Article

Journal of Consumer Culture

2015, Vol. 15(1) 3–27
The vinyl: The analogue ! The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1469540513488403

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Dominik Bartmanski
Masaryk University, Czech Republic

Ian Woodward
Griffith University, Australia

Abstract
Recent discussions of music listening practices have given priority to the digitalisation of
sound and the role of digital music players in changing the form, medium and possibly
even the content of listening. While such an emphasis is warranted given the rapid
uptake of digital music consumption, it is also the case that vinyl records are currently
the fastest growing area of music sales. Moreover, within particular music listening
circles, the vinyl record is approached as an auratic object. In this paper, we explore
the vinyl’s persistence on the market and its rekindled cultural prominence. Using the
frameworks of cultural sociology, combined with insights from material culture studies
and cultural approaches to consumption within business studies and sociology, we
explore the reasons why vinyl records have once again become highly valued objects
of cultural consumption. Resisting explanations which focus solely on matters of nos-
talgia or fetish, we look to the concepts of iconicity, ritual, aura and the sensibility of
coolness to explain the paradoxical resurgence of vinyl at the time of the digital
revolution.

Keywords
Vinyl record, music, aura, icon, material culture, materiality, consumption, commodity

Introduction
This article addresses the enduring cultural appeal of the analogue record at the
time of the digital revolution in music consumption and production. Our interest in
this phenomenon stems from the observation that not only did the vinyl record
manage to survive and persist through the first sweeping wave of digitalisation

Corresponding author:
Ian Woodward, Griffith University 170 Kessels Rd Nathan Brisbane, 4111 Australia.
Email: [email protected]; [email protected]
4 Journal of Consumer Culture 15(1)

symbolised by the compact disc, but that nowadays it is also experiencing a renais-
sance of sorts. Interestingly, the current commercial comeback of the vinyl record
occurs precisely when computer-based technologies have profoundly transformed
the music industry and rendered our economic and cultural systems irreversibly
digital. How could an old and apparently obsolete medium possibly withstand the
tide of technological revolution that effectively transforms the music file from cum-
bersome physical object to weightless electronic information? The story of this
unlikely survival is complex and the complexity resides not only in the specificity
of the vinyl and its rich history but also in the relational construction of such
meanings as old, obsolete, object, information and musical experience.
As a basic phonographic idea first patented by Emil Berliner, the analogue disc
became 125 years old in 2012 (von Leszczynski, 2012). This was also the year in
which vinyl sales reached their highest level since 1993, when the Nielsen Company
started tracking the consumption of the by then marginalised medium. With more
than 15 million units sold in the five years between 2008 and 2012, the vinyl record
has unexpectedly reclaimed a small, but significant, part of the market territory it
occupied from the late 1940s until the mid 1980s. That we may indeed describe this
as a significant change is suggested by the fact that this sales number was bigger
than the total of sales in the entire period from 1993 to 2007. Moreover, the actual
increase may well be bigger, because the majority of vinyl albums were purchased
at independent record stores that often do not report to SoundScan (Fernando,
2012). In addition to the increased quantity, the vinyl record has also reasserted its
special quality as a cultural object. It is not just the surging commercial numbers
which speak volumes about the iconic power of the medium, but also the plethora
of appreciative symbolic narratives. In sum, the vinyl record has survived as an
analogue product and seems to have been reinvented as a signifier whose value as a
thing grows, both within and also outside the music industry proper. Yet this power
and its paradoxical effects cannot be taken for granted or reduced to any single
objective condition. Instead, the phenomenon demands a synchronic inquiry into
the cultural construction of the medium as well as a diachronic understanding of
the social meanings that have made possible the considerable ‘resurgence’ in vinyl
consumption, at least in Europe and the US (Fehlmann, 2012; Fernando, 2012).
To begin with, the wide use in the media of such terms as resurgence and come-
back suggests that the medium’s re-articulated market presence is a multidimen-
sional and relatively robust cultural situation rather than a fleeting craze, or a
passing effect of fetishistic nostalgia briefly fuelled by the ultimate triumph of the
digital. It has been demonstrated that ‘music digitalization and the dematerializa-
tion of musical goods do not mean less materiality and do not imply a less relevant
social role for material objects within consumption processes’ (Maguadda, 2011:
16). This recognition is also shared among the cutting edge electronic musicians
and producers themselves, like the artist Björk, who emphasise that although the
physical process of going to a record shop may be obsolete for many listeners, the
‘hunger for physical experiences’ is not (Björk, 2001: 46). Similarly, elite DJs tend
to acknowledge the ‘attraction’ to vinyl and its ‘mesmerising’ quality even as
Bartmanski and Woodward 5

nowadays most of them embrace the digital technology in their daily business and
personal consumption (Brewster and Broughton, 2010: 433–434). Engineers predict
that the vinyl record has come back to stay as the only analogue medium (von
Leszczynski, 2012), and sociologists conclude that ‘new objects and devices and old
ones are not mutually exclusive’ (Maguadda, 2012: 31).
If these statements may strike the reader as quite commonsensical, it is less clear
how the coexistence of different formats on the market works and what makes the
vinyl live on in the cut-throat domain of the technology-driven entertainment
industry. While all the cited observers recognise the importance of the reconfigur-
ation in the definition of the material as well as the shifts in the relation between the
digital and the analogue, they have not offered a systematic account of what is the
cultural logic of these semantic changes. We also realise that there are numerous
pragmatic aspects of music consumption with which these semantic changes are
associated. Our study aims to make up for this lacuna in knowledge. We use the
analytical resources of cultural sociology, including the concepts of iconicity, nar-
rative and materiality, and the frameworks of material culture studies and inter-
pretive consumer studies, to unravel and categorise the meanings behind the vinyl’s
enduring and still growing appeal.

The vinyl as the medium and the message

A brief survey of the modern history of the vinyl format allows us to lay out the
basic features of its material career. Vinyl emerged in its standard form of the
33 rpm double-sided, long-playing (‘LP’) record via Columbia Records in 1948
(Patmore, 2009). It rose to prominence in the subsequent decade, dominated the
trade in the 1960s and 1970s, and declined in the 1980s, apparently superseded
forever by what was then advertised as a superior sound carrier – the digital com-
pact disc. The downfall was quite dramatic and seemed irrevocable. The LP’s share
in the US market of pre-recorded music dropped roughly from 40% to 1% in the
10 years following the commercial introduction of the CD in 1983. Consigned to
oblivion by the corporate agents of technological progress, the analogue record
became an endangered species of the late modern mass media (Coleman, 2003;
Millard, 2005; Patmore, 2009). Yet it has survived the lean years of the 1990s,
mainly because of its importance for the DJs and the afficionados of such genres
as hip hop, techno and house where vinyl retained its symbolic relevance. As a
matter of fact, it was precisely that decade that witnessed the unprecedented shift in
cultural status of the DJ from a pariah of the music industry to a venerated iconic
figure (see Brewster and Broughton, 2010; Marclay and Tone, 2004: 344). Still, it
was only toward the end of the next decade that the medium could be claimed to
have re-entered the mainstream. As mp3 files had saturated the by then wholly
computerised market and the iPod had become the playing device, the vinyl record
surprisingly became the fastest growing music format in 2010.
Because of this increase in sales – which contradicts the expected linear narrative
of technological progress in regard to sound quality and listening formats – vinyl is
6 Journal of Consumer Culture 15(1)

