Abstract
In this essay I draw on observations about how the pandemic impacted sales of vinyl records, in order to describe a (further) dis-embedding of brick-and-mortar second-hand stores from their local economies and communities. Before the pandemic, the majority of vinyl was already being purchased online; while buyers and sellers were sheltering in place, the vinyl marketplace’s reliance on the internet became total, and vinyl traffic skewed more than ever toward used records. Nearly all record stores had an online presence before the pandemic, and shops that already had an online sales system in place and a customer base accustomed to buying online had an enormous head start toward staying solvent while sheltering in place. During the pandemic, Instagram joined sites like Discogs and eBay as a platform for vinyl sales, and social media graduated from primarily functioning as a means of promotion for record stores and became a requisite component of sales infrastructure. I ask how local merchants of vintage goods like records can maintain a local orientation despite shifting away from local customers.
2019 was the 14th consecutive year of growth in the sale of new vinyl records. Then 2020 was the 15th. Since Nielsen began distinguishing between physical and digital formats, during the 1990s, the four best individual weeks for new vinyl sales all occurred while most record stores were shuttered. At year’s end the daily digest Digital Music News reported these figures and noted (King, 2020) that vinyl’s market share ‘is continuing to grow thanks to the pandemic’. Not despite, but thanks to? How is it possible that an outmoded physical medium enjoyed increased sales during a year when seemingly all culture and commerce had been shunted online? Vinyl’s analog appeal may have received another boost during the pandemic, now an offline reprieve not just from digital saturation but also new maladies like Zoom fatigue and doomscrolling. An Atlantic essay about ‘hyper-nesting’ (Powers, 2021) noted that ‘COVID cocoons are rife with nostalgia, especially as inhabitants binge on old episodes of The Sopranos or listen to decades-old music’. The observation can be extended from content to format, but unlike the 1s and 0s of a streamed song or show, vinyl’s materiality will always require a connection between buyers and sellers ‘irl’. In March, 2020, the people who make and sell records started sheltering in place like the rest of us, so how did records keep making their way from sellers’ inventories onto buyers’ turntables?
The short answer is the internet, of course. When the manager of record pressing plant in New Jersey, founded in 2015, told me (Sean Rutkowski, 2018, personal communication), ‘digital is the best thing that ever happened to vinyl’, he was commenting on the medium’s newfound appeal as an analog respite from life online. But the internet has not only been the main reason for records’ rearticulated pleasures; for over a decade it has also been the primary engine of growth for vinyl’s revitalized business, and it is central to nearly all sales of vinyl records today. Before the pandemic, the majority of vinyl was already being purchased online, and virtually all records sold online are then mailed from sellers to buyers. 1 Once buyers and sellers began sheltering in place, the vinyl marketplace’s reliance on the internet became total. The vinyl marketplace may be thoroughly digitized, but it is still reliant on shipping, and it turns out that the revived vinyl economy is every bit as conditioned by logistical infrastructures as those digital formats to which records purportedly offer an alternative. Vinyl provides an instructive case of what I have elsewhere called (Palm, 2021) ‘post-digital media logistics’. In this essay I draw on observations about how the pandemic impacted vinyl trafficking in order to describe how online sales for old artifacts like records are fueling a (further) dis-embedding of brick-and-mortar stores from their local economies and communities. First I establish vinyl sales today as a ‘post-digital’ marketplace. Originally used aesthetically to describe engagement with media content, the contemporary vinyl marketplace exemplifies how the term applies to cultural form(at)s as well. Then I draw on news accounts and several record stores’ Instagram feeds to describe how record stores turned to social media to stay afloat during the pandemic. Finally, I conclude by noting how some independent sellers of vintage goods are partnering with neighboring businesses to remain connected to their local economies and communities, despite maintaining an expanded post-pandemic customer base beyond the neighborhood.
