Someone in Canada notices the "Vinyl Comeback"

Spinning heads Vinyl is taking another turn on the table

I have no vinyl in my history to wax nostalgic over. My earliest memory is pushing the buttons on the family eight-track to get "Jumping Jack Flash" again. Jump the groove to the next music memory and I'm slotting Michael Jackson's "Thriller" into my gettoblaster.

But about a month ago, a friend asked if we could house her record collection during her indefinite stay in Mexico. Sure.

Two truck loads later, we had three turn tables, a stack of speakers and several hundred milk crated records in our living room. Obviously stuff had to be moved around to accommodate this collection, but man what a gift ... I mean loan. It's like inheriting all the books you want to read but probably wouldn't remember to search for in the library.

Listening to records is so different than hearing a mix of MP3 tracks off the computer. It's a fuller sound. A sound that crackles. Suddenly the room becomes warmer and you hear parts of Beatles songs you never had before. Flipping through the stacks, searching for records to play takes almost as much time, as actually listening to them. But that's OK because you want to listen -- not background music listen -- to the whole thing.

In this age of coveted iPods, free downloads and white ear buds, vinyl seems so anachronistic. Most predicted its death when the compact disc came on the scene in 1982.

But just like news of radio's demise when television came out, vinyl never really died. It has been kept alive during the lows of the 1980s by DJs, collectors, and hardcore punks.

And now it's making kind of a comeback. According to a New York Times article, the industry dipped down to a low 900,000 sales in 2006, but then sales then shot up about 37 per cent in 2007, to nearly 1.3 million. Three years ago, Warner Bros. Records opened an online vinyl store. At first, any release that sold 3,000 copies was considered a success, but then the 2007 Wilco album, "Sky Blue Sky," shot over 14,000 copies.

So who is buying these records?

Ghost World, a pop-culture movie that came out 2001, offers some clues. In it, teenager Thora Birch, wearing clunky glasses and 1940s dresses, connects with hard-core collector Steve Buscemi over vinyl. Birch's character, who abhors fakeness, is drawn to the realness of the music and the medium.

It's not the geeky old guy, but rather the retro girl fueling sales. And Sudbury is on the cutting edge of this trend. About six months ago, Cosmic Dave's Vinyl Emporium opened at 525 Kathleen St. It is one of the only stores in the country devoted solely to selling new vinyl records.

"I've sold over 500 records since June, which is good," said owner Mark Browning. "It's not like I'm getting rich doing it. It's a labour of love. At the same time, it's impressive ... That's people building collections."

The majority of his clients are in their teens to the early 30s. Some of the younger ones don't yet have a turntable, but they're buying anyway.

"I think most of them didn't grow up listening to records. It's funny, cause when I see someone older who's coming in I know they're coming in to get rid of their record collection."

High Fidelity is another record movie, in this case about a dusty, cluttered used vinyl store, where customers are mocked for their lack of knowledge. Cosmic Dave's is nothing like that. Each record is presented like a painting on the wall of its open concept space. Browning isn't interested in impressing collectors looking for vintage, but rather he's into turning people on to new music.

"The idea is reduce the choice, give more information about each choice and make each one special and come in and discover new music," he said. "There's so much good new music being made."

The concept for the store came to him when he was living in Vancouver, where he started building up a record collection from second-hand finds. Soon enough, however, listening only to music recorded before 1982 got stale.

"We had 25 years of CDs. Then we see general music industry business deteriorate," Browning said. "Suddenly records are coming back. And it's almost as if there is something magical about a record. It's not about whether records sound better than CDs or not, but there's something about buying a record."

The sound is different -- CDs are mastered to sound like the music is in front of you, while records have more of a surround feeling. Browning calls them more organic too. You know your record will die and you will kill it by playing it, he said.

"You don't feel cool walking down the street with a CD in your hand, but you do feel cool with a record. I think whatever it is that is missing (in CDs), is what killed the music industry ... There is something more personal about listening to a record."

