The vinyl revival is alive and kicking as the latest figures from the British Phonographic Industry confirm in December 2023.
Sales of vinyl in the UK have hit the highest level since 1990 with 5.9 million units increasing for the 16th year in a row.
I repair hifi and turntables in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire. Contact me if you have one you want repaired.
Repairing old hifi equipment I’ve had a fair number of turntables in for repair over the year along with people saying they’re getting back into vinyl.
My local town of Stroud has a couple of secondhand record shops, so the vinyl demand is strong in this area.
Cassettes are also popular
Sales of cassettes were 100,000 units for the fourth year in a row.
That’s pretty insignificant in terms of the UK population, but considering pre-recorded cassettes never sounded very good in the first place they’re hanging on.
This is a 40 second video of an old Pioneer cassette deck I repaired playing a tape I’ve uploaded to my YouTube channel.
Cassettes met their doom when music shifted to CD as the sound quality was far better, although CDs at £15 were about three times the price of vinyl back then.
CDs pretty much killed off vinyl as it gained a foothold. Back then I took about 100 vinyl albums to the local tip!
Why are these old formats so popular? Nobody seems to know as it depends on who you ask.
My take is there’s two camps, the HiFi fans that strive for quality and prefer vinyl and the other that just wants something different, more organic if you like and to get away from the big tech algorithm that controls the visibility of just about everything on the Internet.
With a vinyl album you get a big piece of cover art or arty photo in a sturdy card sleeve.
With a CD you get a rubbish small plastic case that invariably falls apart. The cover art is the same but it has no impact.
A download is just a file that might suddenly expire with licence changes.
Local bands can easily put their music on physical media for distribution to their fans that want it in that format as well as upload it to somewhere like Bandcamp for digital distribution.