Vinyl Is The New Baseball Card

From 8-tracks to cassettes to CD’s to MP3’s, few musical formats are still relevant or even financially smart if you are a local band or label. However, vinyl is a format that is both artistically sound and also making one of the biggest comebacks in history. According to a New York Times article, vinyl sales have been up every year since 2005 and up 18% percent since 2012 alone.

            Though, that is only still 1.4% percent of the market share (which is mostly digital these days), it still begs the question, “how long can this last”? It seems that most hardcore fans want this very collectible item of vinyl, which are limited to certain pressing and colors. There are literally hundreds of different colors you can put on the actual vinyl records themselves. They range from coke bottle clear, to red splatter, to any combination of designs or colors.

            This adds to the hipness of the “vinyl record”. When music is widely available everywhere from your computer or smartphone or tablet at such places as illegal streams or download sites, Youtube, Spotify, Bandcamp, etc… then the exclusivity that makes bands “cool” is pretty much gone. Now when you can say “I have a limited edition split 7” record of XbandX, which by the way, has only 50 copies ever made on green vinyl”, then you get some of that exclusivity back.

            Now a lot of people who aren’t even fans are going online and pre-ordering these limited edition copies and reselling them on Ebay and taking advantage of the hardcore fans these vinyl records draw in. So be careful if you happen to overpay for your favorite bands record on Ebay for 150 bucks when someone already bought it for $12.

            Is vinyl the new baseball card? Do bands have to put out digital, CD, and Vinyl to cater to all of their fan bases or even have a chance to reach everyone’s taste buds? With "vinyl only" labels sprouting up out of the woodwork it seems as if this craze is only becoming bigger as time goes on. Will this counterculture save the “physical copy” as major labels thought of discontinuing the CD as early as 2012 ?

Only time will tell.

Watch how vinyl is made right HERE.