THE COMEBACK OF VINYL RECORDS

Vinyl originates in 1800, when Edison decides to create a way to hear the music from phonautographs, an already existing device. Over the next decades, records were improved and standardized with the 33 and 45 RPM, who soon unseat other formats. CDs were invented in 1982 by Sony and immediately replaced vinyls because of their greater convenience, they were in fact much easier to carry around. Many labels though, in the past years, have started to bring back vinyl because of the collectibility and because many people think the sound is matchtless.

2020 is the year in which physical vinyl sales have surpassed CDs’ ones. Obviously, everything is due to the way people listen to music, we’re now used to hear music everywhere, it accompanies us in almost every activity and for this reason it’s important to stop and listen to a complete album, getting an intimate and often regenerative moment. With a record you have to remove it from the sleeve, open the top of the record player, place the vinyl disc carefully and set the stylus, then switch it all on and wait and this allows you to experience music from another point of view.

The young generation in particular really appreciates vinyl, probably because they were born in an already technological society and living a sort of contact with the past through music gives them new, and in some cases strange, sensations and emotions. All this is clearly due to the different sound of vinyl, the effect is to hear the voices closer and, somehow, more real. Although this, even millenials buy many records, the reasons are naturally different, most of them do it because listening through records to the songs they heard when they were teenagers make a connection with their own past and youth.

There are also other motivations for whom vinyl sales are booming: having an album to consider our own and maybe we’ve been looking for a long time is completely diverse from listening to streamed music and even the act of buying itself is somehow intimate, we’re fascinated from all the cases and we surely pay more attention on reading the titles song by song trying to understand which ones we please the most. Another aspect is the value, some people like to collect and in this case, these objects with the time can become really expensive. We just think that the cost of a vinyl record (even if it depends on the artist and the number of songs present) is nearly triple as a CD and that some of them are rare and so coveted by some collectors.

To conclude, thinking of the future, everyone have the idea that with time passing by, every generation will believe that technology will always evolve more and more, as we do, and this is probably right, the things we consider advanced today, will be obsolete tomorrow, but there are somethings the digital world can’t replace or anyway it will never be able to equal. Records can give us strong feelings and they’re probably here to stay.

Chiara Delle Pulle 3AL