When did vinyl become mainstream again?

Are you new here? He says the same thing in every "vinyl" thread.

Let's face it: The next ten pages will be filled with reruns of The Most Repeated Comments for/against vinyl.

Tinnitus isn't the greatest threat to audiophiles - it's memory loss.

 

Around the time of skinny jeans?

 

Yes, it is.

 

I work at a thrift a couple days a week and teens are buying scratched up vinyl in beat up jackets. And I don't mean choice titles. Like real leftover, picked over junk. The kicker: they haven't yet purchased a "record player". When I ask if they have an existing stereo system, they look baffled, lol!

 

It's not mainstream but I'll place the beginning of its current resurgence as around the same time as the first Record Store Day in 2007. That's about when I first started taking notice and bought a turntable and started getting back into vinyl.

 

The 2 biggest titles in vinyl sales of 2015?


Adele - 25

Taylor Swift -1989


Families are coming in and buying vinyl together. Old people, young people. In between people.


Some people never got rid of their turntables.


Some people never got rid of their records.


Others are discovering the joy everyday.


Vinyl sales officially overtook all other music sales in regards to percentage of money spent in 2016 - in sheer numbers, only streaming is bigger.


That's pretty mainstream.

I have the biggest of anyone I know, around 5k.

Me and my friends swap records, my roommate has over 1k, a buddy at work has 500. A few other friends have a few hundred. My ex-girlfriend has over 100.

I gave a box of around 20 away recently to a friend that got his first tt. The buddy with 500 donated a player AYE?

Sounds like you need cooler friends :\

 

I propose we all start calling them "Elpees" rather than Vinyl(s). Plus it kinda goes with the question of streams... main or otherwise.

 

Probably not! But i think there is just about enough room for disagreement.
Is vinyl "normal or conventional" in 2017? Maybe, it's a visible symbol in media,
it's certainly not a surprise to pretty much anyone who follows music that the format
has been at least "fashionable" again after many years of obscurity.

But it's certainly not the dominant format, that would likely be streaming, or given the
vast number stored on computers, compressed music files like the mp3.


main·stream
ˈmānˌstrēm/
noun

1. 1.
   the ideas, attitudes, or activities that are regarded as normal or conventional; the dominant trend in opinion, fashion, or the arts.

 

Well, it's being sold in supermarkets, so I think it must be fairly mainstream. Personally, I take the view that it became mainstream again as soon as Sainsbury's started stocking it (locally, that was in 2015, I think). It may not be as mainstream as cabbages, but it is sold alongside them!

 

I think around the time when this became considered a good look.

 

Despite the hype sales are not astonishing. Back in the day (70's) albums by Zep, Floyd, The Stones etc would sale in the millions. According to the a recent article in The Guardian world sales last year were only just over 3 million. Not mainstream

Record sales: vinyl hits 25-year high

 

To the OP, your question may not have been phrased in the best way, since few people - even champions of vinyl like myself - would call it a mainstream format. Perhaps the better question is: When did vinyl see a resurgence in popularity and sales?

No doubt there's a graph somewhere that shows the uptick in sales over the past decade, but I can still offer some quick anecdotal evidence.

In 2008, I switched from having listening to CDs all my life to making vinyl my dominant listening format. At the time, I made this choice for audio reasons, as I got sick of hyper-compressed CDs and read that vinyl was not plagued as much by that problem. Once I started telling friends and family that I was making a change to vinyl listening in 2008, a lot of people would respond: "Oh, yeah, I heard that vinyl is making a comeback," or something to that effect.

So a lot of people have been aware of its surge for nearly a decade. I would wager that this dramatic increase for vinyl production (compared to what the format experienced in the early 90's) began somewhere in the mid to late 2000's and has grown ever since. When you look at all the reissues, new releases, audiophile pressings, and box sets that come out these days on vinyl, it's clear that such a wide selection of titles on vinyl was not available in 1997, for example.

Achieving mainstream status is really not that important, because if you're interested in vinyl there's so much being pressed today that you'll have a hard time keeping up and getting everything you want.

