Vinyl sales have grown for over a decade now, but the more interesting shift is who’s buying: a lot of it is listeners who grew up entirely on streaming, picking up a format that’s slower, more expensive, and objectively less convenient than what’s already on their phone.
Ask around and the reasons converge on the same idea: a record, a printed book, a physical photograph — they all impose a kind of attention that a streamed file doesn’t. You can’t skip to the next track from across the room. You have to get up, flip the disc, and sit back down. That friction turns out to be the feature, not the bug.
None of this means streaming is going anywhere — it’s still how most listening happens, by a wide margin. But it does suggest that convenience and satisfaction aren’t the same axis, and that a growing number of people are willing to trade the former for more of the latter.
