Spin doctors

Music is everywhere - on our phones and in the cloud-but, thanks in part to Taylor Swift, Kiwis are joining the vinyl revival.

- RUSSELL BROWN 

It was a fine Saturday in August when 95bFM put its records out for sale, but there were clouds gathering. Even those who accepted that the influential student radio station had bills to pay - most notably about $150,000 in transmitter costs - had qualms when the sale was announced. The station's library of vinyl records hadn't been heard a lot on air over the past couple of decades, but it was in some sense the heart of the place, the family silver. The precious New Zealand collection was ruled out of sale, but it could well have still been a grim morning.

What transpired was more like a wholesome community event. At one point, the queue to get in stretched out along the landing of the Auckland University Student Association (AUSA) building, down two flights of stairs and into the quad. Inside, women in their early 20s stood shoulder to-shoulder with silver-haired men, flicking through the 6000 records in the bins.

A father and his young son talked to a TV news crew about passing on the love of vinyl. A mother and daughter beamed after paying to "adopt" two albums deemed essential, which would stay in the collection with a note bearing the donors' names and any message they wanted a future DJ to read on air. Several donors dedicated their purchases to departed friends. Others lined up to pay for armfuls of records to take home.

It was an illustration of a cultural trend: in an era when music is on our phones and in the cloud, everywhere and nowhere, records are bringing us together.

The vinyl revival is real enough in material terms. In 2007, sales of records in the US, which had been declining for years, ticked up to just under a million. The following year, sales nearly doubled. In 2021, vinyl sales overtook CDs for the first time in 30 years. US vinyl LP sales will top 23 million this year if the trend from the first six months is maintained.