By Maura Connell

Streaming services are all the rage these days. With a few quick taps on your phone, you can have over 100 million songs at your fingertips. Yet, statistics show that vinyls are trending again…

Though vinyl was the best selling music format until the 1980’s (when CD’s took over), they seem to have made a comeback. In 2022, Billboard Music stated that vinyl sales had been rising for 17 years, and 43.46 million vinyls were sold that year by a variety of artists. The top 10 best selling albums range from Taylor Swift’s Folklore and Midnights to The Beatles’s Abbey Road, making it clear that vinyl transcends age. So why, in an era where it is so easy to access music online, do customers still gravitate toward vinyls.

TD’s CD’s & LP’s on Kirkwood Ave, is a small store under SOMA Coffeehouse filled to the brim with old vinyls, CD’s and cassette tapes. There, Wilbur Bewley and Chris Domer, the owner and clerk, shared their opinions on streaming and the evolution of music platforms. The two opposed streaming services, saying that vinyls are timeless and nostalgia is getting the best of us. Music is, ”the future, the present, the past, it’s all at once”. They also believed that music is also a way to escape from reality.

Tracks on Kirkwood, which sells Indiana University apparel also has hundreds of vinyls, mostly from more modern artists like Sabrina Carpenter, Noah Kahan and Kendrick Lamar. Morgen, the cashier, talked about her take on the increasing popularity of vinyls. She highlighted how owning physical media may be part of the trend, saying, “If you go and buy a vinyl, nobody can take that from you and that’s permanently yours … it’s not going to go anywhere.” This seems to be a common explanation for the situation, as it ties to the idea that we mentioned earlier of vinyls being permanent. She also noted that many young people are buying vinyls too, though that is possibly due to the influence of social media trends.

While Spotify and Apple Music (among other streaming platforms) are easily accessible, we’ve learned that many people own older vinyls due to a variety of reasons. For many music lovers, it makes them feel nostalgic, and they also feel like the music they love is now theirs.  For some younger buyers, on the other hand, their vinyl purchases often include newer albums like Harry Styles’s Harry’s House and Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d city and are most often influenced by social media trends.