In the face of COVID-19 and supply chain troubles, vinyl record sales have continued to rise
By: Caelan Monkman
After a decrease in sales in 2020, Canadian vinyl record sales have finally gotten back on track. Excluding the start-of-pandemic and supply chain-related downturn, vinyl records have seen increases in Canadian sales year after year since 2008. According to MRC Data’s 2021 Canadian year-end report, sales of new records surpassed 1.1 million units in Canada last year, an increase of 21.8 per cent over 2020’s sales numbers.
This trend, which comes at a time when streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music continue to grow in popularity, is part of what has come to be known as the “vinyl revival.”
But for some record store owners like Rob Frith of Neptoon Records, Vancouver’s oldest independent record store, this love for records is more than just a trend or revival. “It's been a revival as far as I can remember, for about 25 years,” says Frith.
Alan Cross, a self-proclaimed vinyl record lover and the host of The Ongoing History of New Music, Canada’s longest-running radio documentary, echoes this sentiment.
“A lot of people still believe that this is a fad, that this is a trendy sort of thing,” says Cross. “But I mean, 15 consecutive years of double-digit growth. That's not a fad. That's not a trend.”
Gordie Tufts, owner of Backstreet Records, a pair of New Brunswick’s oldest record stores in Fredericton and Saint John, has also observed the increase in popularity of vinyl records, especially in recent years and throughout the pandemic.
“We've only seen increases in sales since COVID hit,” says Tufts. “People were supporting the store online, but it was really when we reopened that we saw people were out to buy records in a big way. You hear stories of people building decks and doing this and that — well, I think they were playing music as they did renos.”
Eric Hill, who has managed the Backstreet Records Fredericton location for over 25 years, has also noticed changes in demographics over time.
“I think [record collectors] have always been a fairly wide demographic,” says Hill. “I think what's interesting lately is the sort of waves of buyers that have been added. On a weekly basis, I'll talk to ‘road warrior’ people who have been doing it for their entire lives, and then younger people who were doing it for the last five to 10 years, and then people who had done it 30 to 40 years ago, given it up, and then came back to it as a hobby.”
Along with an increase in younger customers, today’s vinyl record community is also less of a “boys club,” according to Andrew Koppel, one of the owners of Kops Records, Toronto’s oldest indie record store.
This increase in women customers can partly be attributed to women artists like Adele and Taylor Swift who, according to MRC Data, had the top three bestselling vinyl albums in 2021 (30, Red (Taylor’s Version), and evermore).
“Taylor Swift is very important to vinyl sales,” says Ian Boyd, co-owner of Compact Music, an Ottawa record store that’s been open for 43 years. “It's unbelievable how powerful she is.”
Swift, who sold roughly 14,000 vinyl copies of Red (Taylor’s Version) and evermore in Canada alone last year, is also the official ambassador for Record Store Day 2022, an annual event conceived in 2007 to celebrate and promote independent record stores.
For many record store owners, the creation of Record Store Day has played a large role in the so-called vinyl revival.
“[Record Store Day] brought the whole idea of letting people know that records were very much alive and that independent record stores were out there still and haven't disappeared,” says Tufts. “Those people should get an award of some sort, in my opinion, because that was the real start of the change, bringing total awareness to people that records were the real deal.”
Another reason for the increase in vinyl’s popularity in recent years is the introduction of more affordable turntables to the market, such as Crosley and Victrola’s suitcase turntable models. Unlike higher-end models of turntables, which often require pre-amps and speakers in addition to the turntable itself, suitcase turntables offer an all-in-one turntable setup for prices as low as $80.
Although these turntables have created a more affordable point of entry for new vinyl collectors, they come with their own drawbacks, which have led many record store owners to caution their customers against them.
“They are 90 per cent of why people bring [records] back saying there's an issue,” says Koppel. “So what ends up happening is we play it on our turntable and it plays perfectly fine, and we get a customer walking away dejected because they realized they're gonna have to buy a whole new record player.”
But some record store owners have noticed that cheaper turntables — paired with vinyl records from artists like Olivia Rodrigo and Taylor Swift — are helping develop a younger generation of vinyl enthusiasts, especially among young girls. They can't help but acknowledge the role inexpensive turntables play in vinyl's longevity, even if they dislike the turntables themselves.
“[Crosleys] are junk. But it's important that Crosley is doing what they're doing because they're ensuring the long-term stability of the product,” says Boyd. “These girls are listening to music in their room at age 13. You know 10 to 12 years from now they'll be in the workforce, and they'll have a component-driven turntable in their apartment or house, I’m convinced of it.”
