Vinyl Strikes (Not Once But Twice): The Non-Digital Future of Listening to Music?: An Abstract

Abstract

Deemed to be an obsolete recorded music format over 30 years ago, vinyl records enjoy since 2011 a major comeback with an average year-on-year sales growth of 40% (Jones 2018). And with nearly 48% of today’s vinyl consumers being under the age of 35, the return of vinyl records might change the way we listen to recorded music again. But its unexpected resurgence also contradicts the dominant discourse among marketing scholars and the media, who have for over 20 years championed the digitalisation of music as a disruptive technology that is revolutionising and ‘democratising’ the music industry (Giesler 2008) and the way consumers nowadays and in the future would access and listen to recorded music with the promise of convenience, freedom of choice and unrestricted mobility (Elberse 2010). Hence, every newly-emerging digital format from CDs (Daniel 2019) over MP3s and digital downloads (Denegri-Knott 2015) to streaming (Wlömert and Papies 2016) has been hailed as the future of how consumers access and enjoy listening to recorded music whenever, wherever and however they want – only for it soon to be replaced by the next emerging digital format. Therefore, it comes to no surprise that marketing scholars have studied vinyl consumers only as the ‘other’ in digital society (Goulding and Derbaix 2019).

This ethnographic study, however, explores how vinyl consumers perceive, experience and negotiate their personal preferences for vinyl records within today’s digital age. The data were collected at record stores and the World Record Store Day over a period of 6 months and analysed hermeneutically.

Contrary to previous studies, the findings reveal that today’s vinyl consumers, regardless of whether they are not-born digital or born digital, are very savvy when it comes to digital technology and music formats. It is because they have bought into the promised possibilities and hype surrounding the digitalisation of music and embraced the emerging digital music formats, providers and technology whole-heartedly for many years that they now feel being betrayed by those same digital music providers, who instead of democratising the music marketplace have become a powerful oligarchy that controls and dictates at will not just the available content but also the means of accessing it. The resurgence and popularity of analogue technologies like vinyl with today’s consumers can therefore be understood as a post-digital consumer-driven backlash to the digital technology providers’ perceived abuse of their dominant market position and their apparent contempt for the consumer’s personal interests – as an unintended result of the digital companies’ own actions. By contrast, analogue technologies like vinyl offer an alternative that has already proven itself in the past to be reliable, trustworthy and often a genuinely social medium that can be enjoyed alone or together with others.