The iPod holds a thousand digital songs, and streaming holds practically every song ever recorded. So why are record stores getting so much love for physical media? At Hybrid Records, the shelves are telling a story. Carlos Cooper, who has owned the shop for 10 years, said roughly 80% of the recent boom in CD sales has come from teenagers and people in their early 20s. Vinyl remains king, but something has shifted. CDs and tapes are moving in a way Cooper hasn’t seen before, and the customers buying them aren’t who you might expect.
Cooper attributes price points as an initial hypothesis. “If you’re a kid that works part-time and likes music and you go into a music shop, you’re faced with the choice of, ‘Do I want to buy one [vinyl] record or like four CDs?’” A new indie record that would have cost $15 in 2015 now runs closer to $25. A major label release that was $30 is now $40 or $50. CDs, meanwhile, remain in the same price range.
Now, the proliferation of cloud services and third-party vendors is contributing to digital fatigue. You buy music on Amazon, and you may not own it for as long as you think. A server goes down, a company folds, a platform changes its terms … and what you paid for vanishes.
Rachael Chaney, owner of Needles & Fins, sees the same shift from a different angle. She recalls a girl, maybe 15, who comes in regularly with a Sony Walkman clipped to her belt. To Chaney, she represents something bigger than nostalgia: “There’s no wrong way to listen to music.”
Needles & Fins is where indie and surf culture collide, and her customers are those willing to paddle out to explore and ensure they own a piece of history. Chaney runs the shop on a simple principle: “all killer, no filler.” And though that phrase unfortunately does not exist on a shirt, it is the credo of her shop and her customers.
When discussing how trends are shaping up, Chaney is clear that the concept of ownership has never left. What’s changed is the deliberateness. She is noticing younger customers being intentional with their purchases, coming in with a sense of purpose, knowing what they want and why they want it in their hands.
Which brings us to the library. I visited my local library and spoke with employee Daniel Schwartz, who has watched streaming fatigue arrive in real time; from visitors asking to check out a collection of DVDs after canceling their streaming subscriptions to using the library as a proxy to test a series before purchasing it themselves when demand outpaced the shelves.
Schwartz shared a phrase from a former colleague: “Libraries are the living rooms of communities.” I saw the coziness of the living room unfold as our conversation was surrounded by the buzzing of families coming through the doors. By the time I had signed up for my library card and was leaving, children were leaving with stacks of books that would make LeVar Burton proud.
Nobody charges you to sit in the living room. Nobody pulls the rug out from under you when the licensing deal expires. You want to know if physical media is coming back? The library never got the memo that it left. It’s been here the whole time, same as always, waiting for everyone else to catch up.
CONTACT: Hybrid Records, 417 Peoples St. | Needles & Fins, 4034 Weber Road | La Retama Central Library, 805 Comanche St.
