Who is popular today?

With young fans craving vinyl copies of relatively recent releases, the industry is shortening the nostalgia cycle to almost nothing. But how long can this boom really last?The remarkable resurgence of vinyl has been one of the biggest stories in the music industry of the past few years. The once-dead format has seen exponential sales growth, with 5.3m records being sold in the UK in 2021 – the highest volume since 1990, roughly when CD sales began to outpace other formats – and record sales in the US up 15.6% year-on-year in the first few weeks of 2023. This Saturday’s Record Store Day will see the usual yearly clamour for limited vinyl editions, with over 400 records by the likes of the 1975, Taylor Swift, Ellie Goulding and more set to go on sale.Keen to make the most of a seemingly steady revenue stream, labels have begun increasing production on limited and deluxe repressings of popular albums. Anniversary reissues – once only common to recently remastered records, or albums several decades old – are now becoming popular for releases that are just five years old, such as Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy, Phoebe Bridgers’ Stranger in the Alps, Lucy Dacus’ Historian and Idles’ Brutalism. They’ve all been repressed in coloured formats or with alternate sleeves in the past two years, often at a slightly increased price point to standard black discs. Continue reading...