There are things made to last and others not. What will the new generations of media like the floppy disk, now dead and buried, remember?
Music has seen a massacre of solutions that were born badly (the minidisc, a crazy fiasco) or ended badly (the legendary Stereo8 cartridge). And then there is vinyl, the great ageless old man, born in its current form already in 1948 and given up for dead a thousand times.
Well, there's a place in the future for him too. According to the 2019 RIAA report, the US association of record companies, sales of vinyl albums exceed those of CDs for the first time since 1986. He's back.
The figures of a resurrection
In the first half of 2019, vinyl generated sales of 224 million dollars against the 247 million collected by CDs, but the clear growth trend on the one hand and the vertical collapse on the other, explains the report, will produce a sure overtaking.
It is the strongest signal of an unexpected (but very welcome) return of popularity, but it is not the first. In recent years the rise of the slope has been accompanied by sporadic overtaking even on digital music (although in some restricted markets). The reintroduction by majors like Sony of vinyl albums was more of a clue, as was the presentation of new turntable models (what effect does this word make me say!).
The reasons
The dematerialisation of society has gone very far, and very quickly. We learned to keep our photographs, our work documents, the games we play, the money we spend under a display and on a remote cloud.
Music does not follow linear paths. It's emotion, not just consumption. And although distribution with streaming platforms seems to be a road of no return, the need for physicality also grows.
Vinyl is concrete. It's objectified music. It's something that speaks directly to the artist. You can touch the album, browse the booklet it brings with it, read the lyrics without searching for them online. And listen, someone says, to a sound that appears more exciting and authentic than the "cold bits" (depends on the quality of the file, I would say, but oh well).
Who knows, maybe vinyl will only give way to a “Spotify” in VR that will allow us to wear helmets and gloves and browse our albums in a virtual reality. Or maybe not, that's the beauty of it.
