Death is pretty final. I’m collecting vinyl.
—R.E.M., “I’m Gonna DJ”
Listening to a vinyl record is a religious experience; it’s full of ritual. It starts with the album cover: a cardboard sleeve of four English men walking across Abbey Road, a triangle reflecting a rainbow in a black sky, or a man surrounded by a cool darkness blowing into his trumpet. The five-ounce, twelve-inch plastic record slides out, and the weight pulls down the hand. The audiophile delicately places it on the turntable platter. The stylus’ needle softly drops onto the disc. POP! Warm crackles hiss as the needle glides over the smooth, dead wax until it’s trapped between the first groove. The speakers vibrate the recording’s sound waves. It’s full of life, however, a gamble. One record sounds clean and pristine; another is skipping between tracks, sounding muddy, and unlistenable. Slight imperfections are something a digital file can’t replicate.
On a crisp Saturday morning in a Wallingford, Connecticut parking lot, melomaniacs congregated outside of Redscroll Records. They sat and waited comfortably inside their running vehicles for day two of its Black Friday sale. They were surrounded by lawn mowers and tractors belonging to the lot’s shared power equipment business when, finally, they were allowed to usher inside the sizable, beige, industrial box that houses the largest variety of vinyl records for sale in the state. A tall black cardboard sign inside the store read the Black Friday sales.
Thirty minutes after they opened, the concrete showroom with nearly fifty thousand products for sale was congested with a diverse group of Redscroll Records patrons. From casual fans who wanted to get a CD for a dollar, to the hardcore music enthusiasts who swam through plastic totes full of DIY cassette tapes. The majority of them were there for what filled the room: vinyl. In the background, the song “Sink” by Feeling Figures, a rock band from Montreal, Québec, could be heard. Customers appeared to be in a meditative trance as they dug for treasure. Their appearances were as varied as the selections in their hands, and, for some, wrapped around their arms. There was the suburban dad and his third copy of Steely Dan’s Aja who browsed the secondhand rock and pop section, sweaty stoners who wore battle jackets littered with patches of indecipherable typography on the hunt for anything gory or sludgy in the metal section, like Sanguisugabogg’s Homicidal Ecstasy, and twenty-something-year-old hipsters who grabbed Oneothrix Point Never’s new progressive electronic album, Again, from what Redscroll calls their “weirdo” section.
“Oh sweet, look at what they have!” A young man with curly ginger hair exclaimed to his friend. He held Molchat Doma’s 2018 coldwave album Etazhi in his freckled hands. His smile grew as he looked at the cover, an edited photograph of Hotel Panorama in Štrbské Pleso, Slovakia. He explained that he didn’t even realize it was on vinyl, as he discovered the band on YouTube. “It’s an exclusive too!” Proclaimed his friend who pointed at the hyper sticker on the shrink wrap with his finger. The vinyl itself was translucent with a blueish-green tint, like a Coke bottle, lacking the carbon-based pigment records that are normally coated with to improve sound quality and durability.
“Thousands of records, new and used, surround you, and it’s just so much fun digging through it all.”
“One of the pieces of advice we got seventeen years ago was that we should let the customers guide us, don’t try and force your tastes on others. To a very large degree, what we carry is a reflection of our regular customers.” Co-owner Rick Sinkiewicz told me over email. “I know folks are happy when we have things they’re looking for. We recently got passed along a nice story about someone being in a random place quite a distance away and connecting with someone else because they recognized a Redscroll logo on their sweatshirt, and they both had nice things to say. We are generally here to help, but are not in the face of anyone. There’s no commission to be had here; no ‘sales force.’ Take your own journey through the stacks.”
“I like shopping at Redscroll because it’s really authentic to the record shop experience.” Said Caleb, twenty, from Bristol. “Thousands of records, new and used, surround you, and it’s just so much fun digging through it all. I love the user selection, too, because you’ll never know what you’re going to find.” He sported a black bandana hugging his head, pearl and silver necklaces, a charcoal gray overshirt with an Aphex Twin t-shirt underneath, and baggy-washed denim jeans with paint splatters to match. In his left hand was the Richard D. James Album by Aphex Twin on CD, a drill and bass release he already owned on vinyl.
As far as music consumption goes, streaming services dominate the music world. According to a year-end review by the Recording Industry Association of America, in 2022 streaming continued to account for the lion’s share of revenue, $13.13 billion. This was a 7 percent increase from the previous year to reach an all-time high. After their remarkable resurgence in 2021, physical music formats continued to grow in revenue. Over 70 percent of physical format revenue came from vinyl records alone, which grew 17 percent to $1.2 billion. This is the first time since 1987 that vinyl albums have outsold CDs in units.
Sinkiewicz has had a turntable view of this vinyl renaissance. “Since day one of us opening the store [in 2007] there have been stories about the resurgence of vinyl. It’s been nice that we could grow as a store as sales grew everywhere. We didn’t notice any drastic, sudden change at any point. It’s all been a nice, steady uphill [climb].” Rolling Stone Magazine reported that songwriter and pop megastar Taylor Swift played a big role in the sales increase. Sinkiewicz knows the effect of Swiftonomics, “There are, of course, artists that have embraced the vinyl format like Taylor Swift that have a huge cultural impact. No one can deny that. It helps to constantly cultivate a new audience to keep the passion growing.”
Streaming is going to continue to dominate music sales, so why invest in what people consider an outdated form of analog technology? Caleb cradled Bathory’s 1984 self-titled debut–an album that pioneered the genre of black metal–and explained his philosophy. “There is something so beautiful about being able to hold music with your hands. To see and really visualize the music in the grooves of the record, to be in awe by the fact that music is coming out of a plastic disc. Vinyl is such a fascinating form of media to me because of how otherworldly it is really.”
Sinkiewicz unveiled his own hypothesis on the allure of vinyl. “I think different releases lend themselves to different mediums.” He prefers listening to long playing tracks on CD because it prevents having to flip a record in the middle of a song, and lo-fi, promotional tracks, and/or mixtape releases on cassette for their own charming imperfections. But for Sinkiewicz, when it comes to, “something you want to truly dive into and pay full attention to, a vinyl record can’t be beat. We have more vinyl than any other format because that is the way the river bent, [and where] the winds pushed us.”
Nearly two hours after they opened, the glass door continued to swing open with sonic junkies who looked hungry to snag a deal. It’s clear that there will always be a timeless appeal to vinyl amidst the ever-evolving landscape of how we listen to music. The discs will never stop spinning.
Dame Martin is a Staff Writer for Blue Muse Magazine.
Header Image courtesy of Dame Martin.
The suburban dad getting his third copy of Steely Dan’s AJA and the sweaty stoners–thanks for bringing us there in this splendid article!