Vinyl goes (post-)digital
Online record sales exemplify what some media scholars have taken to calling our ‘post-digital’ condition. The term was originally applied to aesthetic experiences, especially of ‘art, computation, and design’, (Berry and Dieter, 2015) and more recently it has been applied to music specifically (Mazierska et al., 2019). Vinyl provides a rich example of ‘post-digital’ commerce as well as culture, and one whose materiality exceeds the goods for sale. Vinyl is the leading case study in David Sax’s popular book, The Revenge of Analog, and Sax’s (2016: 11) formulation that ‘digital helped save the very analog record it nearly killed’ signals the centrality of the internet for contemporary vinyl commerce as well as for the format’s rearticulated appeal. Ironically, vinyl’s new value is enhanced by its perceived distance from the same technology appreciated by buyers and sellers alike as fueling the contemporary vinyl marketplace. While vinyl’s commercial infrastructure has migrated online, the format’s materiality tethers it logistically to nondigital media. Chief among vinyl’s postdigital logistical media are mail services. Every record made entails the transport of intermediate materials, and every online sale of a record occasions its packing and delivery. 2 The online vinyl marketplace is only sustainable through the use of logistical media such as cardboard mailers designed especially for records alongside the tracking numbers used by buyers to remotely monitor those mailers in transit. Vinyl is culturally noteworthy as an analog alternative amid digital ubiquity, but its contemporary marketplace provides an instructive example of how digital and nondigital media connect any supply chain today.
Comment SOLD to purchase
All of vinyl’s rosy sales figures from the past 15 years, including 2020, are only for new records; second hand sales aren’t tracked by the industry, yet when the pandemic hit, markets in used vinyl were also thriving online and in record stores, as well as in thrift shops, flea markets and the like. Despite the decade and a half of climbing sales of new vinyl, ‘the bulk of records traded, sold, and played today’ are on at least their second owner, a fact that makes vinyl trafficking uniquely green among popular media, rivaled only by books (Sax, 2016: 20). Amazon, of course, sells more new records than any other retailer, as well as a healthy share of used records; but all told, over two-thirds of new records are being sold by independent merchants, as well as most used records (Hogan, 2020). Due to production stoppages and supply chain disruptions, the pandemic has seen vinyl traffic skew more than ever toward used records.
There are roughly 1400 independent record stores in the U.S., a number that the prominent online music magazine Pitchfork describes (Hogan, 2020) as having ‘held fairly steady in recent years’. The number isn’t static; but steady because as many shops had been opening as closing, at least until the pandemic. In glowing industry sales reports and bemused news coverage of vinyl’s revival, however, the fates of individual shops and record sellers are too often ignored. Understanding which vinyl merchants survived 2020, and how, can tell us a lot about the political economy of independent resale labor. To begin with, any analysis of vinyl’s growth during 2020 should start with the observation that, while overall vinyl sales continued to climb, of course not all vinyl sellers survived. Many established shops shuttered for good, and while more difficult to document, other than anecdotally, many individual sellers stopped, too, due to increased shipping costs as well as health and safety concerns, especially during the early months of the pandemic.
Several high-profile record shops closed for good during 2020: perhaps most notably, Bop Street in Seattle, which had been open for 30 years and had been recognized as one of the five best record stores in the U.S. by that noted tastemaker the Wall Street Journal (O’Neil, 2011). Bop Street’s inventory was 500,000 recordings when it closed, and which, in something of a happy if ironic ending, was purchased by the Internet Archive (de Barros, 2020). In Nashville, another legendary shop, Grimey’s New and Preloved Music and Books, was able to stay afloat thanks to Taylor Swift, who wrote a check to every employee and agreed to pick up the tab on 3 months’ of the store’s health care costs. By far the biggest independent record seller in the U.S. is Amoeba Music, with massive stores in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and its flagship in Berkeley. ‘The Blob’ had never begun to sell records online, because it was moving enough volume in its stores that it never needed to. When the pandemic hit, with no online sales platform to shift to (and no benefactor like Taylor Swift materializing), Amoeba started a GoFundMe page to help cover rent and to pay and insure their more than 300 employees. The fund was created on April 20, 2020 with a stated goal of $400,000; a week later, they were over halfway there, and by the end of the year, the fund had raised nearly $300,000, with donations still trickling in every week or so, most in the $20–$25 range. (Among some 6600 donations, the highest of $5000 came from Chris Rock, Rachel Ray, and Anonymous.) Amoeba began 2021 on a happy note, ending the campaign and thanking donors for ‘[y]our generous contributions [that] helped us cover health care for our employees and bridge the costs while our stores were closed’ (GoFundMe, 2020). Amoeba reopened its doors in a new Los Angeles location on April 1, 2021 (and now sells online, too).