treated as something of a cultural curiosity in the mainstream media, which work

to re/construct its mythology as they report its apparent resurgence. In the UK,
data compiled by the BPI ( a body representing the UK’s recorded music industry)
stated that sales of vinyl rose by nearly 50% (43.7%) over 2011, representing what
it called a ‘modest resurgence’ (Jones, 2011). In the USA, the mainstream rock and
pop magazine Rolling Stone recently ran with the headline ‘Vinyl sales increase
despite industry slump’, reporting Nielsen SoundScan data which showed that
‘though overall album sales dropped by 13 percent in 2010, sales of vinyl increased
by 14 percent over the previous year, with around 2.8 million units sold’. The
magazine continues, commenting that: ‘this is a new record for vinyl sales since
1991, when the format had all but disappeared in the wake of the CD boom’
(Perpetua, 2011). Further evidence of the current remarketisation of vinyl comes
from The Wall Street Journal, which in early 2012 proclaimed in a headline, ‘It’s
alive! Vinyl makes a comeback’, and reported that:

The digital revolution was supposed to do away with a lot of fusty old relics. First
compact discs took their toll on the long-playing (and long-played) vinyl record; then
iPods and digital downloads began doing the same to CDs. But long after the eulogies
had been delivered, the vinyl LP has been revived. The LP still represents just a sliver
of music sales. But last year, according to Nielsen SoundScan data, while CD sales fell
by more than 5%, vinyl record sales grew more than 36% (Felten, 2012).

Although without any genuine prospects to fully recapture the mass music market,
vinyl has secured its position of a medium that is there not only to stay, but also to
influence once more the experience of sound and our thoughts on what constitutes
‘physical’ media. This shift in its popular status may be described as a sudden
transformation from a critically endangered to dangerously critical medium, one
that seems to prove the Nietzschean adage: what does not kill makes one stronger.
But this perceived ‘revival’ of the analogue record may seem odd or unexpected
only when looked at from a purely quantitative perspective based on assumptions
of exclusively linear technological progress, and a certain understanding of effi-
ciency and convenience. Once a broader qualitative optics is adopted then a dif-
ferent, more complex cultural landscape emerges. Such a vantage point enables us
to discern the relative autonomy of iconic power and reveals that what the main-
stream registers as a kind of surprising renaissance of the vinyl cannot be exhausted
by the ready-made vocabulary of nostalgic sentimentalism, or such shibboleths as
‘retro’ or ‘vintage’. Nor can it be adequately captured by discourses reducing it to
mere fetishistic impulses contrived to divert jaded publics of the late modern mar-
kets. Instead, it points to a necessity of coming to terms with the multi-track
character of the modern mediascape in which material media are contingently con-
structed and socially enacted as cultural messages (Belk and Tumbat, 2005; Bull,
2002, 2007; Scott and Woodward, 2011).
The perspective we adopt is sensitive to the fact that certain formats of expres-
sion, preservation and use of artistic works can be construed not merely as niche
Bartmanski and Woodward 7

products or valuable aesthetic goods but also as vehicles of non-artistic, moral

values and instruments of identity-projection. But rather than emphasising their
role of status-signalling commodities in disenchanted societies, we propose to focus
on them as aura-laden objects connected to constellations of other non-human
entities that facilitate a series of emotionally charged rituals and experiences on
which various communities thrive. Here we follow Durkheim, who acknowledged
that collective feelings that keep communities together ‘become conscious of them-
selves only by settling upon external objects’ (Durkheim, 1995: 421). Beyond its
‘rediscovered’ sonic specificity as a material container of ‘warm’, ‘human’ and ‘real’
sounds (Yochim and Biddinger, 2008), the story of vinyl is capable of disclosing the
intricate nature of meaning attribution and its commercial and cultural conse-
quences. The fact that the vinyl grows in stature amongst some listening commu-
nities and artists despite being the most expensive and least portable medium
precisely at the time when the high quality electronic formats like FLAC or
WAV became available, further accentuates the non-musical messages that the
sound object contains and/or is believed to deliver. As noted by Brown, ‘If the
topic of things has attained a new urgency . . . this may have been a response to
the digitization of our world’ (Brown, 2001: 16).
The sales figures for the top selling vinyl LPs bear out the role of vinyl as a
popular, ‘authentic’ way to experience the pop and rock canon. Sales data gathered
by Nielsen SoundScan show that Abbey Road by The Beatles has been the top
selling vinyl LP of the three years 2009–2011, with sales of over 100,000 units
(Perpetua, 2012). Looking at the comparative pricing of the vinyl record reveals
some noteworthy aspects of price and value elements of the vinyl story. Amazon
UK sells the remastered version of the Abbey Road album on vinyl for around £35
for a new copy, while Amazon in the USA sells it for anything from US$15 to
US$50, depending on the version of the album one buys. CD and MP3 versions of
the album sell for around US$13. What is noticeable, from a scan of comparative
pricing, is that the vinyl edition of an album generally commands a price premium
of 30–50% relative to other listening formats. To take another example using one
of the top-selling vinyl releases in 2011, the album by Mumford and Sons Sigh No
More sells for US$15 on Amazon, with the CD version selling for around US$9,
and the MP3 version for US$7. Likewise, a remastered vinyl version of A Love
Supreme by John Coltrane sells for US$17 on Amazon, compared to US$9 and
US$9.50 respectively for the standard CD and MP3 formats. Interestingly enough,
the same trend is true for the brand new productions as well as contemporary
classics. For instance, the album Tomboy by Panda Bear was bought by one of
the authors for US$35, though the CD version could be purchased for around
US$20, and the MP3 version can be had for US$17 on iTunes. Any iconic
album of the 1990s is likely to be much more expensive on vinyl than CD.
Moreover, some singles and remixes never officially appeared in a digital form
and they are known as vinyl-only versions. The price discrepancies between for-
mats are even wider when one compares the first original vinyl edition with the
digital issues of any album released before the introduction of the digital carrier.
8 Journal of Consumer Culture 15(1)

In order to understand what this economic dimension indicates, we look closer

into the cultural construction of vinyl as object. This can be done by paying more
attention to two aspects of vinyl’s cultural biography: (1) the material nature and
aesthetic affordance of the vinyl album format, i.e. 33 rpm LP, and (2) how other
forms of vinyl record, in particular 45 rpm seven- and 12-inch singles lend them-
selves to particular cultural practices of specific taste communities and urban scenes
that not only utilised and venerated the vinyl during its lean times in the 1990s as
the medium, but also endowed it with the enduring meanings of coolness and
archaeological cultural value.

