Vinyl records are now so hot they move UK inflation

https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/11/business/vinyl-records-uk-inflation-basket/index.html

Quote: "The prices of vinyl records will feed into UK inflation statistics for the first time since 1992, highlighting a surge in their popularity among British consumers driven in part by Taylor Swift.
LPs — which dropped out of the UK inflation basket more than three decades ago, owing to the rise of CDs and cassettes — have made a huge comeback in recent years."

Which one is 'now so hot' ?............ Vinyl or Taylor Swift ?
 

Attachments

  • 12in-Vinyl-LP-Record-Angle.jpg
    12in-Vinyl-LP-Record-Angle.jpg
    59 KB · Views: 35
  • 6a00d8341c764653ef01b8d144082f970c-800wi.jpg
    6a00d8341c764653ef01b8d144082f970c-800wi.jpg
    56.8 KB · Views: 35
Last edited:
At least judging by shelf space, vinyl LPs are at least as popular in Oz as CDs; some stores have stopped selling at all in some outlets. Not that there are many dedicated record/CD/tape stores any more.

LP prices are another thing: Kind of Blue $60, Hendrix $50, new Beatles red and blue $130 each - ouch.

Geoff
 
In England (where I live, LOL), the record shops are moving to Vinyl in a big way, but also in a very expensive way - I've seen £30 an album!). Dozens of cheap and some slightly better turntables litter the stores too.

Some record stores are actual managing to survive too, against the onslaught on Uniform Business Rates, high rents, high electricity bills, high heating costs and high tax if they do make any money... there's even two in the small town I'm in today! So that's hopeful - echoes of the 1970s, back when commercial hifi was fun, instead of todays magic fuses and cables LOL :D

Charity shops are also good for vinyl, but no much good stuff, the closest I saw was David Essex, but it's still an area worth looking at. Particularly as many highstreets appear to only contain charity shops...

CDs started off terrible, then got over mastered - so Mp3s sounded the same, then in the last few years the mastering has calmed down a bit, but people are going for vinyl. Not sure if it's just because modern music is sh-t-, or if it's the smooth(er) sound, or the fact that watching a disc rotate is considerably more entertaining and rewarding than what's on TV.
 
Member
Joined 2020
Paid Member
Some of the EDM / synthetic music popular today seems to benefit from vinyl playback over pure digital reproduction. My friends and I play a lot of that stuff on various systems and it really takes a high-end DAC to make a digitally streamed source not sound dark and compressed. The speed and dynamics of a good turntable, stylus and phono stage, and a well tuned sub, can really make a very fast, very deep EDM track sound proper.