Abstract
r. saylor breckenride and william tsitsos on wax’s recent waxing.
“Majors Accelerate Vinyl Phase-Out,” Billboard magazine, Sept. 17, 1988 “Music’s Hot New Growth Area: Vinyl!” Billboard magazine, May 3, 2014
Vinyl records were the dominant physical medium by which people listened to music for over half a century. They were displaced as the best-selling media format by cassette tapes in 1982, followed by the dominance of compact discs starting in 1993. Then, in1999, as digital music file formats and streaming services entered the consumer world, compact disc sales began to decline alongside the other physical formats. Since 2006, there has been a shift in this pattern: vinyl record sales in the U.S. have seen a resurgence.
While virtual formats still dominate, vinyl is the only physical medium to see any consistent increase in sales in the 21st century. And this growth has been swift and steep: in March 2015, Mike Campbell wrote in the online magazine Noisey that there are “roughly 20 active pressing plants nationwide. These facilities can in no way meet the current demand for vinyl.” Major artists like Beyonce and Taylor Swift are releasing LPs as normal parts of their careers, and vinyl is booming as a format. As a June 9, 2013 New York Times headline about young adults in the U.S. states, “Weaned on CDs, They’re Reaching for Vinyl.”
Contrasting the U.S. sales volume of compact discs with that of vinyl in 2000 and in 2016 highlights this changing landscape. In 2000, the total number of compact discs sold, including full-length albums, CDEPs, and CD singles, was approximately 500 times greater than the total number of vinyl full-lengths and singles. By 2016, the gap had narrowed tenfold, to about 50:1. This change is even more dramatic in terms of sales revenue. According to Recording Industry Association of America data, in 2000 compact discs brought in almost 250 times more revenue than vinyl ($18.6 billion vs. $75.3 million, in adjusted 2016 dollars); by 2016, that ratio was reduced to less than 3:1 ($1.17 billion vs. $435 million, in adjusted 2016 dollars).
Considering this long-arc change in formats, their technical qualities can be seen as key sources of distinction. The trends from vinyl to cassette to CD to digital file all represent shifts toward convenience: portability, ease of storage, and reduced caretaking. Price could play a key role, too, most notably in the 21st century, when the cost to consumers of downloads and subscriptions is a tiny fraction of the cost of physical media. Vinyl is, generally, the most expensive of the lot. New LPs can regularly cost over $20 while online digital subscription services provide access to millions of songs for less than $10 per month. Compared to all other formats, vinyl is costly and inconvenient, so a different angle is needed to explain its sales growth.
The notion of conspicuous consumption ties vinyl records to the acquisition or maintenance of prestige: the format by which music is consumed can serve as a marker of status, and vinyl has cachet. Dominik Bartmanski and Ian Woodward, in their 2015 article in the Journal of Consumer Culture, describe just this: a “coolness” tied to modern vinyl records.
Underlying this “coolness,” though, is a taken-for-grantedness that vinyl is a viable option as a medium for music at all. In order to be the “cool” choice, vinyl records must be part of the social environment as a possible, even if unpopular, option by which to listen to music. The format was in decline with the advent of cassettes, but its ultimate demise was predicted with the arrival of CDs. “Digital Compact Disks: Replacement for LPs?” reads a March 31, 1983 headline in the New York Times; “The Vinyl Record Era May Sing Its Swan Song” from March 2, 1989 in USA Today; and, on May 11, 1991, Billboard headlined “The LP’s Passage to Oblivion Nears.” Sales had plummeted, and these sorts of obituaries cropped up for about a decade from the mid-‘80s to the mid-‘90s.
Sales volume of physical formats 1976-2016
Source: Recording Industry Association of America
Vinyl records, compact discs and cassettes in the titles of media articles, 2006-2016
Source: New York Times, Billboard, USA Today
NY Times articles with vinyl, LP, CDs & cassettes in title, 1973-2016
Source: New York Times
But then came a shift. Headlines started to reference vinyl and how it was holding on to a share of the market, being sought by audiophiles, and serving a market for independent artists. The New York Times noted “Music Lovers are Voting for Vinyl” on Dec 8, 1994 and “Fans Flock to Vinyl In the Era of CDs” on May 7, 1998. The news of vinyl’s death had been greatly exaggerated.
