CDs take back seat to vinyl, tapes on Record Store Day

When Minneapolis drummer and music fanatic Michael Reiter went to the merch stand to buy a CD by Los Angeles buzz band Wand after a local gig last week, he was out of luck. The band had only vinyl albums, singles and cassettes for sale.

"What year is this?" he marveled.

With the 10th annual Record Store Day having taken over indie shops nationwide Saturday, the CD format seems as outdated as Celine Dion's wardrobe. Retro modes of music have won favor with younger, hipper fans — at least the ones who still bother to buy music instead of just streaming it off the web.

Just look at the long list of limited-edition releases being funneled to Minnesota stores for Record Store Day — the biggest shopping day of the year for such shops as the Electric Fetus, Hymie's and Eclipse. Hundreds of vinyl LPs, EPs and 7-inch singles are being offered, but only a handful of CDs.

CD sales have dropped by about 15 percent in each of the past three years. Meanwhile, vinyl record sales have been climbing since 2007 and saw a 52 percent spike last year, with 9.2 million albums sold in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

"A lot of our older shoppers still buy CDs," Electric Fetus retail manager Bob Fuchs said, "but we'll have kids in here who say, 'I haven't bought a CD in five years.' "

Fuchs credits Record Store Day for adding spark to vinyl's explosive resurgence. Vinyl, in turn, has helped indie stores not only stay in business but actually see increased profits in recent years despite the advent of streaming and downloading music sites.

"Chain stores like Tower Records were closing in droves, but those of us at the independent level knew that most true music fans still wanted to get their hands on this stuff," said Brown, who is vice president of marketing at Bull Moose Records in Portland, Maine.

As for vinyl's role in Record Store Day, Brown said, "It's become pretty common knowledge that vinyl just sounds better."

So common, in fact, that teen-centric clothing stores such as Urban Outfitters and Hot Topic have brought vinyl back to the malls that once housed Musicland and Sam Goody. The Twin Cities has seen several vinyl-focused stores open in the past two years, including Barely Brothers and Agharta Records in St. Paul, HiFi Hair and Records and It Records in Minneapolis, and Mill City Sound in Hopkins.

Somehow, even cassettes — a far cry from the audio quality of vinyl — are also enjoying a comeback.

Those cheap, plastic, pocket-size contraptions of the early MTV era hold kitsch value for millennials too young to remember how easily they warped on the sunburnt passenger seat of your mom's Chevette. Tapes are also favored by some underground bands and small record companies because they're much cheaper to manufacture than CDs or vinyl.

Fifth Element record store in Uptown, which primarily sells hip-hop music, now orders more vinyl copies of certain big albums than it does CDs. And yes, cassettes have seen a revival there, too, since rap came to fruition in the boombox era of the early '80s.

"Those tapes that we are selling are from artists with cult followings," Fifth Element music buyer Kevin Beacham said. "It's not just 'tapes' we're selling. We're selling 'items' from artists whose fans want to own all their cool stuff."

One of the most coveted of this year's Record Store Day releases is a cassette copy of Metallica's 1982 demo tape. Many young Twin Cities bands are also selling cassettes now, including What Tyrants, which recently delivered a stack of tapes to Hymie's and threw in some CDs for free "just because," Hoenack recalled.

"I think a lot of the smaller independent artists may just give up on making CDs," said Eclipse Records manager Martin Devaney, a musician who issues his own albums. Eclipse deals only in vinyl now.

"If people really want something on CD, they can download it and then burn a copy off the computer," Devaney noted. Another explanation for the decline of CDs, Hoenack pointed out, is "they can get scratched or damaged so easily nowadays, and everybody hates a skipping CD."

"It's hard to beat the value of a $7 new CD," Brown said, compared to $15 to $20 for an average new album.

Said Fuchs, "There are enough 40-and-older fans that may like getting vinyl here and there but still primarily buy CDs. And those are the people that never stopped shopping in record stores."