But while you have a point that a large segment of the vinyl-buying market are “old guys” (like Forster’s Max Cherry character, or you and me at this point!) who are still clinging to a technology that they grew up with, I think there is a fairly large youth audience too (late teens and early ’20s). I work in the music industry, and I encounter college-age kids all the time who are deeply engaged with vinyl, much beyond the level of conspicuous consumption or purchasing just a record or two per year. Maybe there aren’t too many of them here in Madison, but they’re out there. I’m hesitant to draw conclusions too broadly from just anecdotal evidence, but I can say with some certainty that “kids” are buying vinyl. They may be a relatively small group, but hey, vinyl remains a niche product.

If anything, the record stores (and labels, et al) already have the 30+ crowd on the hook. Sure, they’re probably hoping to draw some older folks that they lost along the way back into the vinyl fold. But more likely, I think something like Record Store Day exists to try and build up among younger audiences the attention for vinyl (and recorded music more broadly), as well as the romanticism and nostalgia for it. The record industry is trying to plant the seed of this fetishism in the next generation because, as you point out, it’s going to need the youth of today in order to sustain recorded music for the long term.

Maybe for “many,” but I don’t think this is a dominant theme in the current vinyl revival. Robert Christgau’s term “semi-popular” is useful here, since it doesn’t carry the political overtones that “subcultural” has picked up. The current vinyl revival seems to me to be a “semi-popular” phenomenon; I think that most of it has very little to do with “anti-mainstream values.” There are a number of themes that come up in the pro-vinyl discourse–display, “warmer” sound quality, appeal of the physical object–and some of them involve asserting a slight or contingent difference from a prevalent practice or value (after all, as Chris and I have noted, most young vinyl-purchasers are still rocking their MP3s most of the time). But translating that to “anti-mainstream values” strikes me as grandiose. Of course, maybe if you interviewed the people who are buying vinyl, that sort of grandiosity is what you’d get. But I suspect not in most cases.

Also — I was a college-radio DJ in the 1990s (worst way to begin a paragraph _ever_!) at a time when “indie rock” was the bread-and-butter of such stations. As I recall, vinyl as a medium for new releases was not big, except for electronic music/dance, hip hop, and some very outré noise and experimental rock (where I think the affinity for vinyl probably does have some “oppositional” valence). And of course older albums were often sought, or only available, on vinyl.

The majority of the DJs and hangers-on who listened to indie rock purchased it on CD. The major exception is 7″s, which retained considerable cachet, especially in the indie-pop world. The vast majority of new _album_ releases were sent to us on CD. I know that Matador, Drag City, etc. were still pressing vinyl at that point, but from my experience very, very few people –or fewer folks of college age — were buying indie rock in that format.

It’s hard to translate these observations into generalizations. I think we’re roughly the same age, Andrew, so maybe your experience simply contrasts with mine. We probably need more numbers. But at least judging by the outsized presence of vinyl in record stores these days, there does seem to have been a difference of scale significant enough to approach a difference in kind. Or maybe that’s just relative to the CD…

Vinyl started to fade from the electronic dance music scene in the early 00’s when computers started to become powerful enough to provide and process dual sound outputs. Now a vinyl record store is rare, and DJs who primarily play vinyl are often referred to as doing “a vinyl fetishist set.”

As far as status symbols and being a “popular” thing to do, in past years I would go to a flea market and have people practically begging me to take their old records off their hands. Now it’s all gone very quickly and people are charging higher prices for their used records.

The funny thing is most of the people I know who now have turntables with their stereos who didn’t a few years ago usually have USB turntables that will record the record directly to a computer. I guess they are hedging their bets.

However, I think the current vinyl trend is most closely associated with the indie/punk rock subculture (which is an incredibly broad category, and in my mind envelops movements as diverse as “freak folk” and noise). Vinyl has remained an integral part of that subculture, and its authenticity is constructed less from retro-nostalgia than from ideology – vinyl is anti-digital, anti-mainstream. In the past decade or so, though, the indie/punk subculture has grown in size and prominence, largely as the result of the Internet. As the music has grown in popularity, so have the cultural practices, in particular a dedication to vinyl. Which is why I disagree with all this discourse (common in the popular press) about “vinyl is back.” Where did it go? Absolutely nowhere! What we’re seeing has been going on in the indie/punk subculture for decades, only now it’s happening on a much larger, more visible scale. And though I don’t deny that there is an element of the status object to vinyl, I think for many consumers in this indie/punk scene, owning vinyl is a sociocultural and political statement as well – it is a statement of one’s allegiance to the subculture’s anti-mainstream values.

First of all I want to say that I think that MP3 sacrifices more than “a bit” of sound quality as one commenter above says. MP3 quality is attrocious. The only time I can stand to listen to it is as background noise – at the gym, when working on my computer, etc. If I’m actually actively listening to music I can hardly bear to listen to an MP3. FLAC is a different story, but they take up a lot of storage space.

The vast majority of my records are older. I have a few new releases, but not many. I love the warm, full, analog sound. But with any new release the music has likely been digitally recorded, edited, mastered… The end result can only be as good as the worst step in the process. As recently as the 90s musicians were recording to tape. Now everything is done with computers. How can people claim that new vinyl still has the full analog sound when its digital music just pressed onto an analog media?

The now-standard industry practice of selling a vinyl album and offering a free download with it seems to testify to this. The album (or more precisely its jacket) is for the purpose of display, while the MP3s are more likely to be listened to.

It seems to me that this latest vinyl revival differs from the 1990s one associated with the rise of turntablism, in that somehow its cultural impact is lesser while the terms of its discourse are more mainstream. Your mention of “yacht rack” aside, it doesn’t seem to track as closely with the subcultural reappropriation and reevaluation of specific genres. That said, it’s interesting to consider some of the byways of this broader phenomenon — for example, the “new ethnomusicology” of Sublime Frequences, “True Vine,” or “Victrola Favorites” compilations, which try to convey the materiality of the old vinyl and shellac they collect via reproductions of deteriorating jackets or the retention of all the pops and crackles of the “original” 78s and 45s. The particular kind of connoisseurship or curatorial approach this implies is far from the “academic” approach taken by many earlier compilations, and seems–if not influenced, then at least broadly consonant with the terms of the new vinyl revival. Though maybe I’m just giving in to the human inclination to pattern recognition….

In “Jackie Brown,” which we watched in class a few weeks ago, there’s a scene where Robert Forster goes into a brightly-lit mall record store to pick out a Delfonics cassette. Tarantino has loud rap music blaring throughout the scene, which contrasts with the film’s otherwise nostalgic soundtrack and makes Forster seem like a fish out of water. But now the whole scene feels weirdly anachronistic–record stores like that don’t exist anymore, and if they did, you’d be more likely to find Robert Forster in there than the young folks swarming around him in the scene.

Madison might not be the best way to judge all this, though. Maybe it’s because the record stores around here have an ossified feel, maybe it’s because we don’t have the requisite critical mass of hipsters, but I see way more young people in stores in Chicago than I do here.