The Return of Vinyl Records

Passage

A In a converted warehouse in an unfashionable part of a British city, a pressing plant runs its machines around the clock, stamping grooves into discs of black vinyl for an industry that, twenty years ago, most people in the music business would have confidently described as finished. Vinyl record sales in Britain have now risen for seventeen consecutive years, and in 2023 outsold CDs for the first time since the 1980s, a reversal that surprised even some of the format's own longtime advocates. B The revival's roots lie partly in what digital music conspicuously lacks. A streamed song exists as a licence to access a file on someone else's server, revocable if a licensing agreement changes, and carries no cover art larger than a phone screen, no liner notes, and nothing physical to own once a subscription lapses. A vinyl record, whatever its other inconveniences, is unambiguously a possession: something a listener can hold, display, lend to a friend, or resell decades later, qualities that streaming's own convenience was never designed to offer and cannot retroactively provide. C The audio case for vinyl is more contested than its commercial revival might suggest. Analogue audio purists argue that vinyl captures a warmth and continuity that digital formats, sampling sound at discrete intervals, structurally cannot reproduce; audio engineers more sceptical of this claim point out that a well-mastered digital recording is measurably more accurate to the original studio performance, and that vinyl's celebrated "warmth" is frequently closer to a pleasant, consistent distortion than to superior fidelity. Both positions have genuine technical grounding, and the debate has continued, largely unresolved, for as long as digital formats have existed. D Whatever the merits of the audio argument, it is not obviously the revival's primary driver, since streaming remains, by a wide margin, how most vinyl buyers actually listen to the same music day to day; industry surveys have repeatedly found that a majority of vinyl purchasers also stream the same album regularly, treating the record itself less as a primary listening format and more as a physical artefact bought in support of an artist, or as a ritual object whose appeal lies partly in the deliberate inconvenience of playing it — selecting a record, cleaning it, placing the needle — compared with a playlist that simply continues. E The revival has not been without friction for the format itself. Pressing capacity, which shrank drastically during vinyl's commercial low point in the 1990s and 2000s, has struggled to expand quickly enough to meet renewed demand, and major album releases now routinely face pressing-plant queues of several months, a bottleneck that was almost unimaginable when the format was assumed to be a shrinking niche market rather than a growing one. Independent artists and smaller labels, competing for the same limited plant capacity against major-label releases with larger guaranteed orders, have reported particular difficulty securing a pressing slot at all. F The economics of the format also remain lopsided in ways that complicate any simple "vinyl is back" narrative. A new vinyl record typically costs a listener two to three times what the same album costs on CD, reflecting genuinely higher manufacturing and shipping costs rather than pure markup, and represents a far smaller share of most artists' actual streaming-dominated income than its cultural visibility might suggest; for the great majority of working musicians, vinyl sales remain a supplementary revenue stream and a marketing tool rather than a primary source of income, however healthy the format's sales figures look in aggregate. G Whether the current growth continues indefinitely or eventually plateaus at some smaller, stable niche remains genuinely uncertain, and several industry analysts who track the format expect the latter: a format whose core appeal rests partly on scarcity and ritual, they argue, is unlikely to ever again approach the mainstream, default-format status vinyl held before cassettes and CDs first displaced it.

বাংলা অনুবাদ জমা দেওয়ার পর দেখা যাবে — আগে ইংরেজিতে বোঝার চেষ্টা করুন।