Vinyl Records Are Back

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Arun Venugopal: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Arun Venugopal from the WNYC newsroom filling in for Brian Lehrer today. Vinyl records sold more units than CDs in the US last year. That's the first time since 1987, and that's according to the Recording Industry Association of America's report released on Thursday. It marked the 16th consecutive year of growth in vinyl with 41 million albums sold compared to 33 million CDs. Before any of you get the idea that physical music formats are making a big dent in the industry, not really, streaming remains the biggest source of revenue for the music sales making up 84%. Still, a lot more people than ever have been drawn to records in past few years. Why now? Joining us now to discuss what's behind the revival of vinyl is Larry Miller, professor and director of the Music Business Program at NYU Steinhardt and host of the Musonomics podcast. Welcome to WNYC, Professor Miller.

Larry Miller: Hi, Arun, glad to be here.

Arun Venugopal: Listeners, we're going to open up the phones to you right away on a couple of different tracks here. No pun intended, maybe. Have any of you gotten into vinyl during the last couple of years? How did you get into records, and what's the first one you picked up perhaps in a real record store bin, like the old days? What are you buying now? Is it vintage? Is it new releases like Taylor Swift? Where are you buying it? For the long-time vinyl fanatics out there, same goes for you. Call us at 212-433-WNYC or just tweet us @BrianLehrer. Maybe you want to help us report this story. Have the prices of vinyl gone up as the demand for vinyl has increased? Are certain records or maybe even parts of record players getting harder to secure? Maybe you own a record shop or work somewhere along that vinyl supply chain, call us. Again, that's 212-433-WNYC.

Larry Miller from NYU Steinhardt School, tell us, the revenue generated by vinyl grew 17%. Pretty dramatic. It topped 1.2 billion last year according to the industry. Why?

Larry Miller: That's not nothing, right?

Arun Venugopal: No. It's substantial.

Larry Miller: If we were having this conversation, say, 10 years ago, we would say things like, hey, vinyl hasn't really dominated the music industry now in a few decades really since 1987, as you pointed out, and yet, it's still a $14 million business 10 years ago. Why is it not going away? In the last 10 years, vinyl has gone from being not completely gone, but still fun to talk about, to being a significant part of the business and even more fun to talk about at about a billion for last year. That's not nothing. Maybe [crosstalk]--

Arun Venugopal: Do you buy vinyl yourself?

Larry Miller: I do.

Arun Venugopal: What's the last thing you remember listening to, or last couple things, maybe this weekend, perhaps?

Larry Miller: Well, I happen to have it right here, [laughs] so I can-

Arun Venugopal: Perfect.

Larry Miller: - look back and see. I love all kinds of music, and weirdly, the older I get, the broader my musical palette has become. I am looking at The Philadelphia Experiment. This is Christian McBride's record that was put out by Newport Jazz Festival just last year. That's what I listened to last on the vinyl anyway.

Arun Venugopal: Do you still have CDs?

Larry Miller: Yes, I still have them. In fact, I recently carried some pretty heavy CD boxes and stuck them down in the basement acknowledging that finally, I think I still have a CD player, I'm not sure, but it has been many years since I put a CD on. How about you?

Arun Venugopal: Just thinking about the first CD that came into our home, I think it was my sister who must ordered a Columbia Record sort of a thing, 5 or 10, whatever. I think it was Invisible Touch by Genesis.

Larry Miller: There you go. We're talking the '80s here.

Arun Venugopal: Yes, I think it was '86, '87, but I remember also not long after that my uncle and aunt gave me, maybe it was a birthday, I can't remember, it was a double album of '60s era Stevie Wonder, My Cherie Amour, Signed, Sealed & Delivered. I just could not stop listening to that. That was CDs. I don't remember last time-- I keep on talking about it. I remember when I was younger, a few years before that, getting CDs, something came in the mail. This is obviously a very different era. Not in the mail, in the newspaper. It was the last five minutes when Nolan Ryan pitched his fifth no-hitter for the Houston Astros. I played that 200 times. I just kept on.

Once upon a time. People who love records are going to tell you how much they prefer the sound of the format. Tell us how much is the difference in sound for you between CD, vinyl, or streaming?

Larry Miller: It depends on what you're listening on. Theoretically, a well-recorded, well-mastered, in good conditioned vinyl record will sound warmer and more immersive than most CDs. Although, back in the earliest years of the CD format, there were some really bad sounding CDs that were made. Those defects were later fixed even before the end of the 1980s, and so most of the CDs that have been made over the last few decades really sound excellent. The thing about streaming is that most of us are listening on earbuds to highly, highly compressed music in which, believe it or not, unless you're listening on a super special high bit rate streaming service, which is not something that Spotify has at the moment, and if you're not listening on some super special home recording gear that's using a particular compression format and way of storing the digital music, we're throwing out about 90% of the bits that were recorded. Although it still sounds pretty good, it doesn't sound nearly as good measurably as a decent final record played on a good stereo or a CD.

Arun Venugopal: I feel like it wasn't that long ago when the idea of a turntable was something thrown around like a hipster affectation. I'm just wondering, it's like, when did that change?

Larry Miller: That that is so true. When did it change? I'm going to say over the last 10 years, say, oh, I don't know, around 2012 or so, it was a hipster affectation. People were into vinyl in the way that certain people in, say, certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn might be more into artisanal things than the mass market in general. That has really changed and changed pretty dramatically over the last decade. Oddly or maybe not so oddly, COVID, the lockdown was an accelerator of this trend toward buying and collecting and playing vinyl.

