Vinyl Sales Rise in Digital Age of Music Streaming

By Connor Glowacki, Capital News Service

SILVER SPRING, MD — At The Record Exchange in Silver Spring, vinyl albums fill the shelves and walls, spanning a range of genres and decades of music. Vinyl album sales have slowly increased nationally during the past decade and Record Exchange Owner Sam Lock said that vinyl offers a different listening option in today’s digital climate.

“I think there’s a kickback against technology,” Lock said, “People like to have things to hold and to look at.”

Sales in the music industry have been led by digital downloads from iTunes and streaming services, such as Spotify and Apple Music, where a customer pays a monthly fee to listen to as much music as they want.

However, vinyl sales have resurged in the past decade. Vinyl album sales in the U.S. have grown by 260 percent since 2009 and just last year, vinyl sales totaled nearly 12 million, which marked the 10th straight year of vinyl sales growth, according to Nielsen, a global information company that keeps track of what consumers buy.

Lock has seen teenagers and young adults come into his store to buy vinyl throughout the last few years and said he thinks there are several reasons that this age group is buying physical music, including a warmer sound quality.

“It just seems to fill the room a lot more than digital,” Lock said, “You get the low-end and high-end more on vinyl, rather than it all just compressed.”

Potomac native Alex Cohen, 17, said people of all ages like to collect vinyl because of the sense of ownership and the physical process of starting a record.

“When you can hold the record in your hands, it’s different than just pressing play on your iPhone because it’s about lifting up the tone-arm, turning on your receiver, lowering the needle onto the record and hitting start. It’s a relaxing process,” Cohen said.

Lock also said that he believed a lot of his younger customers are buying vinyl again because they might have discovered and listened to their parents’ records for the first time.

Cool Albums of the '60s Spark Interest in Albums

“There’s a whole new generation now getting records from their parents, who grew up in the cool age of the ‘60s. People are getting (Jimi) Hendrix, The Beatles and Pink Floyd. They’re just great records. They’re timeless,” Lock said.

But people aren’t just buying vinyl records of older acts. Modern artists such as Mumford & Sons, The Black Keys, Jack White and Lana Del Rey all have albums ranked among the top 10 of vinyl album sales since 2010, according to Nielsen.

And even though rock music generated 68 percent of vinyl sales in the U.S. in 2015, Christian Arias,19, a record shopper from Silver Spring, said it’s not simply a specific music genre that people his age or older are buying.

“It’s going to be whatever they like. Simple as that,” Arias said.

With streaming becoming the new platform of the music industry, record stores like The Record Exchange and Roadhouse Oldies in Silver Spring have had to try and adjust with the times.

Alan Lee, the owner of Roadhouse Oldies since 1974, said that even though it’s nice to see vinyl album sales going up, he doesn’t expect it to be a long-term trend.

“I think it’s another passing fancy. I think more and more people will be reluctant to pay for music as time goes on,” Lee said, “There’s always going to be a small market for vinyl and for record stores. But it’s not going to be like it was in 1964. … You’ve just got to try and go with the flow.”

Lee still said he was pleasantly surprised that a younger audience was gravitating toward vinyl records.

“I’m flabbergasted...I figured by now kids would have some kind of micro-chip planted in their heads so that they would never have to buy music again,” Lee said.

Lock, like Lee, has been with his company for a long time. He said shortly after starting with The Record Exchange in 1993, he had to take all of the vinyl bins and push them to the back of the store because nobody wanted them, and he considered vinyl a dead medium. Lock said that it’s interesting to see the cycle come full-circle.

He put the vinyl records back near the front of his store.

“I’ve seen vinyl disappear, and I’ve seen CDs come in. Times were tough though from 2008 to 2012 because you couldn’t sell anything,” Lock said, “CDs were dead and everyone was into iPods.”

“Luckily in 2011, we started to see a spark in vinyl and it’s been uphill ever since then. It’s nice to be back on our feet finally,” Lock said.

Despite the success of vinyl sales in recent years, it only accounted for 9 percent of total physical albums sales in 2015, according to Nielsen. Cohen said he thinks vinyl sales will stabilize and connect with a niche market, groups of millennials and baby boomers, even if they don’t grow and take over the music world like they did decades ago.

Even with an uncertain future for vinyl and record stores, Lock said he is ready to ride this wave out and tackle the next one, whatever that may be.

“I don’t think vinyl is ever going to go away, but hopefully we’ll still be here. We still have a five-year lease,” Lock said with a smile.

»PHOTO: Record Exchange Owner Sam Lock, in the spring of 2016, credits the comeback of vinyl due to the warmer sound it brings, compared to a compressed digital music file. (Capital News Service photo by Connor Glowacki)