Vinyl Resurgence

Vinyl resurgence is a term that has come to be used for the phenomenon of the significant, and as of yet uninterrupted, yearly growth trend in sales of vinyl records from 2006 onwards. As such, it is one of the two sole growing segments in the music market today, the other being on-demand streaming. The growth have resulted in the challenges for adequate supply, due to the outdated production facilities; therefore, it is important to understand what the trend is all about, in order to be able to decide whether to invest in the prohibitively costly production facilities. While the explanations with regard to the vinyl’s symbolic qualities abound in the music press, it is nevertheless not clear at all why would a medium that has been practically discarded a quarter of a century ago, suddenly experience such a growth in the current times of prevailing dematerialized digital delivery of music. This paper first shows that standard economic explanations, including the recently proposed identity economic framework, cannot adequately describe what is going on in the market, and then proposes two alternative explanations, one being based on vinyl’s social and symbolic and the other on physical qualities, that we derive from a field study performed on a set of 63 interviews with vinyl users. This enables us to develop the vocabulary and justifications to support our argument that vinyl use is driven by two main factors: on the one side it has strong capacities to signal information about a desired social status; on the other, it is the very materiality of the medium that play the decisive role. The specific physical practice of use enabled by this materiality, enables people to engage more deeply with the world around them, and this is seen as the key motivation for the vinyl consumption in the dematerialized world of digital information. Thus, we argue, materiality affects economic outcomes. The findings developed through the research in this thesis provide a thorough understanding of an economic phenomenon, which can serve as a basis for an informed decision-making process that is needed for the stakeholders in developing the market in the future.