of the digital age.

“This is not a trend. This is going to be there for a long time,” Wishnow said.

Believe it. Vinyl is groovy again.

Niche market – Vinyl records better than digital cd’s – Still Setting ‘Records’

Digital Music News, Daily Snapshot
December 4, 2009

Labels have been treated to a number of unexpected growth stories over the past decade, perhaps the most out-of-the-blue being ringtones. But as the ringtone wanes, the trajectory on another unexpected contender, vinyl, remains on the up-and-up.

Make no mistake, vinyl is still niche, though it has now grown beyond its initial small footprint of deejays, die-hard collectors and other aficionados. According to the latest data from Nielsen Soundscan, wax has already set a sales record in 2009 – at least for the 90s and 2000s. Specifically, US-based sales recently crossed into the two millions, beating a 2008-year total of 1.9 million.

Part of that is coming from the retro-cool of it all, though other factors – including spacious artwork, lyrics, and lots of tangible satisfaction – are also playing a role. Actually, that is great for niche retailers, and instructive for artists. Outside of that, the payoff remains limited – in perspective, year-to-date album sales are now past 320 million, also according to Soundscan.

Vinyl Records and Turntables Are Gaining Sales

At a glance, the far corner of the main floor of J&R Music looks familiar to anybody old enough to have scratched a record by accident. There are cardboard boxes filled with albums by the likes of Miles Davis and the Beach Boys that could be stacked in any musty attic in America.

But this is no music morgue; it is more like a life-support unit for an entertainment medium that has managed to avoid extinction, despite numerous predictions to the contrary. The bins above the boxes hold new records — freshly pressed albums of classic rock as well as vinyl versions of the latest releases from hip-hop icons like 50 Cent and Diddy and new pop stars like Norah Jones and Lady Gaga.

And with the curious resurgence of vinyl, a parallel revival has emerged: The turntable, once thought to have taken up obsolescence with reel-to-reel and eight-track tape players, has been reborn.

J&R Music, at 23 Park Row southeast of City Hall Park, now carries 21 different turntables at prices ranging from $85 to $875. Some are traditional analog record players; others are designed to connect to computers for converting music to digital files.
Rachelle Friedman, the co-owner of J&R, said the store is selling more vinyl and turntables than it has in at least a decade, fueled largely by growing demand from members of the iPod generation.

“It’s all these kids that are really ramping up their vinyl collections,” Ms. Friedman said. “New customers are discovering the quality of the sound. They’re discovering liner notes and graphics.” In many instances, the vinyl album of today is thicker and sounds better than those during vinyl’s heyday in the 1960s and 1970s.

Sales of vinyl albums have been climbing steadily for several years, tromping on the notion that the rebound was just a fad. Through late November, more than 2.1 million vinyl records had been sold in 2009, an increase of more than 35 percent in a year, according to Nielsen Soundscan. That total, though it represents less than 1 percent of all album sales, including CDs and digital downloads, is the highest for vinyl records in any year since Nielsen began tracking them in 1991.

Sales of CDs, meanwhile, have been falling fast, displaced by the downloading of digital files of songs from services like iTunes. Sales of albums on CD, which generally cost half as much as their vinyl counterparts, have dropped almost 20 percent this year, according to Nielsen.

With overall sales down, numerous big music-store chains like Tower Records, Virgin Megastore and HMV have pulled out of Manhattan, leaving music sales largely to online merchants and the few small, die-hard record shops scattered about Greenwich Village and Brooklyn.

One exception has been Best Buy, a national electronics chain that recently opened its sixth store in Manhattan. A year ago, the chain started stocking vinyl albums in about 50 of its stores, including one on the Upper East Side. Their presence, with their alluring cover art, still has the power to stun.

“Some individuals come into our store and they stop in their tracks,” said Andre Sam, a sales representative at Best Buy’s store on East 86th Street. “They don’t expect to see this. You can see them reminiscing as they start looking at the album covers.”
Last week, that store and a new Best Buy on Union Square installed departments, dubbed Club Beats, where customers can test out turntables and other equipment that DJs use to mix music. “They can spin, they can mix, they can scratch, whatever they want to do,” Mr. Sam said.

He suggested that video games deserved some credit for the resurgence of interest in vinyl albums and turntables. Popular games like Guitar Hero and Rockband have introduced young customers to classic rock and pop artists like the Beatles and Metallica, while DJ Hero has inspired some to try their hands at mixing music for real.

Not all of the turntables in these stores are designed to do anything so old-school as spinning actual records. A few models are still made for that purpose, many of them with cables that connect to computers so that the music can be transferred to portable devices. But others simply allow their users to simulate the manipulation of records while the songs they are mixing are being fed from iPods.

Interest from younger listeners is what convinced music industry executives that vinyl had staying power this time around. As more record labels added vinyl versions of new releases, the industry had to scramble to find places to press discs, said Mike Jbara, president and chief executive of the sales and distribution division of Warner Music Group.

“It is absolutely easy to say vinyl doesn’t make sense when you look at convenience, portability, all those things,” Mr. Jbara said. “But all the really great stuff in our lives comes from a root of passion or love.”