Arun Venugopal: Do you think it's just the idea that the virtual world, it feels so dislocated, and here's something that is in your hands you can see scratching and and revolving right before your eyes and that you touch and then gaze uponm the gate fold or whatever it is that it came in?

Larry Miller: Yes. No question that for many people who are buying and collecting and listening to vinyl, it's about that. It's about the physical act of choosing something and holding it in your hands and it's not a a small CD plastic toolbox. It's a 12 by 12 beautiful, in some cases, lovingly designed thing, taking it out, putting it on, and yet watching it go around and around and hearing that sound come out in that immersive way that is hard to duplicate even with the CD experience, if anybody's still listening to CDs, and is impossible in streaming. One other thing about vinyl is that a lot of people are collecting it, and young people especially are putting it up on their walls and displaying it. Try doing that with a download or a stream.

Arun Venugopal: That's right. Who knows what you're listening to on your little phone? Let's take some calls. Getting some callers from Brooklyn, but let's take a call from Bob in Queens.

Hi, Bob.

Bob: Hi, yes, I'm in Queens, and let's see. My first job was selling records when I was in high school on Eighth Street in Manhattan. I worked in two record stores, and when Sergeant Pepper Lonely Hearts came out, we had stacks of them by the register, and everything was written by longhand and 4.69, 24 cents tax, 4.93, 4.69, 24, 4.93 embedded in my head. We sold so many. I've rediscovered vinyl. I've gone back to it. I have at least a thousand records. I think your guest just spoke to it that there's something about the ritual of holding it, looking at the art, reading liner notes, [unintelligible 00:11:08] down, taking care of the object. I can't believe all the paraphernalia that goes with records now, cleaning it, and aligning the cartridge. Man, who knew about that? I just did that to my turntable.

Anyway, I think it's a great thing. I don't think the whole issue with it being warmer. I was once at a convention, and these engineers from Ortofon Cartridge were there with a display of why vinyl is warmer. They said that they came up with this thing called transient shift of the upper partials of the overtone series in digital recording that came in a millisecond later, and that was the reason digital was not as warm as vinyl. I don't hear that at all but [crosstalk]--

Arun Venugopal: Bob, what was the last thing that you remember putting on?

Bob: I just was checking out the Keith Jarret Lausanne Bremen concert. It's a 3 LP set. That's what I was playing yesterday. It [inaudible 00:12:24] great.

Arun Venugopal: Great. Well, thanks for calling in, Bob. We're going to take another call real quick in the few minutes we have remaining. This is Dina calling in from Brooklyn. Hi, Dina.

Dina: Hi. I am calling because I live in Chinatown, and we'll walk around the East Village in Lower East Side and there are just so many amazing record stores that have either been there forever or just cropped up like Ergot on Second Street or Academy. It just feels like such a personal, embodied experience to go and just search through the stacks and put one on and listen and decide whether or not you wanted to take it home. It feels like a real community thing to do is to go around and you're just spending time in these spaces that are so cared for.

Larry Miller: Yes. It's a social experience, isn't it, to be in a physical place with other people who may have interests that are similar to or different from yours, but in that space where you're flipping through the crates and maybe discovering something entirely new. It's different than having something algorithmically fed to you by your favorite streaming service, right?

Dina: Totally, totally. It's not as intimidating as I feel in the 90s record stores or CD stores would just feel like there'd be a clerk who was maybe a little agro. I think that that's changed a lot and they feel very welcoming.

Larry Miller: Yes. I still go back and watch High Fidelity the film once a year or so for a dose of that agro record store clerk.

Arun Venugopal: Dina, thanks for your call. I think I'm just thinking about around the corner from our station here in Lower Manhattan you've got Carmine Street, which I guess used to have a whole bunch of record shops. Still has a couple. It's nice to sift through those bins and find something. A lot of stores are closed. Do you know if some are reopening?

Larry Miller: Some are reopening. In fact, I understand that there is now a Tower Records something in Brooklyn. Of course, Tower, at one time, by far the most important specialty retailer in the United States and in many other territories around the world. I think they're figuring out what to do with the brand. It is for now a small performance base and community meeting space. You can buy some records there. They're sorting it out, but there are many new entrants into the record retail business today, although none in the size and scale of the giant record supermarkets of days gone by. It's interesting to me I think that older people and younger people seem to be similarly interested in vinyl in similar numbers. Also, looking at the genres that are more popular in vinyl as opposed to the market in general, there are some real differences in terms of the way that people are discovering and buying and consuming music in terms of what it is that they're actually listening to.

Arun Venugopal: One thing about the physical artifact that you can't really overstate the importance of it is when you want to give a gift to someone, say a younger person, introduce them to some music that you love, it used to be just you're going to get something, maybe it used to be a CD or an LP, and in the streaming era, I don't even know what to do about that. It feels like such a loss in just that interpersonal sense.

Larry Miller: I know. There was a great study done last year for some of the industry organizations by a wonderful research company called Music Watch on vinyl exactly and really understanding a lot more about who are these vinyl buyers of which there are so many now. In that study, two-thirds of the vinyl buyers bought vinyl as a gift. There's a small sub-segment, 15%, who only buy vinyl as gifts for other people.

Arun Venugopal: All right, we're going to have to leave it there for today. My guest has been Larry Miller. He's professor and director of the music business program at NYU Steinhardt, and he's also host of the Musonomics podcast. Thanks so much for coming on, Professor Miller.

Larry Miller: Thank you, Arun.

 

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