Revival of Vinyl

Hello all!

This week’s blog is going to be on a topic that has interested me for quite some time now and I finally have the opportunity to do some research on it! Vinyl records are back and there is no denying it! I recently read an article on Alternative Press discussing the large increase of sales in the last year. This article inspired me to take a break from my normal advice blog and dive into some research!

Based on the Alternative Press article, in 2015, sales of record EPs and LPs surpassed the revenue free music streaming sources obtained from advertisements! Sales from last year reached the highest level since 1988 reaching a total of $416 million dollars from records alone. According to Nielsen, 2015 marked the tenth straight year of growth in vinyl sales and stated the biggest contributor to the sales increase were independent record stores. In another article by Nielsen, I discovered that sales of vinyls have grown by roughly 3 million units every year for at least the past three years! Billboard adds to this saying record sales have grown by 260% since 2009! Vinyl has come back with such intensity that the ‘Vinyl Revival’ is an actual page on Wikipedia!

 

Last Christmas I took all of my gift money and went to Hastings with my best friend to buy a record player and we spent hours looking at all the new and used records they had to offer! Since then I try and spend a least a day a month where I just listen to my record player for the sole reason of the pure sound it puts out. It is hard for me to put into words the way the sounds come out of the player compared to songs I listen to on my iPod or phone. I think the biggest reason for the purity of the sound is the fact that vinyl has an exact replication of the sound wave in a physical form whereas digital music samples the waves and reconstructs them. Honestly, I really just like the idea of being able to play something like a vinyl and that’s a huge appeal to me! As anything goes in life, it’s a personal decision on whether or not you enjoy listening it. As far as I’m concerned, if you’re listening to music, you’re doing it right!

Sticking with the theme of vinyl, I sought to find someone who has a large impact on the Vinyl Revival. After some preliminary research, I found multiple articles about Maggie Derthick, an active member in the music scene in the Detroit area. While not everything company she has worked for has been music based, she has many skills which are similar to those a great artist manager would have! She has been an account manager, a marketing manager and marketing director, and even was the founder for various companies over the last nine years!  One of her biggest and longest ventures has been her work on Girls Gone Vinyl, an entity dedicated to fighting the stigmas of being a female in the DJing field. Every year they put on an all female DJ concert and last year it was 15 hours long and all the profits went to a scholarship Girls Gone Vinyl started to send one artist to Production Classes at the Music Industry Academy, a woman-owned and operated non-profit in the Detroit area. Currently the woman working at Girls Gone Vinyl are working on a film to document all of the struggles and segregation facing a woman in the DJ field. Maggie Derthick is doing so much to change the way woman are looked at in the music industry and I think it’s about time we had more role models like her for our field!

Until next week,

Emily