As our entire world has shifted to the digital side of the veil, our connections to the physical world around us have become more and more frayed — including to the tangible objects once key components of our lives — and, accordingly, the longing for the corporeal has never been more intense yet more difficult to come by than ever.
This won’t be new to most collectible industry folks reading this. Long has this drum been beaten over the past twenty years. While few want to go the full nine yards and truly reconnect with that natural world à la Chris McCandless at the expense of missing out on valuable Candy Crush time, an argument can be made that millions find solace in collecting.
While it is most commonly attributed to nostalgia (in many cases studies find an increasing number of young people feel nostalgia for a time before they were born), I believe this is just part of the explanation. This is not merely a matter of capturing nostalgia, it is a distinct and intentional contrast to the frictionless modern world.
Of course some collectors of analog-type technology, antiques, and relics of history are more easily connected to the desire to fill that psychological hole (and become a version of themselves envisioned) — there may be no better example than the thriving vinyl market, which spans demographics from Olivia Rodrigo Fans to elderly Jazz enthusiasts.
Remember when “rawdogging” flights became a thing for a week a few years ago? Much of the embrace of analog technology and other physical media (as opposed to simply living exclusively in Zuckerberg’s Meta Verse which is definitely still happening…) shares this same DNA. The difference is few would describe listening to vinyl as a painful test of will. But still, in a way, the vinyl world’s renaissance is its own example of “friction-maxxing.” It is not difficult to see how the status quo would spur this desire in young people, who are the first generation in history whose taste was shaped by algorithms from day one.
The rise, fall and shocking rise again of the vinyl market is nothing short of extraordinary, and since I imagine most have a sense of the numbers by now given how frequently the story has been covered in recent years, I will provide a brief breakdown.
Vinyl revenue peaked at $1.5b in 1978, only to drop like a brick to $6.4m in 1993 (thanks CDs). In 2004-05, vinyl accounted for just 0.2% of music revenue, bottoming out with merely 900k records sold in 2006. Then, the resurgence: In 2020, vinyl passed CDs for the first time since 1986 in revenue, and by 2025 posted its first $1b year since 1983 and has had 19 years straight of growth according to RIAA. Last year, vinyl’s $1.04b revenue more than tripled the $312m of CDs.
