Category Archives: Vinyl

Vinyl records return to UK ‘inflation basket’ for first time since 1992

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Strong sales of Taylor Swift’s 1989 (Taylor’s Version) help format make an impact, as air fryers also join list

Not since Simply Red’s album Stars topped the albums chart in 1992 have vinyl records been included in the basket of goods used to calculate annual inflation, but a rise in sales over recent years has brought them back as a marker of UK shop prices.

The Office for National Statistics said the “resurgence of popularity” in vinyl records meant they should be included among the 744 items used to calculate inflation each month, in its latest annual shake-up of the basket.

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US vinyl sales up 21.7% for first half of 2023, report finds

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Vinyl boom continues with another major leap and Taylor Swift’s Midnights leading the pack

Vinyl sales in the US are up 21.7% for the first half of 2023 over the same period last year, according to a new music industry report.

The vinyl resurgence is itself not new – 2022 marked the 17th consecutive year that sales of vinyl records rose, according to Luminate’s music midyear report. But the growth rate this year has reassured experts that the vinyl market did not hit a natural plateau after surging during the pandemic, which caused a 108% increase in 2021.

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Australia’s boom in record shops: ‘Our regulars are high school kids who can stream stuff for free!’

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With revenue from vinyl sales nearing $37m in Australia last year, new retailers explain why they opened record stores post-Covid

Joshua Hodson-Smith spent much of the pandemic listening to an obscure record called Panther Phobia, by Memphis band Tav Falco. It was the mix of swampy blues and dark poetry on tracks like Cockroach that seemed to capture the mood of endless lockdowns. And after dabbling in selling records online, Hodson-Smith finally quit his warehouse job to open Footscray Records last July.

“With the virus, no one knew what was going on. I hated work and wanted out of a bad situation,” he says. “I’ve been collecting records for years and so I just went for it. There was no real plan. I looked for a spot and then leant in. It hit me the day I signed the lease – I knew it was suddenly real.”

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Plea after ‘irreplaceable’ records accidentally sold at Derbyshire car boot sale

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Relative mistakenly sold ‘shocked and horrified’ Buxton woman’s inherited vinyls for less than £1 each

A woman has told of her devastation after a relative mistakenly sold her collection of irreplaceable vinyl records for less than £1 each at a car boot sale.

Rohan Mellor, 26, inherited the 16 pieces of vinyl from her late uncle to whom she was very close.

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Legendary Nashville store Ernest Tubb Record Shop to close

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The oft-photographed country music institution, which has been in Nashville since 1947, will close in the spring

The downtown Nashville, Tennessee, record store that was opened by Opry legend Ernest Tubb in 1947 and has been a landmark in country music for decades will close as the building is being put up for sale.

The owners of the Ernest Tubb Record Shop said in a statement on Friday they were heartbroken that the store, which has been in its current location on Broadway since 1951, will close in the spring. The building and store is owned by the Honky Tonk Circus, LLC, and the David McCormick Company, Inc.

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‘I never saw my guitar again’: readers on belongings they lost in a breakup

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Long after two people have gone their separate ways, some partings still rankle. Readers reflect on the beloved items they left behind

Even though my breakup was amicable, I felt a lot of guilt – so when I moved out I said: “Keep it all.” But, in the years since, there have been a few items of kitchenware that I wish I’d held on to: a Le Creuset casserole dish, my favourite mug, a digital cooking thermometer, the plastic bowl attachment for my stick blender (the blender itself I retained at her insistence, but I forgot all the accessories that came with it). There never seemed like a good time to ask for any of it back – I hope she’s at least getting some use out of them. Anonymous, Australia

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The Who Sell Out: still a searing satire on pop’s commercial breakdown

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Filled with product placement and advertising, the band’s newly reissued 1967 album put the pop in pop art, by showing how closely music was entwined with capital

These days, we think of the period between 1965 and 1967 as one of white-hot musical progress, a dizzying three-year period during which innovation followed innovation, a succession of totemic albums and singles were released and pop music changed irrevocably. But, as Jon Savage’s superb book 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded made clear, not everyone at the time was impressed with how things were going. Savage’s research revealed a succession of contemporary naysayers, devoted to “ringing the death knell” as he put it: 1966 – The Year Pop Went Flat was noted music journalist Maureen Cleave’s assessment of 12 months that had seen the release of Revolver, Blonde on Blonde, Reach Out (I’ll Be There), Eight Miles High, It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World and 19th Nervous Breakdown.

The most striking contemporary quote of all might be one that didn’t appear in Savage’s book. “People aren’t jiving in the listening boxes in record shops any more, like we did to a Cliff Richard ‘newie’,” it lamented, before qualifying: “I like some of the new sounds, purely as sound, that are coming out of pop music.”

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Jackie Kay on Bessie Smith: ‘My libidinous, raunchy, fearless blueswoman’

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As a black girl growing up in 1970s Glasgow, poet Jackie Kay developed a passion for Bessie Smith. In this extract from her new book, she remembers the wild spirit who helped her find her true self

I was adopted in 1961 and brought up in a suburban house in a suburban street in the north of Glasgow. A small, semi-detached Wimpey house. Outside our house is a cherry-blossom tree that is as old as me. It doesn’t seem the most likely place to be introduced to the blues, but then blues travel to wherever the blues lovers go. In my street and in the neighbouring streets to Brackenbrae Avenue, I never saw another black person. There was my brother and me. That was it. The butcher, the baker and the candlestick-maker were all white. (Although I never actually met a candlestick-maker – has anyone?)

So the first time I saw Bessie Smith, it really was like finding a friend. I saw her before I heard her. My father – a Scottish communist who loved the blues – bought me my first double album. I was 12. The album was called Bessie Smith: Any Woman’s Blues and produced by CBS Records ( John Hammond and Chris Albertson; Albertson went on to write her biography). I remember taking the album off him and poring over it, examining it for every detail. Her image on the cover captivated me. She looked so familiar. She looked like somebody I already knew in my heart of hearts. I stared at the image of her, trying to recall who it was she reminded me of.

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Kyrgyzstan ballads, Okinawan folk, Ugandan hymns … the album rewriting global music history

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Excavated Shellac rejects the western canon of pop, rock, jazz, classical and more to champion 78rpm gems from overlooked corners of the world – ‘an alternate universe’, according to the man behind it

Imagine an anthology of 20th-century music making that purposely ignored pop, rock, jazz, blues, country, classical and opera. Cue outrage, at least from English-speaking listeners. But away from the western canon that has come to dominate our conception of music-making, much of the world was busy creating swathes of very different, extremely beautiful music.

These overlooked styles are collated on a new 100-track compilation, An Alternate History of the World’s Music, and presumptuous as it may seem to announce that the best album of 2021 has already been released, to my mind it’s unlikely it will be topped. Helmed by Dust-to-Digital, the US label that has done a magnificent job with box sets chronicling overlooked areas of pre-second world war music, the digital release also features a 186-page ebook (complete with beautiful illustrations like the ones here), in which every tune gets discussed – the first is a South African miner’s protest against police brutality, the last a sultry Cuban dance tune whose singers sound like they might have been hitting the rum while recording. This sonic smorgasbord from across the globe lives up to the provocative title, with music from Afghanistan, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, Uganda, Spain, Albania, Mongolia, Mexico and elsewhere. Ever wondered what the Crimean Tartar Orchestra might sound like? Well, their raucous, minor key, brass party music is fabulous.

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