Record Collecting?

Vinyl, wax, albums, LPs, EPs, 45s and singles. These are several names associated with the outdated consumer music medium known as records. Vinyl records have had a major rise in interest and appeal in the last three years, despite the fact that they were officially phased out of the retail market in 1990.

The LP and its smaller cousin, the 45-rpm single, are making a healthy comeback. Vinyl stores are appearing around the country, and retail outlets like Tower Records are actually featuring a limited stock of new releases on the vinyl format. In 1995, only 1.2 million new vinyl albums were sold in the United States, according to the Record Industry Association of America. By comparison, 495 million compact discs were sold that year. However, the number of vinyl records sold nearly doubled to 2.2 million last year alone. Vinyl has gotten a recent boost in sales from contemporary groups such as Hootie and The Blowfish and Pearl Jam, which have paid tribute to the wax with its unique warm sound format by releasing vinyl versions of the records a week before distributing the compact discs or cassettes. "It's a way for the band to help keep the LPs alive. They grew up on them and still feel a lot of nostalgia for them," said Jim Merlis, a spokesman for Geffen Records. * (Bowles, A8)

Some of these popular artists have released new albums with bonus artwork and additional songs not appearing on any other format. These artists and their record companies are pressing LPs at an average of 10,000 to 20,000 copies per release, and according to Merlis, these titles "usually sell out immediately. Hard-core fans consider them collector's items. For that reason alone, I think vinyl is here to stay."

My own collecting craze began right as the vinyl police arrested the last store for carrying LPs in 1990, when I was 14. My friends knew I was making a dumb move. Records were passé, and CDs were nouveaux. Music chains began deleting leftover stock, which had already been sent into hiding behind the cut-out cassettes of Vanilla Ice and the other one-hit wonders of the 1980s. Local outlets officially changed their name to rid themselves of the obsolete word "record," and all salespeople made sure to point and stare if you dared ask "where the vinyl went" in their store. I felt like the typical 8-track collector in 1980, when cassettes became the consumer tape medium. To be a true collector of vinyl albums meant that I had to search elsewhere, outside of the retail market, to uncover this antiquated, obsolete format.

Baltimore record collector Tim Kabara talks about the local record scene.

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* = Scott Bowles, "For the Record: LP Sales Jump in a Vinyl Revival," The Washington Post 10 Feb. 1997: A1, A8.