the vinyl renaissance

This past weekend, I attended Adelaide’s Vinyl Palooza, the state’s biggest music fair where, as the name might suggest, records are the purchase of choice. The decision to go on Sunday, mere hours before the sellers closed up shop, was mostly one of time constraints, but the trade-off for less choice was a lot of heavy discounts.

The last few years have seen a resurrection in vinyl sales while sales on other physical mediums, such as CD and cassette (who even remembers those things?), continue to decrease. Sellers at Vinyl Palooza had offerings on vinyl from numerous modern artists alongside the vintage releases, with many current musicians choosing to capitalise on this trend.

But that still doesn’t explain why so many people, in particular young people who were raised on CDs and mp3s, are now buying records.

As I write this, my iPod is located in my tiny handbag, completely concealed by my wallet while the records I lugged around at Vinyl Palooza left a bruise from holding the bag handle around my wrist, and of course contained a tiny fraction of the number of songs that can fit on the average mp3 player. Not to mention that you need a gramophone to play them, which isn’t the most easily found object (granted, I nicked mine from my parents, so perhaps they’re easier to come by than I think). Records get scratched and Apple won’t replace them when they break down. They don’t have the efficient filing system available on computers and they’re more expensive than CDs. And they are so heavy that it’s worth mentioning twice.

There are few, if any, practical reasons to buy vinyl, and maybe it’s just a romanticised idea of records that makes their sound richer than that which comes through a laptop’s speakers. But it’s the combination of everything that they are that makes their impracticality worth battling with. Cover art actually means something when it’s housing a 12-inch record, and clicking on a ‘Buy’ button doesn’t feel quite as good as flicking through hundreds of albums, knowing you might be about to stumble on some musical gold.

For my part, listening to vinyl started around the time I began listening to music as more than just background noise to whatever else I was doing. The fact that I could only listen to a few tracks at a time before having to flip the record over or put on a different one ensured that I paid attention.

It’s not for everyone (ie. if you can’t be bothered going to your record player relatively frequently, the shuffle function will probably remain your preferred listening method) but it does offer an engagement with music that other media cannot.

And if you don’t believe me? The next Vinyl Palooza will be held on November 6th-7th in the CBC Gymnasium at 214 Wakefield St, Adelaide. And if you don’t live in Adelaide? Count your losses. We need at least one thing going for us.