Vinyl's making a comeback? Don't believe the hype
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Version 0 of 1. The other night, outside one of those preposterous city-centre places that is both a grocer and a restaurant, I noticed a remarkable deal on offer in the boxes of produce stacked up outside. A bunch of half a dozen or so carrots, green stalks attached at the top, soil clinging to the orange roots, was on sale for a bargain £2.50. You can stick your £1 for a bag bursting with the things from Morrison’s or Iceland, because those are the carrots I want, oh yes. And given that the stupidly priced bunch of carrots with green tops and soil is cropping up in farmers’ markets and chi-chi grocers all across Britain, then I’m calling it now. Never mind that the vast majority of people are still buying their carrots from supermarkets at a much cheaper price, and that there’s no sign of that ever changing, because I’m willing to say there’s a stupidly priced bunch of carrots comeback! That, more or less, is what the much trumpeted “vinyl comeback” amounts to. The BPI today announced that vinyl sales has exceeded 1m copies for the first time since 1997, with a possible end of of year total of 1.2m. Imagine! The total vinyl sales this year in the UK – that’s all the records available by everybody from the entire span of music history – have gone triple platinum! Just like Ed Sheeran’s album X has. That’s right: the combined sales of all vinyl in the UK have matched the sales of the second Ed Sheeran album. There is no vinyl comeback, as the BPI sort-of-admits later on its press release (after several excitable paragraphs), when it notes: “Vinyl still remains a niche product, accounting for just 2% of the UK’s recorded music market.” I don’t know how that compares with the overpriced bunch’s share of the carrot market, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the comparison is unfavourable. The boasting about vinyl’s “comeback” is a music industry con trick: find some piece of good news, however minuscule, and then claim some sort of revolution is under way. There’s no comeback, not least because vinyl never went away – there were always people who wanted to buy vinyl and felt they weren’t being catered for, and now record companies are making a bit more of an effort to meet their desires. A big reason for that is because they’ve realised a lot of those vinyl buyers are pretty well off and are willing to shell out quite substantial sums for deluxe and limited editions, so they’re putting a lot more of them out. You can see that in the albums that make up the year’s top 10: three Led Zeppelin albums, old albums by Pink Floyd, the Stone Roses and Oasis, plus a top four made up of Arctic Monkeys, Jack White, Pink Floyd and Royal Blood. Vinyl is the only area where rock – the preserve, largely, of the older, wealthier buyer – is king. You can look at the year-on-year figures and see the how the vinyl market has changed. Vinyl sales reached an all-time low in 2007, with 205,000 sales. The following three years were much the same, then there was a dramatic jump to 337,000 in 2011, 388,000 in 2012, 780,000 last year, and now the magic million. In percentage terms, that’s a massive increase over five years, but it’s just a drop in the ocean of music consumption, and it speaks simply to increased availability rather than substantially increased demand. The vinyl market is composed largely of fetishists and superfans. I have no problem with that – I could be accused of being both (I’m still wedded to the notion of music ownership, and when my very favourite bands release limited vinyl editions I do make special efforts to get hold of them) – but let’s not pretend this group of people can in any way be taken to represent the wider music market. The ultra-fetishism of Record Store Day feeds into this, too. Limited edition represses of records that are, almost always available in other formats; coloured vinyl; different covers. These records aren’t intended to be listened to; they’re intended to lure in collectors and completists. Vinyl is sold as a signifier, the perfect complement to the exquisite taste of your furniture or the pictures on your wall. That’s why it costs so much (even Amazon is charging £28.99 for the vinyl edition of Pink Floyd’s The Endless River, which recorded the highest first week sales of any vinyl album since 1997 with – count ’em, because you probably could – 6,000 copies shifted). That’s why so many vinyl records include a download code, so you can listen to the music without actually depreciating the value of your vinyl. That also has an effect on those who aren’t even that bothered about the music: once vinyl is a signifier, it gains cool points – that’s why my 14-year-old daughter wants to have my portable turntable in her room, along with a selection of my records: because it looks good. I love vinyl. I love the big covers, the feeling of sliding the record out of its inner sleeve, the thwump sound as the needle hits the record, scanning run-off grooves for messages. I adore it. But let’s not keep pretending that one tiny segment of a dying industry is making a comeback. So sales have risen fivefold in seven years? Five times very little doesn’t make a lot. |