Long play as deep play

First, the idea of ‘the album’ itself is crucially connected to the history of the vinyl
long-playing record. In its modern form, vinyl is classically based on the 33 rpm
‘Long Playing Record’ (LP) format. It is materially designed for the idea of the
album as a listening experience, akin to reading a book divided into parts and
chapters. The LP album was thought of as materialising a sonic narrative that
reaches the public in the form of an artistic object. The idea of ‘the album’ pre-
serves the integrity of an album such as The Beatles’ Abbey Road as a complete set
of interrelated songs which is best appreciated in the continuous long playing
context structured by the dramatic pause introduced by the side division. It pre-
serves the idea of unique suites on each side of all LPs, each with its own musical
character, trajectory and narrative. Marillion’s best-selling Misplaced Childhood
album is just another example of that particular affordance of vinyl LP. In other
words, the vinyl, which must be flipped at the end of each playing side, commands
attention and sensitises listeners to both overall structure and details of a record. In
this context it is also worth considering Miles Davis’s album, Kind of Blue. Anyone
familiar with the album can recall a poignant effect achieved by having the album’s
melancholy highlight track ‘Blue in green’ in the middle of the album, but also at
the end of the first side. The artistic and commercial success of such albums sug-
gests that this is a culturally valued way of crafting and receiving the musical
performance which aspires to be more than mere entertainment. It invites one to
ritualise and celebrate the act of listening. It can effectively compel one to focus on
minutiae of composition and thus delve deeper into carefully delimited structures
of LP. Indeed, the slogan used by Rhino Records in their ‘RhinoVinyl’ series of
classic album reissues, is that vinyl affords listening to ‘music the way it was meant
to be heard. One side at a time’. Importantly, these aspects of the vinyl as an
attention-riveting medium and awe-inspiring artistic message are explicitly appre-
ciated by the youngest groups of contemporary consumers (Maguadda, 2011: 29),
not just those who grew up with records as the medium.
In addition to this set of features, buying the vinyl record is literally and figura-
tively a package deal. The LP format’s material packaging is relevant for under-
standing its reported aura. In the case of Abbey Road, for example, the cover image
is extremely well known; in fact, it might be considered one of the iconic images in
Bartmanski and Woodward 9

popular culture, and is recreated and referenced by tourists and other media alike.
The obvious attraction of vinyl in this context is the large size of the photo on the
LP record cover, about 500% larger than a CD cover, let alone the small accom-
panying images included in such applications as iTunes. The scaled-up visual and
material dimensions of the vinyl package also lend themselves to references to
record covers as artworks in their own right. Many books on popular culture
have been devoted to reproducing ‘the best album cover art’. A notable example
are the celebrated vinyl record covers designed for Factory Records, reprinted in a
book entitled Factory Records: The Complete Graphic Album (Robertson, 2007), to
highlight the artistic legacy of Factory’s futuristic record covers. Similar books of
classic record covers exist for important labels such as ECM, Blue Note and
Prestige.
But the most recent vinyl renaissance seems to be going well beyond just the
scale of the cover art as a way of giving sensual expression to the materiality of
vinyl. Recent new and re-releases incorporate a range of other special material
features which play up the attractions of buying vinyl, relative to CDs and digital
downloads. First is the increasingly frequent use of the heavy vinyl pressing.
Standard vinyl releases have been pressed on 140 gram vinyl. Heavier pressings –
frequently 180 gram pressings, but sometimes 200 or even 220 grams – are more
durable and resistant to warping and are sometimes advertised to buyers as
‘Audiophile vinyl’, though for the non-audiophile buyer the heavier editions
have a pleasing heavyweight feel suggesting the importance of the musical content
and increasing the longevity and collectability of one’s purchase. Other ways of
promoting the distinctiveness of vinyl as a listening format include the use of col-
oured vinyl (though this idea has been around for a long time, it seems more
popular in recent times as a way of promoting the collectability of vinyl). To use
again Miles Davis’s iconic oeuvre as an example, the 50th Anniversary Edition of
Kind of Blue released in 2009 contains a transparent blue 180 gram vinyl record,
plus exquisitely printed pictures and a richly illustrated, hard cover book about the
cultural significance and production of the album. Finally, while music buyers will
pay 100% more for a new release vinyl album compared to a download, many new
vinyl releases come packaged with a download voucher for the complete album,
and sometimes more special features like a cover art poster (as in re-releases of the
well-known photographic record covers for the band Roxy Music). Though a
buyer might pay a little over twice the price for a vinyl record than a digital
download, with the vinyl they not only get a download voucher, but also the
pleasure of possessing a large, artistic cover art sleeve. The latter quality may
play a particularly critical role for the consumers of remix EPs (Extended Play)
that rarely if ever contain download vouchers but happen to come in beautifully
crafted sleeves – think again about Roxy Music’s Remix # 01, exquisitely packaged
in a well-designed gatefold sleeve.
In short, the LP format appears to be a special, often carefully curated object. It
can help distinguish a ‘true music lover’ (Fernando, 2012), partly because it con-
veys a sense of higher value and often provides rich information disclosing the
10 Journal of Consumer Culture 15(1)

depth of preparation behind the recording. This is particularly though not exclu-
sively true of classic jazz records. Today their current reissues stick to the old
convention and reprint all the information plus original liner notes. Influential
legendary producers and avid collectors such as Madlib, Ron Trent and DJ
Shadow share overt appreciation for these aspects of the medium. Madlib lends
his authority to it, admitting that:

. . . art is as important as the music, to be honest. I don’t just download things. I want
to know who played on a record, who produced it, where it was made . . . This stuff is
important to me and always has been (Madlib, in Felmann, 2012: 76).

Trent points out the same aspect, saying:

I was immersed in a lot of music on the DJ front. These guys were always buying
records . . . When I was coming up, we tried to study what it was all about instead of
getting what we call the ‘newscaster version’. If you’re going to know something, know
it. Try to be the best at it because you’re carrying a legacy that’s rich (Trent, 2007).

Shadow explicitly emphasises the haptic satisfaction that records provide: ‘Aside
from the fact the music was everything to me, it satisfied multiple dimensions. It
was tactile in the way that comic books are tactile. And yet they spoke to you
sonically as well’ (Shadow, in Brewster and Broughton, 2010: 226).
Last but not least, for the consumers of contemporary releases the sense of
acquiring the fullest format is greater than ever because ‘practically all vinyl rec-
ords today are small-batch boutique pressings. There are limited editions, collector
editions, audiophile editions and more’ (Furchgott, 2012). In other words, it is the
fact that the vinyl is not anymore, and will never be the standard mainstream
medium which facilitates the rekindling of its cultural message. Instead of com-
pletely displacing the analogue medium, the digital technologies helped recontex-
tualise it (Sterne, 2012). Specifically, they created the general cultural situation in
which the analogue record is not merely the prime carrier of continuous ‘natural’
sound but can be marketed as a customised aesthetic object. As artist Christian
Marclay recalls:

. . . coming from Switzerland to the United States in the 1970s, I noticed that change in
attitudes towards objects. I would see records on the streets, in the gutter. I would see
thousands of records in thrift shops that nobody wanted, that nobody cared about
(Marclay, in Cox and Warner, 2004: 345).