The new vinyl releases come with codes, allowing the owner to download the album online, giving them the best of both worlds.

It costs more for bands to press vinyl records. Making a CD can start around $1,500, while a small run of records (about 1,000) begins at about $4,000, said Browning. The process of mastering it is different and more involved. Of course, with smaller runs they're also more expensive to buy -- most are in the $20 range.

Sudbury also has more local bands that have pressed their work to vinyl -- The Statues, Kate Maki, Nathan Lawr and the Minotaurs, and Browning's band, Ox, come to mind.

"Other cities of this size don't have this many bands that are touring and making records," Browning said.

Rob Seaton, frontman of The Statues, a Sudbury power-pop punk band, explained why its music is available on the big discs.

"Mostly, it was the labels we were working with. They're pretty much only vinyl labels," he said. "Any kind of underground music lends itself to the vinyl format. In the '90s everyone was pretty much doing CDs because it was cost effective. But there's been a huge shift and everyone's going back to vinyl."

At their shows, The Statues tend to sell more vinyl than CDs. Actually when the band was touring Europe, the ratio of records sold to CDs became even more skewed at about 5:1. The format fits the music, he said.

"It's a little more DYI to have your record pressed to ship it off to the CD manufacturer," Seaton said.

Browning's theory is the punk and metal lovers tend to appreciate the tactile, so have always been fond of the clunky discs. Records are also about friction which fits the sound.

"I prefer the sound of vinyl. It sounds better," said Seaton. "Audiophiles will debate that until they are blue in the face, of which I'm not one. I love the fact that they are huge and cumbersome and that they require work."

He's more inclined to put a record on and listen to the whole thing, while with a CD, there's the temptation to skip tracks.

"It's totally making a comeback," Seaton said.

[Sudbury Star]

Warm sound, artistic covers fuel record sales

The day Dr. Wax shuts its doors for the last time will be a sad one. The iconic music shop’s closure is a sign of the end of the CD era, but there is still a record store in Evanston that’s doing quite well.

“Business is great,” said Steve Kay, manager of Vintage Vinyl in Evanston near the intersection of Davis and Maple. “Always good here.”

The posters, t-shirts and other memorabilia that hang on the pink walls of Kay’s shop frame its centerpiece and main attraction: racks upon racks of vinyl records encased in plastic sleeves. A lanky, bespectacled man with long, gray hair, Kay seems to complete the scene. “I’ve never actually even bought a CD. It’s not the way I would prefer to listen to music,” said the store owner, sorting through a stack of new arrivals. “I never bought a cassette in my life, so when they introduced the cassette format that wasn’t interesting for me, either. So, for me, music is not about the convenience factor; it’s a very different experience.”

Vintage Vinyl has developed a reputation, even at an international level, for providing high-quality records (they owe at least some of their notoriety to a name-drop in the 2000 John Cusack film High Fidelity). “People know that the quality that we deal with is always going to be top-notch… we’ve developed a reputation for that in terms of the world market,” Kay said.

While Dr. Wax, whose revenue came almost exclusively from CD sales according to manager Jason Hoffman, was beset by hard financial times, Vintage thrives on the sale of an even more seemingly outdated form of media. Even though vinyl is one of the methods of recording furthest from the digital age, it has been experiencing resurgence.

According to the RIAA’s 2007 year-end report, vinyl has seen a 36.6 percent sales increase over the past year, a complete reversal of the downward trend of the past decades. “There definitely has been a rise in vinyl sales over the past year or so,” said Erik Keldsen, Sales and Distribution Representative for Thrill Jockey Records (The Sea and Cake, The Fiery Furnaces).

iTunes and other downloading formats are also on the rise, and online music piracy is more widespread than ever. The internet is what killed Dr. Wax; the same RIAA report shows CD sales experiencing an overall downward trend since 2000. However, vinyl appeals to a lot of people for a lot of different reasons, and even the ultra-portable mp3 format can’t rob the LP of its charm and potential for growth.

