All in a spin about vinyl sales

What goes around spins right round, baby, right round, as record sales soared in 2016. Is vinyl back?

Side One

In 2014, I started the New Year with a column about the impenetrable sadness of finally retiring my record collection. True, they are still in boxes under the bed, but then the turntable is in a box in the cellar, and my amp... good question, actually. A man should always know where his amplifier is and I have failed. Bad human.

It seems I might need to get them all together again, if I want to prove that I’m still deeply cool and in touch with the mood of the time. Why? Because sales of vinyl albums went up by 53% last year, compared to 2015. 1991 was the last time more 12” circular black things were sold. Vinyl is back and flourishing.

David Bowie was the year’s biggest seller, with The Beatles, Fleetwood Mac and Prince rubbing grooves with Nirvana, Amy Winehouse and Radiohead in the top 10.

I have already been a style icon once (I single-handedly made donkey jackets fashionable again by wearing one at college). So wandering around with my vintage copy of Mike Oldfield’s “Tubular Bells” tucked under one arm should mark me out as a complete winner. Or something that sounds similar.

Music sounds warmer on vinyl. Album covers are works of art. These are physical treasures of musical love, to be cherished and admired.

Side Two

Vinyl isn’t back – it’s still history, and these are just the twitches of a long dead format that hipsters like to think makes them look cool. That and man-buns. 3.2million albums were sold – quite a lot in one sense, but actually less than 3% of music sales overall.

Half the people buying them don’t even play them, and some don’t even own a record player.

Even CD sales are in a downward spiral, dropping by nearly 12%. If CD’s effectively killed off vinyl, then downloads seemed destined to be the murderer of the physical format altogether. But even they’re in trouble, with sales crashing by nearly a third.

According to the BPI, the £1bn music market actually grew during 2016. So if vinyl is vanquished, Compact Discs have crashed and burned and downloads are down in the dumps, what’s taken their place for the discerning Justin Bieber, Drake and Rhianna fan?

Streaming. 45 billion of them, or every household in the UK listening to 1,500 songs during the year in this way. And that doesn’t include YouTube either. When you take into account how many old buffers like me are still clinging desperately to their physical formats, that average figure is quite startling.

Some people have never purchased a song. Never ‘owned’ any music. It just comes at them for a flat fee. Rent-a-tune. They haven’t lived.

But then I have purchased Queen’s first album on vinyl, cassette, CD, re-mastered CD AND expanded edition CD, so best draw your own conclusions.

This post first appeared as my 'Thank grumpy it's Friday' column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 6th of January 2017. The print version was re-titled as "Are we victims of vinyl spin?", whilst the website version became "What goes around, spin around".

Rather splendidly, the teaser in the index on page 2 of the paper had a photo of a bearded, gleeful, chap, holding up a Bowie album cover. The accompanying snippet from my column was "These are just twitches of a dead format that hipsters think makes them look cool". Me likey! Now I'm offending vinyl buffs in South Cumbria :-)

If I had space, I'd have a turntable available again in a heartbeat. I miss my vinyl, although massive over-use and a dodgy player at one point mean almost everything jumped in the end. Still - it's a connection with my past and a happy time when I could easily pop my headphones on and get lost in a great album.

A belated Happy New Year to you - hope you had a good one. Nasty colds meant we saw the New Year in at midnight in bed, cursed people letting of fireworks, then were asleep by 12.15. Go us! Paaaaar-ty!

(CD A-Z: On hold for some new ones received for Christmas, including KT Tunstall's "Kin", which is grand thus far...)

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