Moments ago, I checked back in on Rough Trade, the primary and high-powered online vendor for vinyl records of note in the world today. And I made a somewhat shocking discovery: records cost markedly more than they did four years ago. The difference is, on average, about nine dollars per record, pitting the current average of about $34 against what was then the almost uniform figure of $25. So about a 40% increase in price point has pummeled the industry, relative to about a 10-15% hike within the same time frame for common goods like food.
Momentarily, I had one theory explaining the retail gouge on vinyl — that the industry is just dying, lending itself to a decreased supply, giving the item a sort of antique value, of sorts. One Google search quickly demolished this whim, upturning figures of 2025 representing the highest vinyl revenue total in U.S. history, surpassing $1B, from ’24’s $950M. So increased demand is undeniably a factor, here, in other words.
What market commodities tend to, in general, appreciate in value? Things that aren’t manufactured anymore, for one, almost certainly will, also known as “antiques,” the other obvious answer being housing. Actually, part of what we’re experiencing in the 2020’s, in the midst of almost insurmountable rent hikes in America, is a problem of overpopulation, wielding a decreased supply of housing coupled with an equal demand which is then multiplied by a greater number of people looking for a place to live, as our country grows and capitalism behaves “properly” (sic).
Well, you’d think, the increased manufacture of vinyl records in 2026 (a maneuver I would think would be a no-brainer for any record company that initially pressed them on their artists’ release) [1] would be simpler than building a bunch of apartment complexes in government-allotted open space, or lobbying with the politicos into zone realignment. Whereas, as we know, in the ’90s, et. al., most record companies didn’t bother pressing vinyl for their high-profile artists’ releases, a famous example being Elektra’s treatment of Third Eye Blind in 1997, which, mind you, simultaneously garnered the largest record contract for a new artist in the industry’s history, at the time. So it’s possible that, today, with what we can at least furnish as a hypothesis that these record companies lack the resources to press popular analog, a sort of phenemon of the vinyl enterprise getting “reparations,” to use a clumsy term, of course, for how it was culturally persecuted in the CD and digital age (1992-2007, roughly). It’s like this recent surge in price point and demand is simply a by-product of what was frankly, in all likelihood, a capitalistic maneuver in the late-’80s to replace all of our music listening media, and hence propel GDP, which, by basic production model, would debilitate vinyl’s level of supply, in our current era. Anyway, if it makes my local record retailer seem like less of a Scrooge for charging $40 for Talking Heads records circa 2022, of course, I guess I can at least hang my hat on musical quality and artistic merit genuinely informing the record industry, something that certainly didn’t always seem like a given, particularly in the corporately-dominated United States of America.
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