Amoeba was the offline exception to the new vinyl rule, but even ‘the Blob’ needed digital payment infrastructure to weather the pandemic. Most record stores were already selling online before the pandemic, and literally any store hoping to continue selling during the pandemic had to. And they had several options, including their own website or a dedicated platform, clearinghouses like Amazon and eBay, and social media. Most are now using a combination of some or all of these. One fundamental observation about selling records during the pandemic is that, while nearly all record stores had an online presence before the pandemic – at least a Facebook page if not a dedicated website – shops that already had an online sales system in place and – just as importantly – a customer base already comfortable buying online had an enormous head start toward staying solvent while sheltering in place. Other shops had to catch up. For example, the co-owner of Spoonful Records in Columbus, Ohio claims that ‘[w]e never wanted to have a website. It was never part of our game plan’ (quoted in Oliphint, 2020). After closing in March, 2020, Spoonful’s sales ceased, but by April they were nearly level ‘thanks to a new online ordering system’ (quoted in Oliphint, 2020). Similarly, Used Kids Records in Columbus had sold online for a while, but previously had reserved website sales mostly for rare, high-dollar items. During the pandemic they took advantage of the down time to list their entire catalog online. ‘We’ve been in business since 1986 as a brick and mortar store primarily, and then the market says, “OK, you’ve got to stop and completely redefine yourself as an online business,”’ said [owner Greg] Hall. ‘The only way I can make my business survive is to get a much, much bigger net. And that much, much bigger net is the Internet’ (quoted in Oliphint, 2020).
No company has been more central to the vinyl marketplace becoming ‘a bigger net’ than Discogs. Started as a ‘hobby project’ in 2000, the site is now ‘like Wikipedia for music’, with more than half a million users contributing to entries for over 7 million artists and over 13 million recordings (Discogs, n.d.a). Unlike Wikipedia, however, it also lists over 62 million items for sale, over 42 million of which are vinyl records (Discogs, n.d.b). Discogs has matured into an authoritative database as well as a sales platform, and its roles as each are inextricable, as purchases on Discogs help determine the going rate for records in shops and on other websites. Discogs embodies the centralizing, if not outright monopolizing force of ‘platform capitalism’ albeit on a smaller scale than an all-encompassing retailer like Amazon (Srnicek, 2016: 92ff). Not only are millions of used as well as new records are bought and sold via Discogs annually, but many of its more than 7 million site visits per month are price checks from sellers as well as buyers (Discogs, n.d.a). The time-honored tradition of ‘crate digging’ has long been a source of exchange – as well as use-value for record collectors, and Discogs has upended the practice by providing access to prices and availability for novices alongside connoisseurs. Most record stores list at least some inventory on Discogs, 3 and given the shift of vinyl traffic online during closures, it is not surprising that 2020 was Discogs’ best year ever. Their year-end report for 2020 boasted an increase in vinyl sales of more than 40% over 2019 (Discogs, 2021). From the perspective of the Digital Vintage Economy, platformization via sites like Discogs is the next phase of consignment and an intensification of it (Kneese and Palm, 2020).
The championing of local, independent merchants took on a new urgency during the pandemic. The resilient and adaptive record shops in Columbus, Ohio shops that I mentioned earlier were applauded – and promoted – in the Arts and Culture outlet Columbus Alive. Other local papers’ coverage of record stores took on the flavor of a public service announcement. On March 24, 2020, less than 2 weeks after shelter-in-place orders began sweeping the U.S., the weekly paper The Reader in Chicago ran a column (Galil, 2020) titled ‘How to buy records during a pandemic’, explaining to readers that ‘if you have the money to help Chicago’s record stores stay in business long enough to reopen, here are your options’. Of the 29 shops listed, only two were listed as simply closed.
During shelter in place orders, social media graduated from primarily functioning as a means of promotion for record stores and became a requisite component of sales infrastructure. The note ‘DM to purchase’ has become commonplace across Instagram. To help facilitate sales and avoid confusion, many record shops have begun to post records individually, often dozens a day, and instructing followers to comment SOLD to reserve a purchase. Permanent Records in Los Angeles encourages buyers to comment ‘with a spicy version of DIBS’ to break up the monotony and to help catch employees’ weary eyes. Buyers are then asked to ‘Please DM us for payment instructions’ (Instagram, 2021b). During the pandemic, Instagram joined sites like Discogs and eBay among the ranks of platforms for vinyl sales, with established shops like Permanent in Los Angeles and Econo Jam Records in Oakland (Instagram, 2021a) adopting it as their primary site for sales.
