Music
Half of vinyl buyers don't actually listen to their records
by Richard Howard
April 15, 2016
Study finds 48% of vinyl buyers don't listen to their records, and 7% don't even own a turntable.
Ever had the experience of admiring a buddy’s sweet record collection, then after asking him to throw on his original pressing of Pink Floyd’s The Wall on the $1,200 turntable proudly displayed on the bookcase, received the following reply: “Uh, well I haven’t really gotten around to picking up an amplifier yet”? Well, according to a new study, records are just as likely to become pillars for inter-bookcase spiderweb expressways as they are to actually be played.
BBC News recently outlined a poll by market research agency ICM Unlimited that investigated trends among vinyl buyers. They gathered a lot of interesting if not terribly surprising information:
1) Nearly half of vinyl buyers first streamed the albums that they eventually purchased.
2) The largest age group of purchasers is the 25-34 demographic.
3) The demand for vinyl continues to increase, approaching a 10-year trend.
However, there was one discovery that was pretty unexpected: it turns out that 48% of those buying vinyl may not even listen to the records. Going one step further into the quagmire of ridiculous, 7% of those same buyers don’t even own a turntable.
Seeing as there are people literally giving their blood to feed their vinyl addiction, these are no doubt infuriating statistics to many.
Now, while the actual metric appears to be those buyers purchased an album in the last month but had not yet listened to it, many interviewees made clear they don’t buy vinyl with the intent to listen. Many explained their purchases are meant to support the artist (commendable) or as a form of collecting (understandable). Others, however, simply see them as decor, with one British student commenting thusly on his “vinyls”:
“I don’t actually play them… it gives me the old-school vibe. That’s what vinyl’s all about.”
So when you’re out for Record Store Day on April 16th and some infant in a paperboy hat and unseasonably thick scarf swoops in for the store’s only copy of J Dilla’s 4,000 pressings worldwide of The Diary, remember that, likely as not, it’s going on his coffee table where he’ll point to it and tell friends: “I don’t know who that dude is, but the cover looks dope.”