“The cover of a record is more of an art object than a smaller CD where it’s hard to read and seems very disposable, so that could be one way of entering into it, just an aesthetic choice,” Kay said. “And then there’s the area of collectability… certainly there are more CDs produced than records.”

What this all amounts to is that having a physical embodiment of one’s music is an important and desirable thing for some. “As music gets further and further away from something you can hold onto – people rebel,” said Nicole Yalaz, publicist from Drag City Records (Silver Jews, Joanna Newsom) in an email.

[Inside Vintage Vinyl. Photo by Tom Schroeder / North by Northwestern.]

According to Kay, there were some who “felt manipulated by the record companies in terms of being told that their vinyl was no longer valuable or worth hearing once the CD format was introduced.” As a result, some people did rebel – by simply continuing to listen to vinyl. Still, the format’s popularity continued to wane until recent times, although it kept a cult following consisting mostly of audiophiles and music collectors.

“[Records] have a warmer, more natural sound; they’re closer to what you would probably hear if you have a live experience rather than the codes that you would find on a CD. It’s a very different way of hearing things,” Kay said. “It’s audible, you can actually hear it clearly.”

A digital music file is a string of rapid “snapshots” of the recorded sound, so that “by definition, a digital recording is not capturing the complete sound wave. It is approximating it with a series of steps. Some sounds will be distorted because they change too quickly for the sample rate.”

In addition, the limitations of the LP give it a certain charm. Dropping a needle into the groove of a record and finding where a song starts is a more personal act than hitting “play” on an iPod, though it may require more effort. Due to the importability factor, listeners are forced to sit down, relax for a bit and take in an entire album at once as a musical unit.

For similar reasons, Jay-Z’s most recent release, American Gangster, has been taken off of iTunes because of the tendency of iTunes users to download only select tracks. “As movies are not sold scene by scene, this collection will not be sold as individual singles,” Shawn Carter stated in a press release. The album is still available for download through Jay-Z’s label, Roc-A-Fella, but only as a whole album.

Though much of the vinyl fan base consists of older people who were actually around in the medium’s heyday, records have recently started to appeal to younger crowds as well. “Now that there’s a resurgence in media support, I think the demographic has expanded again to include people starting in their late teens,” Kay said. “I think a lot of the kids in their late teens and early twenties have the feeling that they can sort of stand out from the pack on some level if they embrace the format whereas most of their friends are still downloading just the one song that they like by a certain artist.”

These kids aren’t just classic-rock fanatics, either. New, popular material is being released on vinyl such as Coldplay’s Viva la Vida and Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black.

In order to eliminate the need of vinyl buyers to purchase music twice (once each for portable and home listening) some record companies, like Thrill Jockey, have found a way to cater to those who enjoy both vinyl and mp3s. Labels are including free digital copies of albums with the purchase of their records. “From a consumer standpoint, [including a digital copy] makes it even more attractive to buy the vinyl because otherwise… you’ve got the vinyl which is great, but then some people are like ‘What am I going to do in my car, or on the train…’ so giving them the mp3s, I think, makes a lot of sense,” Keldsen said. Thrill Jockey started including the downloads about two years ago. Today many labels are following suit, but some, like Drag City, “haven’t jumped on that train yet,” as Yalaz puts it.

Old collectors, audiophiles, teenaged hipsters, nostalgia buffs and pretty much anyone else can find something to enjoy in a good record. The world is rediscovering vinyl, which was never quite forgotten in the first place. “From the first day until now, there have been no lulls in business,” Kay said. And the resurgence certainly bodes well for Mr. Kay and his shop. “[Selling new records], for me, is exciting because it’s how we started in a way, so the fact that people are interested in supporting bands that are pressing their records out on vinyl is to me a very exciting proposition and I hope it continues.”

[North By Northwestern]