Stop Telling Us About “the Vinyl Revival”

By this point, the story of vinyl’s resurgence has been done to death. Every story on the subject seems to focus on several points, all of which are now cliched.

Case in point: the article “The Vinyl Revival,” from the University of California, Irvine’s campus paper New University. Within the first paragraph, the article refers to LPs as “an ancient relic of our parents and grandparents’ memories.” In the second, there’s the reference to vinyl being primarily a product of “underground musicians and DJs” for the better part of the past couple decades.

What the article — and most others like it — fail to point out are details like record plants being backed up from the multitude of orders, or the popularity of represses. An example of a quality article would be the Detroit’s Metro Times article “Keepin’ vinyl alive” from 2001. It focuses on the pressing plant, and manages to avoid any mention of vinyl as a “lost art,” and it was written before the really big upswing of the past couple years.

In conclusion, it’d be nice to see vinyl treated less like some exotic product than a part of the myriad ways by which we can enjoy music. When you can buy vinyl at Best Buy, it’s no longer “news.”