Why Today’s Vinyl Resurgence is Nostalgia For Another Era

One less digital, less fragmented, slower, and more immersive.

Photo by Sara Rolin on Unsplash

Albums, in theory, are themselves a singular concept, made of smaller cohesive components or layers (songs). The singles are only part of the story. Still, I had never really listened to a full album until Beyoncé dropped in 2013, and then again a few years later when I listened to Beyoncé’s full visual album, Lemonade. Before then, I’d only flipped through singles on this playlist or that.

I’m 26 — this could be generational.

It could be the byproduct of being young in the digital age with digital downloads and streaming. Still, I have this nostalgic haze of a vision that things were different decades ago; as though, in the 60s and 70s, we used to really listen to an artist’s album from beginning to end—and to stop somewhere in between would be to miss something from the story.

And yet, the onset of the digital age made it easy to buy and download singles, which caused album sales to plummet in all formats.

Some artists must have seen this coming. When iTunes was created in 2001, several of them pushed back against the idea of their albums being fragmented, cherry-picked, and sold for 99 cents a single. But ultimately, the digital song sales…