Celine Court, 29, also collects vinyl (she claims to own about 250 records).. He says he does it for its warm, nostalgic sound, absent according to many listeners in digital music.
“Listening to music on vinyl is very different,” Court tells the AFP while perusing stacks of records at New York’s Village Revival Records. “He Feels Authentic.”
Vinyl’s popularity has grown in recent years in the United States, a shift after CDs and digital downloads reigned supreme during the 1990s and early 2000s, respectively.
In 2022, vinyl sales (41 million) surpassed CD sales (33 million), for the first time since 1987, according to data released Thursday by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA).
Vinyl revenue had already begun to outpace CD revenue since the 2020 RIAA report.
Big retailers, including Walmart, embraced the retro format, and artists like Taylor Swift, Harry Styles and Billie Eilish jumped on the trend.
This week, the hard rock band Metallica bought one of the vinyl manufacturers, Furnace Record Pressing, to meet the demand for their own reissues.
Who would have thought vinyl would come back to life?
Smaller stores also fuel interest among young people: Jamal Alnasr, owner of Village Revival, stocks some 200,000 vinyl records, not to mention CDs and cassettes.
“Who would have thought vinyl would come back to life?says the 50-year-old shop owner, who moved to New York from the West Bank as a teenager.
Alnasr went so far as to donate much of his own personal collection, which he estimates could be worth around $200,000 today, to an archival institution.
“In the ’90s, talking about vinyl wasn’t very cool,” he laughs. But now, “this new generation is looking for all the music of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.”
“They actually know more than we who grew up in the 1990s and 1980s,” he adds. “It’s a beautiful thing.”