Drop the needle. Vinyl is back.
Timothy Wilson has owned Urban Lights Music on University Avenue in St Paul for some 30 years. He is seeing first hand, the explosion in requests for vinyl.
“It’s a new vinyl buyer," Wilson tells WCCO's Susie Jones.
Wilson said back in the day, you might have hundreds of records, but now it has become a collector’s game.
“It’s about having different colors,” Wilson said standing behind his counter, pointing out one of the albums for sale.
“For instance, the Nelly – Country Grammar album has been out for years but it’s the 25th anniversary album and it’s on blue vinyl,” he explains about the collectability of some records.
In the era of the "mp3" and music being squeezed down to smaller sizes so they fit on phones, quality of the sound has people buying records. It also has people spending thousands of dollars on turntables with special needles.
“They like the sound,” he said. “They might have only 50 records. Whether it’s Steely Dan, Metallica or Kendrick Lamar. It does not matter. They have their favorite music, all in their stacks ready for when friends come over.”
While the collectors are generally an older crowd, he is also seeing younger fans of vinyl as well.
“You’ll find a lot of younger people are discovering Marvin Gaye," Wilson said. "They are listening to Prince. They are going back and they are finding the Isley Brothers.”
He says the kids are digging the old stuff too.
“What we find is that 70’s, 80’s and 90’s music is much better.”
Over the past decade, vinyl records have made a major comeback. People purchased US$1.2 billion of records in 2022, a 20% jump from the previous year.
Not only did sales rise, but they also surpassed CD sales for the first time since 1988, according to a new report from the Recording Industry Association of America.
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