What's old is cool, agree both shoppers and purveyors of vinyl albums

Last summer, the Lakes Region suddenly had two places to buy vinyl records, with Defiant Records & Craft Beer and NH Vintage Vinyl doing business on either side of Canal Street in downtown Laconia. Some asked if the region could support two record stores, when it so recently had none.

It turns out that was the wrong question. The better query would have been: How many more record stores does the region need? Because, as of this summer, the Lakes Region’s count of vinyl dealers is now doubled, with the opening of Full Circle Vinyl on Main Street in Meredith, and with Old’s Cool relocating from Plymouth to the Senter’s Market plaza in Center Harbor.

Vinyl is back — and it has been on its rebound for a long time. A 2022 year-end report, published by the Recording Industry Association of America, found that last year represented the 17th consecutive growth in sales for music in the vinyl format. That year was the first year since 1987 in which vinyl albums outsold compact discs in terms of units — 41 million versus 33 million.

Industry experts insist the vinyl revival is being driven by nostalgia, as middle-aged music fans seek to replace the favorite albums of their younger years. But a glance inside a store shows something else is going on, as many of the people flipping through the stacks are too young to remember the days when listening to music had nothing to do with a phone — unless you were calling in a request to the local radio station.

“I guess I’m nostalgic — or I yearn for the nostalgia,” said Artie Emmett, a 19-year-old from Dover who found several albums at NH Vintage Vinyl. Two were vinyl records — “Fresh Cream” by Cream, and “Jubilee” by Japanese Breakfast, albums separated by about six decades — and the rest were CDs.

Emmett started collecting vinyl in 2019, around the same time a turntable appeared as a gift from a parent. Emmett said there’s an appeal to albums that isn’t matched by the experience of streaming.

“Just having the physical copy I find fun,” Emmett said, adding it’s nice to be able to listen to music apart from a smart device. “It’s just different.”

Full Circle

The newest shop in the Lakes Region is Full Circle Vinyl, which opened in Meredith on July 15. Co-owners Jennie Wesco and Nils Nelson started Full Circle as a means to escape corporate careers.

They were “burned out, wanted to have a life change, a career change, doing something we enjoy,” Wesco said.

Both of them had been vinyl collectors, and when they landed on the idea of starting their own store, they started collecting with intention. Once they had enough stock, they started looking for a good retail space. While their search was wide — they considered options across the Northeast — their hearts took them to Meredith, where Nelson had spent his boyhood summers, and where they had both vacationed as adults. When they saw the space on Main Street, they found what they were seeking.

“We knew what we had for inventory, we knew we needed a space at least this big,” Nelson said.

“The experience is what attracts us both to vinyl,” Wesco said. “We almost feel bad for the younger generation” who grew up without knowing what it was like to visit a record store in search of something, perhaps even stumbling on an album that becomes a favorite.

They’ve found the response to be “overwhelming,” and they’ve already established a base of regular customers, some who are buying their first albums, and others who have an extensive collection they’re trying to complete.

Nelson said their typical patron is between 35 and 55 years of age, but added they have had some 11-year-olds whose excitement suggests the beginnings of a collector.

Old’s Cool

Mike McDowell opened Old’s Cool in Plymouth last year, but decided to relocate to a larger space in Center Harbor this summer. McDowell was a performing musician, but lost that revenue stream during the pandemic, and found selling music was a way to work with the art form he loves.

“I have 20,000 records,” he said. Each day at his shop is a question: “What am I going to listen to today? I love that.”

McDowell said the sound quality of vinyl, which he asserted is noticeably superior to compressed files that streaming services use, is driving the return to a medium that was largely abandoned, or so it seemed, when CDs became common in the late 1980s.

“Additionally, the form factor is just cooler,” McDowell said. “You can read the liner notes. It’s just cooler, a big record.”

Like other vinyl stores, McDowell deals in both vintage records — usually found by the boxful in attics and basements of people looking to downsize — as well as new printings of both classic albums and contemporary recordings.