Screenshot of Econo Jam Records’ Instagram post from 16 March, taken at 7:45 am EDT, March 17.
Little more than a mile from Econo Jam, Contact Records opened in October, 2016, as one of the first five occupants of the ‘MacArthur Annex at 40th Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Way, a complex of 27 shipping containers marketed as offices for “artists and entrepreneurs”’ (Lefebvre, 2016). Contact’s floor space totals 150 feet and features custom-made double-decker record bins with pullout drawers to maximize the amount of stock that can be displayed. In an area with notoriously high rents (see Kneese, 2021), the confined space minimizes overhead costs, and Contact’s only employees are its husband-and-wife co-owners. Like most stores across the country, Contact closed on March 13, 2020, reassuring its more than 2000 Instagram followers that they ‘will be expanding our virtual shop by loading tons of goodies onto our discogs page & posting extra stuff here for you to buy online’ (Instagram, 2020a). While closed, it became common for record stores (alongside other businesses like restaurants and book sellers) to offer local pickup. Some record sellers began offering local delivery as well. Consistent with vinyl’s vintage esthetic, Contact even emblazoned an old VW wagon with the shop’s name and logo, which also served as a form of mobile promotion of the shop’s brand. Contact’s small scale and low overhead meant they were able to remain closed longer than most shops. When they finally reopened their space, on Halloween 2020, they explained to followers that only one or two shoppers at a time would be allowed in, but ‘[g]iven our size – it very much feels like we were built for this. In a way we are finally doing justice by this space & maximizing every inch of shoppable space without worrying about a crowded room’ (Instagram, 2020b).
Conclusion: post-digital, post-pandemic, post-local?
Local pickup and delivery were a way for shuttered record shops to stay connected with loyal customers, but the pandemic has engendered more reliance on the internet to facilitate even local sales. Instagram was already a popular means of promotion for record sellers, and its embrace as a point of sale may be the single biggest shift in vinyl traffic triggered by the pandemic. In May, around the same that Contact began delivering records in their vintage VW, Los Angeles Magazine ran an article (Ohanesian, 2020) describing Instagram as a ‘lifeline’ for shops that had been forced to close. ‘For stores whose online sales were either limited or non-existent prior to the pandemic, the Instagram move has opened them up to new audiences’. While the column quoted several shop proprietors grateful for the new and geographically expanded customer base, it also adopted a local perspective noting that increased Instagram followings led to more shops doing more ‘selling to folks far outside of Los Angeles. That presents an interesting situation when they are able to reopen their physical spaces. Will they continue selling through Instagram? The answer seems to be a resounding yes’.
The digital expansion of vinyl’s marketplace seems irreversible after the pandemic. Owners and operators of record shops who want to remain connected to (and invested in) their local communities and economies are looking beyond their customer base to do so. For instance, in the heavily gentrified Chicago neighborhood of Andersonville, Rattleback Records opened in November, 2018 on North Clark Street, Andersonville’s main shopping and dining corridor. Rattleback, which also sells used books and vintage housewares, quickly partnered with several of its neighbors, ‘other businesses and artists that’, according to the ‘Partnerships’ tab on its website, ‘share our values and [are] an integral part of our business and creative community’ (Rattleback Records, n.d.). These ‘partners’ include many of gentrification’s usual suspects: a micro-brewery, a toy store, a design shop (responsible for Rattleback’s website), and multiple high-end eateries and drinkeries that could be counted on to cater Rattleback’s in-store events. Rattleback had relied on walk-in traffic and the cultivation of loyal ‘regulars’ from the neighborhood, and during the pandemic they turned to gift cards and monthly subscriptions as ways for their customers to continue supporting them (Galil, 2020). The decision to shop local has long been lauded as an ethical decision (see, e.g. Kneese, 2021) and vinyl’s platformization has amplified portrayals of ‘local record stores as temples of ethical music consumption’ (Harvey, 2017: 586). In light of the necessary pivot to online sales during the pandemic, Rattleback’s partnerships with other local businesses demonstrate one way for record stores to maintain a local orientation despite shifting away from local customers.
