'VINYL SALES AT A 20-YEAR HIGH'
We suspected this already but this morning’s BBC article confirms that record sales are higher than they’ve been for the last 20 years. This is good news!
We knew our (that's me and Leigh, as Factoryroad and our record label Blunt Force Trauma) own vinyl sales were up but, as record buyers all our lives (that’s going way beyond 20 years, FYI) we’ve seen its glory days and the weird and difficult days in the 2000s when music buying seemed to become a messy, confusing maze of dead ends, closing record shops and an off-gassing slagheap of discarded CDs floating in a toxic sea of legal and illegal digital. We seem to be through that now and the places we can go to listen to, test out, buy and sell music are clearly defined – the wheat having been cut from the chaff of endless streaming and music-nicking sites in the form of confident, creative independent record labels (whatever it is, always buy it from there first!) – stores stores such as Boomkat, Piccadilly and Juno; Spotify – albeit controversial, still a place to audition your new records, just as you would stand in a record shop listening to a copy before buying – and Discogs, where that long-sought missing record can be found with a little diligence.
Added to the recent story about the pressing plants being overwhelmed with business, something we’re pleased about but feeling the sharp end of at the minute as we wait for our own new vinyl to be finished, this all makes for a rosy-cheeked industry. One that I'm proud to be involved in, albeit in a small way.
At long last. For a minute there, we all got a bit confused.
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