The Vinyl Precedent

by Mark Stephenson
Editor: Ryan Brooks

Though print media is faltering with the rise of online platforms, the newspaper is not the first to experience such hardships in the face of change. The music industry—with sales declining due to music downloads online—has undergone similar changes.

According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the market for digital music has consistently grown over the past seven years. In the first half of 2009, digital sales reached up to 35 percent of the entire market, up from around 30 percent last year. Of these, the popular music platform iTunes accounted for a 69 percent share.

"I download all my music,” says UGA sophomore William Hodges. “It’s so much easier than carrying around a bunch of CDs.”

However, according to a 2009 press release from the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the vast majority of music downloading—as much as 95 percent—is done illegally, with no reward for artists and producers.

“We all do it,” says Sam Williams, a DJ at UGA’s student-run radio station WUOG.

Due to its ease and availability, the illegal downloading of music from online sources like blogs has hurt musicians and the music industry in much the same way free news blogs have hurt news-people and the newspaper. The RIAA reported a 24.7 percent decrease in CD sales last year, with music sales overall down 8.3 percent.

Amidst all the negative statistics, one trend in the music market may hold promise for the offline news industry. As CD sales plummet and illegal MP3s cripple the digital market, the sale of vinyl records has increased exponentially in recent years.

In 2008, the RIAA estimated an overwhelming 124 percent increase in vinyl sales with more than 1.88 million new vinyl LPs sold. Predictions for 2009 put total record sales at well over 2 million. While vinyl’s share of the total music market is still very small at about 1 percent, the nostalgic medium seems to have found a new niche—and that niche is growing.

In many of the small, downtown stores of Athens, Ga., one can easily find that niche at work. On Clayton Street, the sound of Janice’s turntable is often audible outside her vintage clothing store, Minx. Janice says she has been strengthening her vinyl collection for longer than she can remember, and she guards her records carefully behind the front counter.

“I’ll sell you my records over my dead body,” the storeowner says, scoffing when asked if any of her large selection of ‘70s LPs were for sale.

WUOG has always prided itself for its large archive of vinyl music, a rarity in college radio. But Sam Williams says he thinks it would be better to make the conversion to a solely digital platform.

“Vinyl gets messed up. Records get stolen. I just make playlists on my laptop before my show,” Williams says. Asked if he thought WUOG would convert all its vinyl to digital music any time soon, Williams’ answer is strangely similar to Janice’s.

“The station’s going to die out before vinyl does,” Williams says.

Now a town staple, Wuxtry Records has carried vinyl since it opened 33 years ago, cashier Mike Turner says. Upon first glance around the store at the record collection accrued over so many years, this makes for an intimidating shopping experience. Rows of boxes filled with albums line the floors, the walls and everything in between. Spanning across generations of eclectic musical styles and genres, the record prices vary anywhere from $3 used copies of Fleetwood Mac to $40 double LPs by Radiohead.

The differences between the somewhat luck-based, haphazard process of finding and buying an album at the Wuxtry and that of the instantly-gratified music download are immediately discernable. Turner believes the vinyl record listener has an entirely different mindset than an online music consumer.

“The problem with blogs is that they don’t have any original critical thought,” Turner says. “They just post a picture and a press release and then a free song. They recycle other blog posts, constantly update with new music.”

While hesitant to attribute a lot of credence to the much-hyped “vinyl resurgence,” Turner, who also owns local independent label Happy Happy Birthday to Me Records, says he’s seen a consistent stream of vinyl customers over his five years working at the Wuxtry, and acknowledges a recent increase.

“Even Best Buy is stocking vinyl now,” he says. But despite new media, fads and fluctuations in popularity, Turner believes the niche market for vinyl has always been there and always will be.

Vinyl will never hold the share of the marketplace it once did, nor will the printed news industry ever be again what it once was. But newspaper presses might take hope and direction from the precedent of vinyl, which continues to be pressed at increasing rates for an increasingly marginalized customer base.


Vinyl shoppers browse the shelves at the Wuxtry in downtown Athens.