From room service menus in London’s hottest hotels to humble supermarket aisles, LPs are everywhere right now. So how did vinyl make its way back from the brink of extinction?

Words: Christian Koch
Photography: Baard Lunde

It’s a sound that goes straight to your heart – the warm crackle of the needle as it finds its place in a groove; the rich, full peal of the music that sings out from the dusty record player. Listening to a well-loved LP is a thing that envelops all the senses: the decades of stuffiness that scent the air as you pull the record from its sleeve, the soft indentations of the message that your mum’s childhood sweetheart wrote lovingly on the cardboard.

Wrapped up, as we are, in the sentimentality that they afford, increasing numbers of us are using our disposable income to stock up on records. And have no doubt, this is a true, back from the almost-dead revival. Last year, 2.1 million vinyl albums were sold in Britain, the highest sales figures since 1994 when Whigfield and Wet Wet Wet ruled the charts. By the end of this year, sales of 3.5 million are predicted. It’s a far cry from a decade ago, when only 200,000 LPs were sold and vinyl seemed doomed, thanks to the dominance of CDs and digital downloads. Such was the High Fidelity nerdiness of LPs back then that a music article in The Guardian even asked, “Do you know anybody who still buys vinyl that isn’t a total d**k?”

Today, vinyl makes £20million a year for the British record industry (up from £3million in 2009) even though the average LP costs around £20, more than triple that of CDs or downloads. And it isn’t just old school collectors replacing scratched Fleetwood Mac LPs either; around a third of buyers are 25-34 year olds who have fallen for the joy of manually playing an album – snapping up records by everyone from Taylor Swift and Jamie T to Madonna and The Beatles.

They are, quite literally, becoming part of the furniture too. Old school turntables are a key feature in many of the rooms at London’s Ace Hotel, where cult record store Sister Ray has an outlet in the lobby. Three miles away, W London’s ‘vinyl room-service menu’ sees LPs carefully curated by DJs Lauren Laverne and Annie Mac, delivered straight to guests’ rooms on demand. But the trend isn’t just confined to London hotels. In Urban Outfitters, you’ll find racks of records between the plaid shirts and Breton tops – the store now sells more vinyl than anybody bar Amazon. Even Sainsbury’s and Tesco are fuelling the vinyl revival, with shoppers now able to pick up classic LPs with their milk and cornflakes.

How vinyl got its groove back: why we’re all obsessed with records again