Like many people of his generation, Vijay Damerla finds most of his new music online — but the 20-year-old is slowly becoming a vinyl junkie, amassing records in his room.
The student said he does not even own a turntable, adding that for him, “it’s the equivalent of like getting an artist poster, or like even an album poster on your wall.”
“Except, like, there’s actually kind of a little bit of a relic from the past,” he said.
Photo: AFP
For Celine Court, 29, collecting vinyl — she says she owns 250 records — is about the nostalgic, warm sound that many listeners say digital copies lack.
“If you listen to music on vinyl, it’s so different,” she said, as she perused the stacks at New York’s Village Revival Records. “It has like this authentic kind of feeling to it.”
Vinyl’s popularity has grown steadily in the past few years, a reversal after CDs and digital downloads reigned over the 1990s and early 2000s.
The latest report from the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) said that last year, more record units were sold than CDs for the first time in three decades, with consumers snagging 41 million pieces of new vinyl last year compared with 33 million CDs.
Revenue from vinyl had already started surpassing CDs as of the 2020 report.
Big-box retailers including Walmart have embraced the retro format, and megastars including Taylor Swift, Harry Styles and Billie Eilish have sent pressing plants into overdrive.
Last week, Metallica purchased a plant to keep up with demand for their own reissues.
Smaller shops are also feeding interest: Jamal Alnasr, who owns Village Revival, stocks about 200,000 records at any given time, not to mention used CDs, cassettes and memorabilia.
“Who would imagine vinyls will come back to life?” said the 50-year-old shop owner, who moved to New York from the West Bank in his late teens.
At one point he had even donated much of his own personal collection, which he estimates could be worth US$200,000 these days, to an archiving institution.
“In the 90s, if you talk about vinyl, I don’t think you’re cool,” he said.
Decades later he said that “every day I see [this] young generation buying new items.”
“I’ve been doing this for like 30 years ... a new generation, kids, they come in look for all the music from the 1930s and 40s and 50s,” he said.
“They actually know more than us, we who grew up in the 1990s and 80s,” he said with a laugh. “It’s a beautiful thing.”
Alnasr deals in new and used vinyl — the RIAA report refers to reported sales of new pressings, which the shop owner does stock.
He said he the store contains about half new, half used items.
He said that because vinyl is relatively expensive to manufacture and distribute, the markup these days on new items can be as little as 5 percent, and he relies on original collectibles to make up the difference.
Alnasr said his business is driven by a combination of music nerds and more casual listeners, and with a US$15,000 monthly rent — once a bohemian haunt, today’s Greenwich Village is among the city’s priciest neighborhoods — he is mostly operating on the margins.
“Every time I’m about to sink I just take everything I’ve got personally and put it back into the business,” he said, laughing. “I guess ... I love my business more than I love myself.”
Echoing Damerla’s experience, Alnasr said that many people buy records for the art — and discover the music later.
He is fine with that, but does insist that most of his sales be conducted in person.
For a known customer — Alnasr is a favorite record dealer among celebrities, having befriended the likes of Lana Del Rey, Bella Hadid and Rosalia — he is willing to procure and ship an item.
For the most part, he prefers people to “physically experience” the vinyl.
“You can say I’m the only stubborn New Yorker — I do not want to sell this format online,” he said. “I want people to come here ... dig through vinyls and get educated.
“They will see way much more than the front one. There is a lot of hidden gems in here,” he said.
No matter the vinyl revival, sales of physical music media remain niche, with streaming remaining the dominant listening format.
Services including paid subscriptions and ad-supported platforms grew 7 percent to reach a record high US$13.3 billion in revenue last year, accounting for 84 percent of total US profits, the RIAA said.
Court, who is from the Netherlands, called streaming “too fast, too easy.”
“It’s just a better energy to collect your vinyl and then listen to it and be proud of it,” she said.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
The New Taiwan dollar and Taiwanese stocks surged on signs that trade tensions between the world’s top two economies might start easing and as US tech earnings boosted the outlook of the nation’s semiconductor exports. The NT dollar strengthened as much as 3.8 percent versus the US dollar to 30.815, the biggest intraday gain since January 2011, closing at NT$31.064. The benchmark TAIEX jumped 2.73 percent to outperform the region’s equity gauges. Outlook for global trade improved after China said it is assessing possible trade talks with the US, providing a boost for the nation’s currency and shares. As the NT dollar
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to