Hope that helps.

 

Cracker Barrel

You can purchase LPs at the effing Cracker Barrel.

If that's NOT "mainstream", then I guess we've redefined the word...

 

I find it interesting how these ideas circulate, someone should
research all the articles written about the comeback of vinyl,
it might give the impression that it never went away!

There is another example I can think of with a similar history,
which is the phrase "cycling is the new golf", and i found so many
references to this, i wondered when it wasn't the new golf!

 

That's still more than CDs.

Plus, among the top sellers every week are the perennials - catalog titles like Zep 4, Abbey Road, Purple Rain, Rumours, Thriller, DSOTM - I **** you not, the things that sell the most are catalog titles that don't get recertified, so they're not counted.

The "3 Million" accounts for the Adeles, the Taylors, the Bruno Marses...not how many copies of Rumours gets sold AGAIN (we sell ALL 3 versions every week, btw.)

With all the reissues and box set sales, Rumours may be at 60 million in sales if they would recertify it.

 

I think that figure is UK sales. Certainly more impressive than 2007, which was the nadir.

 

LP sales have been increasing at a consistent rate since I returned to the format in 2003, so it's hard to note the exact inflection point when they became "mainstream" again because the rise has been so slow and steady.

That said - LP's are clearly a mainstream physical music format at this point. The sales numbers showing new LP's selling more $ than new CD's are just the tip of the iceberg...those numbers don't account for the fact that used records have all but completely replaced used CD's in the used shops that I've shopped in for decades (at least in Montreal). Those numbers don't account for the fact that non-music-nerds are shopping the LP bins alongside music nerds, which I'd think is what would define LP's as being mainstream: it's not just the audiophile or trendy folks who are buying it, it's anybody with an interest in buying that music.

So I would say that it's pretty nebulous to argue that LP's aren't mainstream now, at least in Montreal where record stores thrive as CD stores (that are too slow to move to LP's) close.

As to when it happened...it was sometime over the last 2 years or so, when I started seeing as many women as men at the record stores, and when Record Store Day started getting lineups (and stacks of records at checkout) as big as the old Boxing Day sales at Sam's.

 

I dunno. What would I have in common with my new "cooler" friends? They'd be at the Salvation Army looking for LPs and I'd be there looking for clothes. Besides, if vinyl is now mainstream, how can it be cool?

 

Of course titles like Rumours get recertified. According to the BPI, Rumours went 11x platinum in 2011.

 

Perhaps you could post your definition.
The debate is going to be around how "widely accepted" vinyl is.


the definition of mainstream

mainstream

[meyn-streem]

noun
1.
the principal or dominant course, tendency, or trend

2.
belonging to or characteristic of a principal, dominant, or widely accepted group,
movement, style, etc

 

Sales in only one way to measure.

There are billions of existing CD's in peoples collections, why discount that from the discussion?

 

https://www.bpi.co.uk/home/bpi-official-uk-recorded-music-market-report-for-2016.aspx

Maybe not....

 

Que?

There are billions of existing LPs in people's collections too. Over 10,000 of them are in this house.

So what's your point?

 

I love the personal offense people take to vinyl being readily available again. It's like they took pride in "killing vinyl" off in 1989-1990 and take it as this personal insult to injury that vinyl has become more in the forefront again. It's like they feel that vinyl making a return somehow makes their devotion to cd's less significant or something.

Vinyl will never be dominant like it once was... but guess what. cd's will never be as dominant as they once were either. Why crap on a format in an era where more and more people are fine with paying for a streaming service and not want to own physical media anymore? Vinyl and cd consumers should try to get along more instead of cd fans taking this personal moral objectification that most of the albums out now are also available on a twice-the-price LP counterpart that nobody is holding at gunpoint for them to buy. Come on, we're both still believing in supporting the artists and owning physical product, which is something that is becoming more and more obsolete by the year... we have college freshmen who have never paid for an album in their lives.

 

To me, it stopped being mainstream when CDs became available.