The popular attitude is shifting again now. The current releases are seldom mass
scale and often numbered by hand. The old records that once avoided physical
destruction but may now be threatened by cultural oblivion are in a position to be
rediscovered as valuable works of art. Indeed, in addition to markets for new vinyl,
or new vinyl re-releases of classic or important albums, vinyl remains important in
Bartmanski and Woodward 11

second hand markets. Absolutely in contrast to the digital format where music files
can be endlessly cloned, each vinyl rests on its relative rarity as a pressing and its
material capacity to have history, and to be ‘possessed’, owned, touched, and cared
for. In a sense, its being a ‘copy’ does not deprive it of a sense of uniqueness. As a
matter of fact, the whole meaning of ‘copy’ changes once different media get
juxtaposed in the market, each capable of being technically reproduced but with
a dissimilar set of other material properties.
Finally, at the market’s top end, vinyl makes the promise of being an invest-
ment, or a collectable object. In collectors’ markets, first pressings of important
albums can cost many thousands, original vinyl releases from popular artists from
the past few decades can cost hundreds, and special cuttings, like DMM1 technol-
ogy, offer unique sonic qualities for slightly higher prices. Some albums appeared
only in limited series or have never been reprinted; a circumstance which increases
their value as something ‘hard to get’, an increasingly valuable quality in the con-
text of the digitalised market saturated with ubiquitous and perfectly transferable
files. The New Musical Express music magazine recently listed the top 20 vinyl
releases, with an original pressing of The Quarrymen (featuring members of The
Beatles, before they became The Beatles) estimated to be valued at £100,000, while
The Sex Pistols’ ‘God save the Queen’ single is estimated at £8000. Independent
contemporary artists often release their music in limited run vinyl format and
systematically resist reprinting even when sales prospects seem good, in order to
give their records special value. The LPs of such electronic acts as Kruder and
Dorfmeister or Boards of Canada are illustrative cases in point. For example, in the
decade since the original release of the latter’s Geogaddi album via the independent
British label Warp, there has been no reissue and today one has to pay for it
anything between E100 and E400. The same is true of the former’s remixing classic,
four-vinyl set The K&D Sessions from 1998, published by Berlin-based ‘Studio!K7’.
In short, much of the remarketisation or reselling of vinyl depends on matters of
context and quality. Part of the excitement, and enchantment in the vinyl market is
in the chase for collectibles, colloquially known as ‘crate digging’. The digger never
knows what they might find and at what prices it might be offered. This is a type of
serendipitous urban archaeology, akin to shopping for second hand clothes or old
furniture. The cultural value added resides precisely in rarity and serendipity fac-
tors, both hardly available in the experience of the internet surfers. Of course,
today the second hand markets for vinyl are supported by internet markets and
increasingly by mobile phone applications such as ‘Vinyl District’ and ‘iCrates’.
This merging of the two spheres illustrates the point of the internet creating not
simply a virtual but augmented reality. At the same time, however, contemporary
independent labels, such as Clone Records from Rotterdam, release store-only-
series of their vinyls. It is also the case that shops usually sell unique vinyls at
lower prices than online markets based on such all-containing websites as Discogs.
For example, one of the authors has recently bought two original and well pre-
served copies of The K&D Sessions in London and Vienna, each below E100. Miles
Davis’s rare European concert performance LP Double Image was priced at E90
12 Journal of Consumer Culture 15(1)

online (as of May 2012 only one copy in nearly perfect condition was available),
whereas an excellent copy of it could be purchased for E40 at the same time in one
of the biggest second hand vinyl stores in Frankfurt. Last but not least, store-based
buying enables one to carefully inspect a vinyl’s condition in person and play it.
Because searching for tunes online and downloading of whole albums is effort-
less and thus potentially unlimited, it became a standard, mundane purchasing
practice. With internet-based consumption, quantity tends to override the quality
of the acquired material. By contrast, vinyl encourages consumption based on the
modern vision less is more. As a physical product it can also sustain record stores
that function as meeting points for various taste communities in which ideas and
information are exchanged, and professional and personal connections forged.
Record stores serve, in turn, as cultural vehicles for genre classification.
Especially the independent venues with electronic music tend to rely on label-
and style-related ordering even if the owners and communities they supply are
aware that today’s music landscape dissolves strict borders and thus becomes
‘post-categorical’ (Dax, 2012: 3). Together with hip hop culture, it was precisely
this broadly conceived electronic dance social milieu that established both the
record store and the club as key cultural venues in the urban landscape of the
1990s, despite the reign of CD and subsequent emergence of cheap portable digital
players. DJs were the gatekeepers of these two taste communities that not only
greatly contributed to vinyl’s cultural and commercial lasting when the mainstream
music industry gave up on the format, but also endowed it with the meanings of
avant-garde artistry and alternative coolness. In other words, nostalgic collectio-
neering and sophisticated audiophile use of 33 rpm LPs alone could not generate a
cultural myth at a scale observable today. Therefore, one has to pay attention to
the meanings of the vinyl formats utilised by these communities: seven- and 12-inch
45 rpm singles. This leads us to the second dimension of vinyl’s cultural biography.

Revolutions of the single, sampling and electronic music scenes

Vinyl’s material properties meant two things crucial for the club scene: (1) DJs
could manipulate the medium manually; they could literally see the tracks, their
structure reflected in the physical micro-architecture of the groove; it was also
relatively easy to master the basic procedures of sound manipulation, the feature
that makes the analogue technology straightforward and fully ‘transparent’ and is
often mentioned as such, especially compared with the cutting-edge digital devices
(Brewster and Broughton, 2010: 433; Marclay and Tone, 2004: 346). (2) The high
fidelity of the analogue medium and the fact that all the music recorded before the
1980s was available in this format rendered it a cultural archive of musical samples
for all style-conscious and ambitious producers. Both dimensions enabled vinyl-
collecting DJs to move beyond the confines of simple consumption and becoming
prosumers, proactive or producing consumers.
Of course, this attractive potential of the medium was envisaged much earlier,
first by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy in his early 1920s texts and then by John Cage’s
Bartmanski and Woodward 13

