NEW YORK – Like many people in his generation, Mr Vijay Damerla finds most of his new music online – but the 20-year-old is slowly becoming a vinyl junkie, amassing records in his room.

The student says he does not even own a turntable and that, for him, “it’s the equivalent of getting an artist poster or even an album poster on your wall” and “a little bit of a relic from the past”.

For Ms Celine Court, collecting vinyl – she says she owns about 250 records – is about the nostalgic, warm sound that many listeners say digital copies strip away.

“If you listen to music on vinyl, it’s so different,” the 29-year-old, who is from the Netherlands, told Agence France-Presse as she perused the stacks at New York’s Village Revival Records. “It has this authentic kind of feeling to it.”

Vinyl’s popularity has grown steadily in recent years, a reversal after compact discs and digital downloads reigned over the 1990s and early 2000s.

The latest report from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said that in 2022, more record units were sold than CDs for the first time in three decades, with consumers buying 41 million pieces of new vinyl compared with 33 million CDs.

Revenue from vinyl had already started surpassing CDs as at the 2020 report.

Big box retailers, including Walmart, have embraced the retro format, and megastars including Taylor Swift, Harry Styles and Billie Eilish have sent pressing plants into overdrive.

Just this week, metal band Metallica purchased a plant to keep up with demand for their own reissues.

Smaller shops are also feeding interest. Mr Jamal Alnasr, who owns Village Revival, stocks around 200,000 records at any given time, not to mention used CDs, cassettes and memorabilia.

“Who could have imagined vinyls coming back to life?“ said the 50-year-old shop owner, who moved to New York from the West Bank in his late teens.

At one point he had even donated much of his own personal collection, which he estimates could be worth roughly US$200,000 (S$269,000) these days, to an archiving institution. “In the 90s, if you talked about vinyl, I wouldn’t have thought you were cool.”

But now, he says, “every day I see (this) young generation buying new vinyl”.

“I’ve been doing this for 30 years… this new generation of kids, they come in to look for all the music from the 1930s and 40s and 50s,” he added.

“They actually know more than those of us who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s,” he said with a laugh. “It’s a beautiful thing.”

Physical experience

Mr Alnasr deals in both new and used vinyl – the RIAA report refers to reported sales of new pressings, which the shop owner does stock. He estimates the store contains about half new, half used items.

As vinyl is relatively expensive to manufacture and distribute, the mark-up these days on new items can be as little as 5 per cent, and he relies on original collectibles to make up the difference.

Mr Alnasr said his business is driven by a combination of music nerds and more casual listeners, and with a US$15,000 monthly rent – once a bohemian haunt, today’s Greenwich Village is among the city’s priciest neighbourhoods – he is mostly operating on the margins.

“Every time I’m about to sink, I just take everything I’ve got personally and put it back into the business,” he said. “I love my business more than I love myself.”

Echoing Mr Damerla’s experience, Mr Alnasr said many people buy records for the art and discover the music later.

He is fine with that, but does insist that most of his sales be conducted in person.

For a known customer – Mr Alnasr is a favourite record dealer among celebrities, having befriended the likes of Lana Del Rey, Bella Hadid and Rosalia – he is willing to procure and ship an item.

But, for the most part, he prefers people “physically experience” the vinyl.

“You can say I’m a stubborn New Yorker – I do not want to sell this format online,” he said.

“I want people to come here… dig through vinyls and get educated. They will see much more that way,” he continued, adding that “there are a lot of hidden gems in here”.

No matter the vinyl revival, sales of physical music media remain niche, with streaming remaining the dominant listening format.

Services including paid subscriptions and ad-supported platforms grew 7 per cent to reach a record high US$13.3 billion in revenue in 2022, according to the RIAA. This accounted for 84 per cent of total US profits.

But Ms Court called streaming “too fast, too easy”.

She said: “It’s just better energy to collect your vinyl and then listen to it and be proud of it.” AFP