Listening to new music is still wonderful today. It is simply assumed that you have to be crazy if you buy a CD. Its UK sales have been falling from year to year over the last decade. The reason is that CDs are an anachronism in a digital world in which music is reproduced and transferred over the Internet, whether legally or illegally.
Of course, that does not mean there's no worth in buying an album, such as a Blondie cd box set in physical format. Paradoxically (or not), vinyl records at stores like Sleeves-n-more have experienced a new boom among the general decline of the record industry. It is likely that you have noticed this tendency at the home of your most pretentious friends, where a collection of tattered discs with a Technics player and HDPE record Inner sleeves has sprung up from nowhere. At the very least, you will have seen these records at the fashion store of the day, or you may have even heard of current artists releasing special small vinyl or picture disc editions of their new LPs.
The rebirth of vinyl records and their poly lined record sleeves is not an anecdotal fashion anymore. People are buying more black vinyl records than decades ago. In 2013, sales increased by no less than 31%, with six million discs sold in the United States alone. In 2007, sales of this format were only one million copies.
I'm not the first, much less to comment on this boom in vinyl. The reason for this trend is another matter. People do not need to buy vinyl with their black record sleeves, and yet they choose to do so. In a world where CDs are obsolete and music exists only virtually, vinyl and any protective record offers the comforting feeling of buying something physical. If the traditional music industry does not want to disappear altogether, perhaps it would do well to examine this trend.