experiments with phonographs in the 1930s. Hip hop and house DJs turned theory
and experimentation into a regular entertainment practice and gradually elevated it
to the level of art in its own right. The subsequent explosion of house and techno
scenes meant that while ‘in the 1980s everybody wanted to be a guitar player, in the
1990s everybody wanted to be a DJ’ (Marclay and Tone, 2004: 346). These com-
munities epitomised the hedonistic cool and often the anti-system alternative. For
them the turntable became an instrument (Shapiro, 2002), and records were at the
centre of the game that offered a way of resisting the system and asserting personal
agency (Haynes, in Maguadda, 2011: 28). Although even the best DJs tend to be
modest and cautious when asked about the artistic status of what they do, they and
their audiences treated DJing – and continue to do so – as a ‘real creative expres-
sion’ (Brewster and Broughton, 2010: 436).
As far as the first material aspect of the analogue technology is concerned, it
gave rise to the now omnipresent aesthetics of scratching, backspinning, cutting,
editing (Borschke, 2011) and mixing first developed by hip hop DJs such as
Grandmaster Flash. In the wake of their growing recognition as true pioneers,
mixing matured as a skill and in the 1990s turntablism emerged as genre with its
own iconic figures such as DJ Q-Bert or DJ Shadow. Turntablism brought special
attention to the vinyl medium, and in the hands of hip hop prosumers delivered a
post-modern message that ‘it is not so much what you say that matters, but how
you say it’ (Shapiro, 2002: 164). Of course, specific high quality devices connected
to this practice, such as Technics SL-1200MK2 turntable and mixers, were needed
and in time became iconic objects themselves. This constellation of products
enabled whole generations of professional DJs and amateur enthusiasts to create
dance sets by successively or simultaneously connecting many records to each other
and citing them within each other. It allowed producers like DJ Spooky to say:
‘give me two turntables, and I’ll make you a universe’ (Miller, 2004: 127), a clear
pun on John Cage’s words that uncannily anticipated the techno culture: ‘given
four phonographs we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor,
wind, heartbeat and landslide’ (Cage, in Shapiro, 2002: 164).
The entire cultural universe that indeed grew out of early hip hop and dance
scenes is unthinkable without the 45 rpm vinyl single. The Jamaican culture of
sound systems was an early precursor of this format, and the birth of the entire
influential genre of dub music is traceable to ‘the existence of an instrumental side,
called version, on the B-side of single recordings, which became both a tradition
and a necessity for sound systems’ (Daynes, 2010: 33). All genres of contemporary
electronic club music thrived on such singles with various remixes on both sides
because they enabled the fulfilment of the key demand of dance – make the music
last, keep the beat going uninterruptedly all night long. In short, ‘the reappropria-
tion of the record as a mass consumer product in the framework of performance
first of all meant the possibility of prolonging a piece on both sides of a 45 by
making use of two different versions’ (During, 2003: 48). Thereafter, a distinct taste
for longer pieces developed, such that would not be supported by commercial radio
stations. Just as one side of the LP album allowed musicians to produce suite-based
14 Journal of Consumer Culture 15(1)

concept albums, so did the single format contribute to freer, more expansive aes-
thetic forms that expressed not only specific musical preferences but ultimately a
series of attitudes. In this context it is important to remember that ‘disco, hip hop
and reggae, house, techno and drum & bass, were all created by DJs, by the ones
who were brave enough to try something weird and extreme and different’
(Brewster and Broughton, 2010: 5). As these new aesthetic sensibilities became
more popular, the whole club-based dance culture centered around vinyl-playing
DJs morphed into a truly transnational network (Bull and Back, 2005: 13) which
increased global visibility of the vinyl and reinscribed cities like Chicago, Detroit,
New York, London, Manchester and Berlin within the map of underground music.
This process was also aided by the DJs/collectors like John Peel and Gilles Peterson
who championed a broad range of avant-garde and obscure dance tunes in their
radio shows. In time it became possible to associate the vinyl with such cultural
tropes as independence, cosmopolitanism and hipness that these urban scenes ini-
tially exemplified. It was under all those cultural conditions that the vinyl single
ceased to be a mere mass commodity of the recording business and assumed quasi-
totemic qualities, often embedded in legendary venues like famous club and record
stores, and connected with effervescent rituals – official and illegal parties. Vinyl
offered not only a ‘warm’ sophisticated sound, but also a world of looks, haptics
and pragmatics that signified the hip, the authentic, the alternative. Just looking at
the subtitles of the now classic compilation series Hi:Fidelity Lounge of famous
Chicago-based house label Guidance Recordings offers a glimpse into these mean-
ings: Subterranean Soundtracks, Licensed to Chill, Cosmopolitan Grooves.
The second aspect we distinguished above, i.e. analogue records being a special
musical library, shows both how two different technologies can coexist and that to
a certain extent they support each other. In particular, the extant stock of analogue
records is a special cultural archive that became especially consequential for music
development when new electronic devices, like samplers introduced in the 1980s,
enabled deeper integration of the existing records to music production (Borschke,
2011; Gitelman, 2004). Because quite a few singles contain material that has never
been released digitally, they constitute the treasure trove of modern musical trad-
ition. Once the medium’s message is retrieved, converted and played with, those
vinyl records’ value of privileged sound files becomes even more pronounced. The
cutting-edge electronic producers like Amon Tobin, who in the mid 1990s began to
systematically sample analogue sources, may have violated copyrights, but they
had deep respect for the content and the medium. Their creative practice revolu-
tionised the pop aesthetics and prevalent understandings of authorship in art.
Crucially, they would always release their works on vinyl through small independ-
ent labels, often only as 45 rpm singles. As listeners, they seem to have been
inspired by artists like John Cage who is reported to have said: ‘What people
ultimately have to learn is to use records not as music but as records’ (Cage,
cited in Fischer, 2005: 12). As producers, they helped re-establish the vinyl
record not only as a legitimate but an authentic medium essential for the most
advanced musical experimentation, and they did that at a time when hardly anyone
Bartmanski and Woodward 15

in the mainstream seemed to believe in it any more. Even a cursory examination of

a few key records created within these scenes offers an understanding of how vinyl
has become more than just another mass product or an obsolete format.
Consider first Endtroducing by DJ Shadow, released in 1996. It is regarded as a
touchstone of sampled music. The entire double album is about weaving together
various styles, beats and snippets of melodies derived from other records and turn-
ing them into a musical narrative that – in the words of DJ Shadow himself
included in the liner notes of this album – ‘reflects a lifetime of vinyl culture’.
The sleeve features a large scale picture of the artist browsing through the stacks
of seven-inch records. Amon Tobin’s seminal debut album Bricolage, released a
year after Endtroducing, provides a definition of the title term and quotes Claude
Levi-Strauss on the back cover to express the idea of sampling. Here the seemingly
obsolete vinyl sat at the very centre of the postmodern revolution in music.
Although such albums played the important role of cultural landmarks in the
electronic music and hip hop scenes, it was the single that sustained these scenes
and their specificity on a regular basis. A single’s B-side often contained ‘exclusive’
tracks, unavailable elsewhere. Some of them inspired whole genres of electronic
music, for example drum’n’bass and breakbeat derived from the beat structure of
Amen, Brother by the Winstons. The masters of these new styles, like LTJ Bukem,
elevated them to the status of late modern classics. They used singles as a primary
format and turned them into self-standing DJ-friendly releases that included what
the jazzmen would call alternate takes: reworks, remixes and special tracks.
Similarly, 12-inch EPs became the preferable concise format for the most important
visionary electronic producers, for example Autechre. To emphasize the artistic
worth of these short forms and underscore their sonic and temporal minimalism,
some newer independent electronic labels like ‘Spectral’ or ‘Apple Pips’ package
their regular output in imaginative sleeves. In this sense they confirm (and conform
to) the vinyl record’s traditional reputation as auratic artwork, even as they rede-
fine the meaning of music itself. Systematically collecting and analysing these vinyls
avails one of access to the sonic and visual sensibilities of entire urban scenes that
revolutionised late modern western culture.
Today, the first pressings of many singles released in the 1990s through labels
like Good Looking Records, Metalheadz, Prescription, Warp, or Ninja Tune have
reached iconic status and some happen to be more expensive than many rock and
pop LPs. To be able to dig in the vaults of legendary labels such as Blue Note or
Verve and compile or remix some of their highlights became a ‘great honour’ for
new producers, and when they did, like Jazzanova and Thievery Corporation for
the two iconic labels respectively, they explicitly defined their work as paying
homage to classic artists and original vinyl singles. Symptomatically, Thievery
Corporation’s first LP released in 1996 features a blurred closeup photo of a
tone arm on a vinyl and is entitled Sounds from the Thievery hi-fi. Over the years
it has become a classic statement of electronic chill out music, never reprinted,
worth at least E50 when in mint condition in the country of its original release –
Germany.
16 Journal of Consumer Culture 15(1)

