This article is taken from the February 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Vinyl is back, baby, back. If you happen to be my mum and have spent the last five decades cohabiting with my dad’s record collection, you might be inclined to ask sarcastically whether it ever went away. But the introduction of the CD set vinyl sales on the long slide to nothing. So it’s remarkable that last year, vinyl outsold CDs for the first time since 1988.

Like Labour’s relentless gains on the Conservatives, this is a story of incumbent failure as well as insurgent success. When vinyl sales began to reverse their long-term decline in 2008, CDs were already beginning to look sickly: the arrival of digital downloads prompted a turn away from physical formats altogether shortly after the millennium.

Why would music consumers be turning back to a bulky, fragile and inflexible medium?

Record companies, slow to recognise that the internet had changed their business model forever, saw audiences drift away to digital piracy. From 1998 to 2008, when Spotify made streaming a viable enterprise, the industry shrank relentlessly. The thing that drove CDs’ success was what was now killing them: convenience.

CDs bested vinyl by being easy to handle: no fear of needle scratches or warping. You could drop them and they wouldn’t shatter. You could skip tracks and reprogramme running orders. You didn’t even need to get up to flip the record. And they barely took up any space at all.

You could bemoan the effect this had on pop music, and me and my dad sometimes did. Whither the artfully controlled two-part structure of the LP? The climactic song at the end of side A, the straight-out-the-gates punch to launch side B, the rise to the ultimate finale?

Whither brevity? The extra run time of CDs was pitched as value for money, but often it meant artists didn’t bother to pick off the weaker songs. The Lemonheads’ 1992 album It’s a Shame About Ray is a tight sub-half hour. 1993’s Come on Feel the Lemonheads is a saggy hour, with 15 minutes of self-indulgent bonus tracks — partly because of all the drugs the band was doing, but also because CDs allowed it.

Whither image? The 12-inch sleeve is a thing of beauty, and no designer working in the CD era has ever matched the work done by Peter Saville for the Factory label or Vaughan Oliver for 4AD. But it was one thing to mourn the art of the LP, another to actually buy the things. My music collection was built on CD. And, when downloads arrived I left CDs behind in turn.

Everything the music industry had learned in the twentieth century pointed to vinyl’s demise in the twenty-first. And it’s true that physical formats are now a tiny proportion of the overall market: 10 percent to streaming’s 84. But while streaming drove CD sales into the ground, it precipitated vinyl’s resurgence.

While streaming drove CD sales into the ground, it precipitated vinyl’s resurgence

At first, the answer seemed to be nostalgia. Vinyl sales were driven largely by classics, or by acts whose sound was not exactly forward-looking. The bestselling vinyl album in 2008 was the Beatles’ Abbey Road. New releases from Fleet Foxes, Mumford and Sons and Adele also performed well: two scrupulously archaic folk groups and a Motown throwback.

But it’s not the boomer market that’s behind the 2022 figures, which are driven by Taylor Swift and Harry Styles. Acts my daughter’s generation listens to. In fact, “listens” might be a contentious word here: a 2018 survey found that around half of vinyl sales were destined to be room decor, never even leaving their sleeves.

That figures: the last remnants of my own vinyl have ended up on display in my daughter’s room. She doesn’t have a deck. They’re albums by hip-hop act A Tribe Called Quest and DC scum punks Pussy Galore, and while she often streams the former, she’s remained strangely resistant to the latter, with their charming song titles like “Penetration of the Centerfold”.

That, I think, is what people are buying when they buy vinyl: presence.

You can tell Spotify doesn’t perceive vinyl as a rival, because it offers LPs for sale through artists’ merch stores. But for artists, physical sales are a bulwark against the stingy margins offered by streaming. For fans,why would music consumers be turning back to a bulky, fragile and inflexible medium?.

That, I think, is what people are buying when they buy vinyl: presence. Listening through a deck rather than your phone or laptop turns music into a bulwark against the clamour of online life. All the annoying attention vinyl requires — dropping the needle, flipping it when the groove runs out — is reborn as a reason to love it.

Vinyl’s comeback suggests good things for the future of the album and the future of the music industry. Maybe, if you want to be expansive, good things for the next generation of humanity, who are learning to value disconnection. Although not, perhaps, good for my parents’ living room if my dad’s collection gets any bigger.