That vinyl remained a topic in the national discourse at all is central to its taken-for-grantedness. Even when it was the least popular format, discussions about vinyl never left the popular press. In order to be “cool” and start to revive, vinyl had to live, and it did so, in part, via headlines: from its sales peak in 1977 to the beginning of its current upward sales arc in 2006, vinyl weathered a precipitous sales decline by remaining consistent in music writing.
This “taken-for-grantedness” links to a central concept within ecological ideas about industrial demography: legitimacy. This is the force that enables organizational growth and founding. As the operation of an organization—its form and structure and output—becomes legitimated or taken-for-granted in the world outside the organization, that organization grows or others are founded. As a countering force, once legitimation is maximized, competition among organizations reduces production and leads to firm shrinkage or failure. This isn’t simply a market story of demand and supply, but of the social environment: there are norms and values alongside the operation of an industry that impact its size and growth. Legitimacy enables an industry’s long-term operation.
The figure on p. 72 reveals the legitimation/competition process by illustrating the size of organizational operations. Vinyl sales grow as it, and the personal ownership of physical units of music (i.e., records) are legitimized. Then the legitimation of cassettes adds competition within the world of personal ownership, then CDs are added to the mix, and finally, digital music starts to drive down all of their sales. Physical forms of music were being outcompeted. But among them, vinyl experiences resurgence.
So how does this legitimation process occur? One way is through media discussion of musical formats. The top figure on this page shows the frequency with which the terms “vinyl,” “LP,” “CD,” “compact disc/disk,” and “cassette” appeared in the titles of articles in USA Today, the New York Times, and in Billboard as identified through online academic search engines. We removed non-relevant cases such as those that referred to non-musical uses of the search terms (e.g., “vinyl” as a chemical, “CD” as a certificate of deposit, or “cassette” as a video format) and cases in which the terms were used in titling a music review (e.g., “The new Prince LP is excellent”). For this graphic, we focused on the period from 2006-2016 to capture the detail of the growth of vinyl and clearly reveal that even while CDs are still the most popular physical format, it is the discussion of vinyl that dominates the headlines.
Archives of Billboard and USA Today were not digitally accessible for years prior to the 1980s, so we were unable to trace coverage in these outlets as far back as we could in the New York Times. Thus the bottom figure shows Times coverage of the three music formats back to 1973. In their 15-20 year heyday, CD coverage clearly dwarfs that of other formats, but coverage of vinyl in the Times never fully disappeared during the ‘90s and 2000s. Vinyl has been the most commonly headlined format since 2009.
The format by which music is consumed can serve as a marker of status, and vinyl, while costly and inconvenient, has cachet.
Vinyl never lost legitimacy. Even when it was a supposedly “dead” format, it lived on in the popular press and retained a prominence in the music community. For collectors and in special marketing to these audiophiles, vinyl has remained a crucial component of “serious” music appreciation (even as its sales dropped). Claims of its impending demise might have dominated in the 1980s and ‘90s, but these headlines gave way to stories about stalwart fans and, ultimately, the revival of the medium. Alternately, headlines referencing cassettes all but disappeared, and those mentioning CDs experienced a rise commensurate with their sales during the early period of their existence in the market, but since 2010, there have been nearly twice as many articles written about vinyl. Vinyl now exists as the predominant physical medium discussed within the headline environment.
The legitimating power of popular discourse has enabled vinyl to weather the arrival of more convenient and less expensive competitors. Its continual place in the conversation about music has enabled it to gather the cachet and prestige that have rendered it, today, the only measurably growing physical format in music. Interesting for continuing research, there is anecdotal, but not consistently measured, evidence of a slight resurgence in the cassette format in subcultural music-genres in very recent years that may add another layer of understanding to the manner in which legitimacy can retain a toehold and enable unexpected growth.