Last but not least, all vinyl-based genres that emerged in the 1980s and refined
their voices in the 1990s played, and continue to play, an important role as the
cultural and political other to digitalisation and corporate mass production. While
vinyl is nowadays the most expensive format to purchase, it is interpreted as the
most critical and politically resistant format. It is associated with the superlative,
and often anti-systemic cultural qualities without absorbing the negative connota-
tions typically attached to some of them. It is exclusive but not elitist, sophisticated
but not snobbish, traditional but not conservative, alternative but not pretentious.
It is being favourably compared to the mainstream digital format which now grad-
ually begins to be seen as being tied to big business and mega brands, which some
consumers see as restrictive, or even exploitative and unbearably mainstream.
This social aspect is not to be understated, and combined with all aforemen-
tioned material factors it makes the now comparably cumbersome 12-inch format
an iconically potent medium, indeed the key signifier of an entire culture and its
attitudes. In an interview with the internet music site ‘Pitchfork’, co-owner of the
emblematic German ‘Kompakt’ label Michael Mayer reflected on the vinyl culture
that Kompakt cultivated:

There are lots of DJs who still want to play vinyl, even if they buy the vinyl and
digitalize it and play .wav files. I don’t think it’s going to die completely. It’s such a
beautiful culture that’s running for such a long time, I don’t think it’s going to stop
(Mayer, in Plagenhoef, 2009).

Discussion
Performativity of the vinyl
One of the fundamental outcomes of the innovations in the last few decades within
consumer studies, material culture studies and sociological studies of consumption
has been a radical revisioning of theories of the commodity. In its conceptualisa-
tion of modernity, sociology in particular has always reserved a special place for
the commodity, as either a material container of economically-driven processes of
alienation, exploitation and disenchantment, or a status-based, aesthetic symbol of
exclusivity and cultural superiority (Miller, 1987; Slater, 1997). While the postmod-
ern and cultural turn in social theory succeeded in emphasising matters of lifestyle,
pleasure, symbolic challenge and desire as elemental to commodity engagements
(Featherstone, 1991), it was culturally and anthropologically inspired work within
recent material culture studies and interpretive consumer studies which has made
the greatest advances in rethinking the commodity (Belk et al., 1989; Douglas and
Isherwood, 1979; Holt, 2004; Miller, 1987; Woodward, 2007, 2012). As the classical
statements in economic anthropology have reminded us, the economic activities of
exchange and consumption actually constitute social bonds and the circulation of
cultural ideals (Douglas and Isherwood, 1979; Malinowski, 1961; Mauss, 1967;
Bartmanski and Woodward 17

Sahlins, 1974). What is valued, exchanged and used are not just ‘commodities’, but
material containers of social meanings. From a cultural point of view, what we call
‘the economy’ is fundamentally a networked system of symbolic exchange, a system
organised for the construction and exchange of totems (Benzecry, 2008), rather
than merely a field of social action defined by models of instrumental rationality
and commercial contract.
This cultural model of markets and commodities requires a rather more
fluid and processual theory of the commodity. Reiterating some basic principles
of classical works in cultural anthropology, one of the important insights of recent
conceptualisations of material culture studies has been the idea that commodity
objects have ‘social lives’ (Appadurai, 1986) or ‘biographies’ (Kopytoff, 1986).
According to these conceptions, objects have social trajectories whereby their
meanings for different groups of consumers change over time and space. Objects
have an inherently mobile, mutable quality and are constructed both by
their materiality and by stories, myths and their production and reception in par-
ticular contexts (Harre, 2002; Pels et al., 2002). Moreover, as things of value,
commodities must be persistently reconstructed via exchange, use and purchase
(Lash and Lury, 2007). Such a constellation of meaning-making processes is dis-
cernible in relation to the vinyl record, historically and in the context of contem-
porary settings, and indeed explaining this context is the general task we set
ourselves in this paper.

The iconicity of vinyl

If we agree that there is more to objects than commodity status, we thereby
acknowledge that their value is culturally constructed and variable relative to spe-
cific social carriers. Objects such as music records matter not only in an immediate
utilitarian way, so to speak by themselves, but also because they are capable of
generating the cultural frame of use and appreciation which then always mediates
their presence and feeds back to the experience of actual object-related practices.
There are certain categories of objects that epitomise this phenomenon more
than others. Their features transfix whole social audiences and are in turn endowed
by them with worth that exhibits a surplus of meaning, not unlike the one Paul
Ricouer talks about in his theory of text (Ricoeur, 1971). As layers of meanings
accrue to such objects over time, a semiotic spiral is launched. As a result, in
addition to all its ostensible functions the object assumes the role of iconic signifier;
it ceases to be a mere noun and becomes an agent of adverbial and adjectival
assessments. It stands for the entire class of experiential qualities and – in special
cases – for lifestyle-defining practices. This means that when it comes to investigat-
ing the social trajectories of the objects that acquire such special significance we
encounter neither instances of artistic epiphany nor commodity fetishism but face
instead complex effects of collective enchantment whose meanings transcend the
boundaries of purely aesthetic or narrowly utilitarian engagement with reality. We
have tried to show that the vinyl record is such an object.
18 Journal of Consumer Culture 15(1)

