All things spin around, right round, eventually.
The United Kingdom government has returned records — call them albums, LPs or long-playing records, or, as I believe they are called now, vinyl — to its basket of goods that allows it to calculate the rate of inflation, according to the Office for National Statistics.
There are currently 744 items that go into this basket, but the return of vinyl strikes a chord of nostalgia with many, like me, who grew up on the musical format and whose week was complete if it finished by procuring the new record from The Smiths or The Cure.
Vinyl sales today are mostly for records that play at 33 revolutions per minute, rather than the 7-inch single, which typically plays at 45 revolutions per minute.
The return of this product is the equivalent of hoteliers stating they are buying a hotel for a long-term hold, a 33-rpm acquisition, not a 45-rpm one.
I have visited many hotels recently that have placed record players back in their lobbies.
Some even have DJs in the hotel clubs spinning records again.
A substantial number of hotels have embraced retro culture as a selling point, and LPs fall neatly into that aesthetic, although if a product newly enters the inflation basket, can it be accurately described anymore as retro?
In fact, 2023 marked the 16th consecutive year in which vinyl sales have risen, according to Music Week magazine. But “following a 2.9% improvement in unit sales [in 2022], the vinyl market in 2023 has experienced much stronger growth, with an 11.7% year-over-year rise to 5.9 million units” sold in the U.K.
The announcement from the ONS also included air fryers entering the basket of goods.
Not air guitars!
The ONS news release announcing the changes stated, “vinyl records have experienced a resurgence in popularity, and so make a return to the basket.”
Fifteen items have been added to the basket in the last calendar year, and 16 have been removed.
My goodness, how things changed, and quickly. One of the items to have been deleted is hand sanitizer.
I might be contributing to the U.K. changing its inflation metrics. I bought a record player — my vinyl collection went with me to the U.S. for 20 years and then back to the U.K. for another 10 without me playing a single side — in 2023, and an air fryer somehow appeared in my life, too, earlier this year.
Somehow my buying habits are being mirrored in newspaper headlines, although Music Week did add that streaming music also is more popular than it ever has been.
On the brighter side, and an argument that this news is not a sign of "retro," is that half of the best-selling LPs of 2023 were released by bands and artists in the past two years.
We might soon be able to say again that someone sounds like a broken record, without the young looking at you as though you have crept from a swamp.
Although surely it is young people who have discovered what many older readers knew all along — vinyl is just so much cooler than CDs, cassettes, 8-tracks and all other musical format options — and who are buying up a lot of those almost 6 million records.
No prizes for guessing who sold the most vinyl in 2023!
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