I think everybody in the industry knew that there'd be an upward trajectory of vinyl. We're all in this industry because we believe in it
The increase in demand for records, while great for record stores, has been severely impacted by supply chain issues throughout the pandemic.
“Sales are up, demand is up, and prices are up, so with all that said, sales are doing extremely well,” says Tufts. “But there is still a shortage of trying to get the product that people want. It is a real problem.”
The problem has roots in various supply chain issues, including a lack of materials to manufacture the records themselves, delays in shipping overseas and record-pressing plants being continuously swamped with orders.
“All the pressing plants in the world can't print all the records that are requested of them,” says Frith. “So they have to turn people down, that's how busy they are. They're all working 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And they just cannot keep up with the demand for records.”
A fire at the Apollo Masters Corp. plant in February 2020 also created “all kinds of issues,” says Cross. Prior to the fire, the California factory was responsible for manufacturing around 80 per cent of the world's lacquer masters required for vinyl record production. With the factory closed, almost all lacquer master production had to be done by a single company in Japan.
Viryl Technologies, a Toronto-based company, is no stranger to these supply chain issues. The company both presses records and manufactures brand-new record-pressing machines for use in plants in over 14 countries globally. Since 2015, their various pressing machines have helped modernize an industry that largely relies on the use of antiquated record-pressing equipment.
“We're one of the few, if not the only places where you could buy a new machine,” says James Hashmi, the CEO of Viryl Technologies and one of the company’s founders. “We didn’t duplicate an existing design, we kind of made our own.”
Due to supply chain delays throughout the pandemic, Viryl Technologies has struggled to get parts needed to build their pressing machines, as well as materials such as paper, cardboard and the actual PVC plastic required to make records.
“I think everybody in the industry knew that there'd be an upward trajectory of vinyl. We're all in this industry because we believe in it,” says Hashmi. “But the explosion that we've seen as a result of potentially people staying at home, having a little bit more luxury to sit down and listen to music, having fewer live shows and other entertainment to spend their money on, and being able to kind of invest in something like vinyl — the demand has just far exceeded anything that the supply chain had really accounted for.”
Hashmi says that when Viryl came onto the scene in 2015, they helped reduce global lead times for record pressing “from eight to 10 months down to four weeks.” Once supply chain issues lessen, Hashmi hopes that Viryl will be able to help reduce wait times once again.
“It'll probably take a little bit longer, just because of the supply chain, but give it another six months or so and we're going to start to see a lot of those timelines start to improve drastically, where people can finally start to get their music pressed and out there.”
For some, the vinyl record craze extends beyond music. During the pandemic, Sam Pomerant, 20, began collecting comedy records. Pomerant, who lives in Ottawa, says he’s always loved comedy, and while he doesn’t see himself ditching his Apple Music account for records, he enjoys having physical copies of his favourite standup comedy acts.
“Ultimately, part of the reason I started buying vinyl was I wanted to down the road say: ‘I own that,’” says Pomerant. “The pieces I'm buying are pieces that matter a lot to me.”
In addition to owning the records, Pomerant also enjoys the attention to detail that goes into the packaging of records.
“I like the more stylized covers that, instead of just taking a Netflix cover and putting it in a square, I have something a little more stylized and a little nicer looking,” says Pomerant, holding up a copy of Mike Birbiglia’s Thank God for Jokes.
The cover — made to look like a stained glass window — depicts Birbiglia sitting with his hands together as though in prayer. Inside the record sleeve, Pomerant explains, Birbiglia writes about the process of getting his standup onto vinyl.
With digital music and streaming services becoming the mainstream source of media for most listeners, the tangibility of owning a physical record is another reason for the increased vinyl demand.
Gary Sinclair is an associate professor of marketing at Dublin City University and studies consumer behaviour and culture. In 2017, he co-authored a study called Psychological ownership and music streaming consumption, which examined how increases in digital music consumption have led to the loss of a perceived sense of musical ownership.
“Music is inherently tied to identity,” says Sinclair. “So when we look at our identities, it's really important to have these kinds of tangible objects that are tied to it.”
Sinclair, who admits he stopped collecting records around 15 years ago, thinks that streaming services like Spotify are great for giving listeners access to vast amounts of music, but recognizes that they “change the nature of our experience with music.”
“You can’t collect Spotify files,” Sinclair continued. “You can organize it and be as nerdy as you want, but at the end of the day there’s not the same kind of excitement to find an obscure track on Spotify as there is to find a rare album or something like that at a flea market.”