A broad conceptual framework that enables one to understand the vinyl in this
special cultural capacity has emerged recently out of the so-called iconic turn
(Boehm, 1994, 2001). It found a sociological expression in the theory of iconicity
sketched by Jeffrey C Alexander in several articles (2008a, 2008b, 2010). According
to Alexander, the objects endowed with the symbolic power adumbrated above are
cultural icons. The ‘iconic’ does not denote the strictly semiotic qualifier Charles
Peirce talks about, nor the one commonly employed in everyday discourses with
reference to the epitome of something. Rather, Alexander points to the more gen-
eral and more profound social role of cultural icons as symbolic condensations
(Freud) and totemic representations (Durkheim) associated with the processes of
identity formation and non-verbal channels of meaning-production. Being iconic is
a social affordance. Alexander emphasises, however, that neither Freud nor
Durkheim ever offered a systematic account of how icons work in this capacity
within modern societies. It is Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura that brings us
closer to understanding how the so-conceived icons work.
However, Benjamin himself added a series of rather restrictive conceptual quali-
fications to the generic notion of aura he promoted. According to him aura denotes
‘the associations which tend to cluster around the object of a perception’
(Benjamin, 1968: 186). He deepened this understanding when he wrote: ‘To per-
ceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at
us in return’ (Benjamin, 1968: 188). This metaphor of the reciprocated gaze that
transfixes subjects and is capable of constituting social audiences is at the core of
the contemporary notion of iconicity developed and applied by such art historians
as Hans Belting (2005, 2012) or Horst Bredekamp (2010). Yet, for Benjamin only
unique objects could count as auratic. An object’s aura was ‘derived from its
uniqueness’ (Benjamin, 2008: 24) and the status of uniqueness was defined by the
presence of all the qualities of an object that are ‘transmissible in it from its origin
on’ (Benjamin, 2008: 22). In this scheme, no ‘copies’ mattered. As a result,
Benjamin would deny the existence of auratic potential in photographs or phono-
graphic records. Benjamin believed that the uniqueness – and thus aura of an
object – is strictly dependent on the unity of creative intentionality, specific time
and particular place recognisable in the object. Applied by Benjamin mainly to art,
this conception presumably ‘extends far beyond its realm’ (Benjamin, 2008: 22).
But he does not prove this contention sociologically. We argue that it would be
hard to prove it for two reasons: (1) his conception of uniqueness is too rigid, (2) the
implied understanding of ‘copy’ is not nuanced enough to account for the varie-
gated forms we observe today.
Of course, it is a benefit of late modern hindsight to understand this double
point. ‘With electronic music, the artwork moves from the era of ‘‘technical repro-
ducibility’’ to the era of the digital hyper-reproducibility – to an extent that even
Benjamin himself might not have dared to imagine’ (Van Assche, 2003: 10). On the
other hand, Benjamin could have realised it, had he limited his ideological com-
mitments and with it suspended his intellectual disbelief. We argue that he missed it
because he employed the notion of aura chiefly to disavow what he viewed as
Bartmanski and Woodward 19

modern disenchantment whose symptoms included the loss of aura as absolute

uniqueness. Here his intention was mainly normative, not analytic. Empirically,
the story of vinyl we narrated illustrates the limitations of his approach, and under-
scores the capacity of objects to be ‘compressed performances’ that reveal the
‘uncontemporaneous’ nature of cultural history advocated by another German
cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer (Pinney, 2005: 266–268). Yet – by the same
token – it suggests unexpected usefulness for the generic notion of aura
Benjamin helped bring to scholarly attention. The trick is to use the concept in
an analytic, not normative manner, and to make it more flexible. One can achieve it
in two theoretical steps. First, replacing uniqueness with other categories such as
relative rarity dislodges the concept of aura from its restrictive denotative structure.
Second, understanding aura as relational and multidimensional, not just an intrin-
sic quality, helps grasp the iconic status of ‘mechanically reproduced’ objects that
Benjamin deemed improbable.
This research agenda is supported by parallel studies in marketing and other
social sciences that utilise the notion of cultural iconicity (e.g. Bartmanski, 2011,
2012; Holt, 2004, 2006; Jencks, 2005; Kravets and Örge, 2010; Sklair, 2010;
Woodward and Ellison, 2012). Taken together these perspectives allow us not
only to understand vinyl as a revived commodity but also to explain its ascendancy
to the status of auratic cultural icon which sums up an important aspect of late
modernity – the search for authenticity and meaning through the heavily mediated,
digitalised and commodified world.

Hearing music heritage and authenticity on vinyl

One of the powerful capacities of the vinyl record is its ability to point to important
referents in pop music history and heritage, while retaining a credible sense of being
part of the cultural underground, cool and cutting-edge. In part, this facet relates
the vinyl record to desires for particular modes of music listening (Bull, 2002;
Hennion, 2001) which privilege the warmth and feel that vinyl is perceived to
offer. In this sense, we must locate vinyl as a material signifier of a special type
of listening practice that finds in the vinyl format qualities such as intimacy,
warmth, authenticity and charisma (Yochim and Biddinger, 2008). The rituals of
preparing for vinyl listening, the physical characteristics of the record, and the act
of playing the vinyl itself, make one more conscious of the medium’s presence and
the specific aesthetics of sound reproduction, not only in terms of audible proper-
ties of music but also visual impressions of the medium and the equipment that
‘reads’ it.
Thus, the analogue format offers an experience that stands in direct contrast to
listening practices in other formats. Precisely because it is not the only, or main,
format anymore, its characteristics become both more legible and more unique. It
is also connected to a series of practices which help to consecrate vinyl as affording
and encouraging sacred listening experiences: caring for the vinyl in order to pro-
tect and preserve its analogue qualities, cleaning the disc, monitoring the turntable
20 Journal of Consumer Culture 15(1)

and ensuring its mechanical integrity, or paying attention to care of the record
cover. These routinal practices of preparation and care mean that vinyl listening
actually requires more work and care than other formats, though this is not inter-
preted so simply as ‘work’, but as practices of care, craft (Campbell, 2005) and
tendering that links to embodied, emotional connections to listening practices.
Moreover, as Yochim and Biddinger (2008: 190) suggest, these types of care prac-
tices invest vinyl with human qualities. Undoubtedly, the fact that the analogue
medium wears out in the process of using it creates a rather clear metonymic
reference to the fundamental experience of human life.
Because of its figuring as the sonically perfected, technologically hegemonic
format for music listening up to the period of the late 1980s, the vinyl record
has an advantage of being perceived as the ‘classic’, ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ format
for certain, if not most types of music listening experiences (Yochim and Biddinger,
2008). For example, listeners who value high fidelity sound reproduction and/or
authentic engagements with music heritage may consider that the ‘best’ way to hear
an early album of The Rolling Stones or Miles Davis is via the format for which it
was prepared and on which it was originally released – the vinyl LP. These artists
and their oeuvre are coded as essential parts of the modern music canon.
Importantly, serious listeners commit to the vinyl format as the preferred way of
hearing and understanding – rather than merely listening to – these heritage acts.
Sound and style, not just melody, are at stake.
Of course, these listeners can be divided between those collectors, audiophiles,
DJs and enthusiasts who search out the various editions of the vinyl recording –
from the first or rare pressing and never played, to faded and scratched second
hand editions, to the fresh and glossy, heavy vinyl reissues and remix versions.
What remains constant is a kind of aesthetic experience afforded by the medium
and the performative logic of the LP’s two sides. To grasp the meanings of these
qualities first made available by the vinyl LP, consider the following statement
about one of the most iconic modern albums ever produced, Miles Davis’s Kind
of Blue:

[it] would not have been possible if the LP did not exist. It was jazz conceived for the
record album, not only because of the playing times of the tunes but also because how
the album creates an overall mood (Early, 2008: 33).

