UK | Vinyl destination: Can the format’s sales growth continue in 2023? …Vinyl has been a good news story for the music industry, but the format has faced persistent challenges with production capacity. Its continuing success is all the more vital given the collapse in CD sales – physical music did not see its usual gifting season boost at Christmas. In our latest edition, Music Week has spoken to major label execs and Kim Bayley, CEO of ERA. For the first five weeks of 2023, Music Week can reveal that vinyl sales are up 15.6% year-on-year. The format topped 100,000 sales for four out of those five weeks, including strong performances by the reissue of Courteeners’ debut St Jude (10,959 vinyl sales so far), The Reytons’ independently released What’s Rock And Roll? (5,850 vinyl sales across numerous editions) and Taylor Swift’s Midnight’s (a further 4,628 on the format in 2023). According to ERA, 2022 vinyl album sales revenue grew 11% to £150.5m, while CD album sales fell 17.4% to £124m – the first time vinyl outsold CD by value since 1987. That increase is largely due to the format’s increasing prices – £30 is now common for an LP.
Newport, UK | Record shop in Newport sees rise in young people buying vinyl: After fading away some years ago, listening to music on vinyl is very much back – with sales of records in the UK exceeding those of CDs last year for the first time in 35 years. In total 5.5 million vinyl records were sold in 2022 – a massive turnaround since the format was written off by many following the rise of the CD in the 1980s. And for those getting into vinyl for the first time, independent record shops such as Kriminal Records – which moved from Newport Market into the Market Arcade late in 2021 – offer a wealth of knowledge, advice, and recommendations. Owner Dean Beddis said he had seen an increasing number of younger customers show an interest in the format. “I have seen groups of them come in and look through the cheaper stuff and chatting away,” he said. “I had one girl come in and ask me if there was music on both sides, as she was only used to CDs, so there is that aspect to vinyl. “Older people are getting back into it too. We have seen good attendance at record fairs in Newport with more people coming in.
Nablus, PS | Vinyl, record player shop in Nablus preserves fading musical heritage: Jamal Hemmou, who repairs and sells records and players, says customers ‘come from all of Palestine to buy from me’ From Jamal Hemmou’s ramshackle workshop in Nablus’s Old City in the West Bank, classic Arabic songs blare into the surrounding cobbled streets. The 58-year-old is the last of his kind in the city — he runs the only shop in Nablus repairing and selling vinyl records and players. Like much of the world, Nablus is attuned to digital music, but Hemmou told AFP working with vinyl was about preserving Palestinian “heritage.” Elderly people regularly pass by at the end of the day and, “when I turn on the record player, they start crying,” he said. Hemmou began learning how to repair record players when he was 17, listening to the great Arab artists of the time as he worked. “I have more experience than the people with the certificates,” he joked, adding that he is entirely self-taught, and acquired his passion for music from his father. “My father was a singer, he used to sing because he loved those old singers… almost everyone in my family is a musician,” he said.
Toronto, CA | Vinyl records pressed with bodily fluids and CDs packaged with human hair — what makes a Toronto doctor collect these things? Psychiatrist Michael Tau wrote a book about extreme music that covers both sound and outrageous packaging. Dr. Michael Tau works in the Unity Health Toronto hospital network, serving patients at St. Mike’s downtown and Providence in Scarborough. Recently, he wrote a book in which he explores a certain obsessive behaviour that might seem odd if not downright disturbing to the average person. But the book in question probably won’t make a lot of waves in his specialist field of geriatric psychiatry – because it’s about his music collection. And it’s not filled with the typical vinyl LPs that you’ll find at Rotate This or Sonic Boom, but music preserved on cassettes encased in blobs of spray-painted cotton, albums issued on floppy disks, and cigar-tin box sets that came packaged with clumps of human hair.
Denver, CO | Vinyl and vintage audio equipment find their groove at new store: South Broadway’s Aural HiFi helps audiophiles rediscover music at the drop of a needle. In a society enamored by the next newest thing, there are still people who like their books on paper, prefer their thank-you notes handwritten, would rather talk to people than interact with bots, and like their music on vinyl records, played on a turntable through a pre-amp and amp with real visible tubes, housed in furniture specifically made to hold audio equipment and heard through speakers the size of an apartment refrigerator. The folks in that later group are fueling a re-discovery of vintage equipment and vinyl records and raising the hopes of Aural HiFi, a new store on South Broadway’s Antique Row that rehabilitates old stereo equipment for a legion of ardent audiophiles. Aural is owned by self-described “stereo archaeologist” Jeremy Irwin.
Wilco, The Grateful Dead and the Tamsui-Kavalan Chinese Orchestra all won Grammys for album packaging: Taking a look at the Grammys packaging winners. Whilst the focus at the Grammys each year is on the biggest categories, such as ‘Album of the Year’ and ‘Record of the Year’, three important awards celebrate and draw attention to innovation and art in the world of physical format music–’Best Recording Package’, ‘Best Boxed Or Special Limited Edition Package’ and ‘Best Album Notes’. This year, the Tamsui-Kavalan Chinese Orchestra took home the award for ‘Best Recording Package’, beating Soporus, Spiritualized, Fann and Underoath. Their project, Beginningless Beginning, is a soundtrack album for the short film Tamsui-Kavalan Trails Trilogy and its packaging was designed by father and daughter duo Xiao Qing-yang and Hsiao Chun-tien. This was Xiao’s seventh Grammy nomination, and Hsiao’s first. Check out the packaging below.
Reissue labels leading the way to a Compact Disc revival: How are reissue labels paving the way to a revived passion for the Compact Disc medium? …“Vinyl record production is too costly,” [they] said. “Compact Discs are smaller, easier to store and they sound better than vinyl, the way music is supposed to sound,” [they] said – and you know what, [we] bought it. If much of the music loving and music collecting community, at that time, hadn’t already started to purge all of their vinyl records in lieu of replacing them with compact disc counterparts, they were gonna be doing it now, because they were ‘convinced’ it was ‘the thing to do.’ Moreover, to obtain anything ‘new’ on vinyl record, would then shortly, ultimately not be possible because; as I’ve already mentioned, by the mid-decade, record retailers did not have the option to purchase non-existent and unavailable vinyl record stock from any major or even independent retail music distributors. Fortunately for vinyl record enthusiasts and ‘audiophiles,’ there were still a small conglomerate of audiophile-focused reissue record labels who did not bow down to the mainstream industry’s “deceit” and ulterior motives regarding the vinyl record medium, as they continued to maintain their production of high-quality vinyl reissues.