While McDowell’s sales are often to middle-aged customers, he said the first transactions at both of his locations were to 13-year-old girls. One bought “Abbey Road;” the other, “The Magical Mystery Tour.”

“In general, young people drive the market for music sales, they always have,” McDowell said. “It doesn’t matter if they’re coming in to buy Nas, Meghan Thee Stallion, Taylor Swift, or their first Beatles album.”

Defiant

The vinyl sales at Defiant are part of the larger operation of Music Connection in Manchester. Gavin McDaniel, general manager, said he likes the idea of selling albums in the same space where people are sipping pints of craft beer.

As much as McDaniel values vinyl as a medium for music, he predicts the current fascination will have a shelf life.

“I know if it’s something that’s hot and you’re in it, you want it to last forever, but collectibles don’t work that way,” McDaniel said. He’s seen it happen with other collectibles, such as baseball cards, and he said it will likely happen with vinyl records, too.

“I think we might be close to its zenith,” McDaniel said, but he added the trend could stay at the zenith for a while before it starts to fade. What’s next? It might just be CDs and cassettes, he said. But all of those require something to play them on.

“After that, I think what will happen will be vintage stereo equipment. Once you hear it on a good stereo system, it will blow you away.”

What McDaniel sees in the customer base for vinyl records is a kind of inheritance of nostalgia. There are people in their 40s, old enough to have teenaged children, who are sharing with their kids what music was like before the era of downloads and streaming.

“I’ve got kids who are buying records who don’t have a record player yet,” McDaniel said. “They are caught up in the collectibility of it.”

The hobby of collecting records is a bond that can reach across generations, even if the music styles might be different. McDaniel also asserted that using physical media to play music changes the listening experience.

“It forces the listener to listen to it in the order and manner in which it was intended,” he said.

NH Vintage

Dan McLaughlin, owner of NH Vintage Vinyl in Laconia, said business has been “slowly building” since opening last year. He’s now seeing a healthy mix of tourists and locals.

“Teenagers are some of the most excited customers coming in,” he said.

While the middle-aged and older shoppers are mostly interested in vinyl albums, younger customers, especially those who came of age during the streaming era, are just as fascinated with cassettes and CDS — any form of physical media is a welcome break from Bluetooth’s invisible tether.

Pricing and evaluating records, especially those were pressed decades ago, can be a challenge. In one typical exchange, a person who was cleaning out an older relative’s home brought a pickup truck full of unwanted items — including boxes of old albums — to the store. Did McLaughlin want any of them before they went to the transfer station?

McLaughlin had a few minutes to do a roadside evaluation, trying to discern whether any of the albums would sell in his store, or if they would just collect dust, as they had for decades in someone’s basement.

The desirability of vintage records is a complicated matrix. Often, the records of the most popular artists during the vinyl’s height are, counterintuitively, least valuable today. That’s because so many copies of those records were pressed the market is still flooded with them. Some of the most valuable today are albums from respected artists but whose albums, for one reason or another, are hard to find in vinyl. Metallica, for example, is one band whose albums sell well, McLaughlin said, because their recording years were during the cassette and CD eras, so finding a good quality vinyl version of “The Black Album” is challenging.

Those observations are for artists with which he’s familiar. If it’s someone he’s never heard of, he will refer to the name of the label that produced the record, as some invested in the best recording and printing quality, while others were known for cutting costs. To make the analysis yet more complicated, there are really two markets: there’s the prices customers will pay in his store, usually $50 and below, and then there’s what seekers of rare albums online will pay, which can rise into the hundreds of dollars for the right record.

NH Vintage Vinyl is marking its second summer by hosting the first Canal Street Block Party from 5 to 9 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 19. The event will feature face painting, kids’ art activities, local vendors and food trucks, an ‘80s dance party at sundown, an air guitar competition and live drum-off and, of course, lots of music from vintage vinyl albums.