The vinyl record paved the way for the emergence of what came to be called the
concept album, and its playing mode fitted both the more expansive strategies of
the creators and the focused attention span of the public.
This association of vinyl with canonical musical performances is expressed in the
current patterns of vinyl production, especially in the reissue of classic albums in
rock, indie and jazz genres. Catalogues such as Universal Records’ ‘Back to Black’
series reissue important and popular albums in the rock and pop canon on high
quality vinyl pressings, and the Blue Note jazz label reissues canonical albums by
artists such as John Coltrane and Miles Davis on heavy 180 gram vinyl formats.
Bartmanski and Woodward 21

The record label ‘4 Men With Beards’, self-described as ‘one of the pre-eminent
vinyl reissue labels in the world’, is another example. A simple analysis of their
online catalogue shows a variety of key vinyl reissues by artists who are either
important in the canon of alternative rock, such as The Velvet Underground, Iggy
Pop, Wire and Bauhaus, or essential soul and jazz artists like Nina Simone, Aretha
Franklin, Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock. This is a finely curated catalogue of
reissues. The case of 4 Men with Beards is significant because, for the most part, its
releases are not focused on the most celebrated albums by these artists, such as
Davis’ Kind of Blue, Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melodie Nelson, or any of Dylan’s
celebrated first clutch of LP records. While major labels and the public retain an
interest in these iconic, relatively high-selling vinyl reissues, 4 Men With Beards
offers the rare and lesser known releases from these artists, for example the latest
reissue of Miles Davis’s 1970s concert performances Pangaea and Dark Magus. In
this sense, they encourage the use of vinyl as a way to engage with the complete and
hard to find canon of ‘important’ music by key artists of earlier, often culturally
formative modern eras.
A further distinct affordance of vinyl in this regard is that it gives larger scale,
tactile material expression to aspects of the record’s production, playing and art-
work. Unlike digital downloads (which sometimes have a virtual book accompani-
ment) the vinyl album encourages an emphasis on the heritage aspects of listening
by making its production and playing directly visible and ‘to hand’ to be read and
felt. This makes vinyl as a whole a kind of palpable, durable work of art, i.e. an
important companion for ritualised aesthetic practices. While digital listening
favours lightness, mobility and ease of transfer, and the CD is popularly held to
erase the music’s ‘warmth’ and also to disrupt the notion of the two-sided LP, vinyl
is the slow food equivalent of music listening practices. Precisely because vinyl does
not lend itself to portability but invites special attention, it can function as a more
demanding, ‘organic’ and thus sophisticated and reflective medium. Indeed, there
are current urban venues that combine vinyl record store with rustic delicatessen,
like the Vienna-based shop called Tongues. Vinyl’s tangible material features make
it durable in an intuitive sense but they are also prone to acquire traces of use in
time which endows them with aura unavailable for digital copies. Together with
analogue sound qualities vinyl may also mean a more immersive experience,
whereby one can feel closer to the music or at least approach the conditions of
reception that the producers of music themselves enjoy when they create their
work.

Conclusion
The vinyl record is a powerful cultural object because of its semiotic mutability; its
ability to materialise a flexible range of meanings for its various audiences, with
each pointing to a basic culture structure which is anchored by notions of heritage,
authenticity and coolness. Vinyl is identified by different listening communities to
draw upon and signify different – to some degree unique and in some cases
22 Journal of Consumer Culture 15(1)

contradictory – cultural connotations. In general, we have argued that vinyl has

this capacity because it concretises and points to various meaningful, powerful
historical and cultural representations and narratives, and because it offers particu-
lar materially afforded qualities of engagement. Our interpretive analysis of vinyl as
an auratic commodity has rested on thick description of cultural texts and narra-
tives as well as some of its material properties, though it should be clear that a
comprehensive and much larger study of vinyl would need to encompass questions
such as the material entanglements with turntables; matters of purchase, storage,
care and collection; record stores and vinyl scenes; second hand markets and
processes of de-commodification and re-commodification; and matters related to
the pressing and production of vinyl.
We have shown that in the first instance, vinyl is an object which crystallises and
refers to the heritage of the pop and rock musical canon. The fact that important
albums in this canon were originally recorded for and listened to on vinyl gives the
analogue format an authenticity and cachet for listeners cultivating and/or dis-
covering the heritage of rock and pop. But, paradoxically, when vinyl was all
but killed off by the compact disc during the 1990s, its relevance to vital, cut-
ting-edge musical and youth cultures was maintained by its centrality to dance,
electronic and hip hop listening cultures, where it was an enduringly relevant
format for the performative and collective listening practices these cultures are
based upon. Moreover, playing vinyl encourages various ritualistic engagements:
localised immobile and immersive listening, careful selection and visually arresting
‘spinning’ performed by DJs. This engagement with ritual renders vinyl a carrier of
deeper aesthetic and political meanings, an antidote to the hegemony of digital
listening cultures’ reliance on multinational conglomerates which provide the
homogenous platform and means for music listening.
Vinyl as a commodity materialises paradoxical cultural values. Ironically, its
fragility and proneness to damage is reinterpreted as a strength endowed with
human qualities, compared to digital formats which are endlessly reproducible
and deletable at a keyboard stroke. As a material container of sounds, vinyl con-
stantly cycles through stages of commoditisation, decommodification and recom-
modification via second hand markets, which are now more than ever enabled
through online means. Vinyl exists relationally with scenes and spaces, energised
by particular myths of cities, labels, clubs and record stores. We demonstrate that
the vinyl record encapsulates a cluster of interconnected sentiments that help define
its contemporary aesthetic consciousness. In this capacity it stabilises a series of
currently important binary codings, specifically the reference of the real vis-à-vis
the virtual, sentimental vs. strategic, ritual vs. convenient, exceptional vs. regular,
etc. It helps embody and thus concretise the notoriously elusive collective repre-
sentations such as coolness, hipness and alternative. Though its commercial resur-
gence is small in absolute terms, the vinyl record is one of the key modern cultural
commodities on which these loose and elusive cultural properties are fixed and
stabilised. In short, the vinyl record is a perfect example of how a mechanically
reproducible product can become an iconic signifier full of references. It shows that
Bartmanski and Woodward 23

aura of authenticity is not reducible to any one notion of originality or uniqueness

but is instead constituted relationally in contingent social performances.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial,
or not-for-profit sectors.

Note
1. Direct Metal Mastering, is an analogue audio disc mastering technique, jointly developed
by two German companies, Telefunken-Decca (TelDec) and Georg Neumann GmbH,
towards the end of the 20th century.

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Author Biographies
Dominik Bartmanski earned his PhD at Yale University in 2011 where he was a
fellow at Center for Cultural Sociology. Currently he holds a European Union
Postdoctoral Fellowship affiliated with Masaryk University. He is co-editor of
the book Iconic Power. Materiality and Meaning in Social Life published by
Palgrave Macmillan in 2012. Among his recent journal articles are ‘‘The Word/
Image Dualism Revisited: Toward an Iconic Conception of Visual Culture’’ in
Journal of Sociology (2013) and ‘‘How to Become an Iconic Social Thinker: The
Intellectual Pursuits of Malinowski and Foucault’’ in European Journal of Social
Theory (2012).
Bartmanski and Woodward 27

Ian Woodward is associate professor in the School of Humanities and Deputy

Director, Griffith Centre for Cultural Research, at Griffith University, Brisbane,
Australia. He has research interests in the sociology of consumption, aesthetics and
material culture, and in the cultural dimensions of cosmopolitanism. He is author
of Understanding Material Culture (Sage 2007), a co-author of The Sociology of
Cosmopolitanism (Palgrave, 2009) with Gavin Kendall and Zlatko Skrbis, and
Cosmopolitanism, Uses of the Idea (Sage, 2013, with Zlatko Skrbis). He is a
Faculty Fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology, Yale University, and a
board member of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology.