Vinyl Resurgence

You know the more I think about this, the more I wonder if the phenomenon of scratching on early hip-hop and house music was another area (besides the skinny Limey guys with guitars area) where vinyl kept its head just above water in the late 80's and early 90's until the real resurgence started.  They had a turntable (well, two turntables and a microphone) and they were spinning and scratching the old stuff, so there must have been some guys into that scene who were putting their new stuff out on vinyl as well.  I don't know any big electronic or hip-hop heads, but it sounds plausible.

Album art would be incredible.  Might be hellish time-consuming though!

It did take me a wee while to do the import but none of that was because of you.  I didn't have my own spreadsheet, I'd been cheating by keeping my collection on Discogs.  That's why it's not 100 percent up to date, because if no one had created the record on Discogs, I wasn't able to add it to my collection there.  But they let you export your collection data as a csv, so there weren't too many problems.  

Believe it or not my biggest problem came from something you never could have predicted - my keyboard transposes the two characters for vertical bar and the broken vertical bar!  So I'd type out one of them and get the other.  Took me a good half hour of serious head scratching.  Then my version of Notepad wouldn't transfer over the vertical bar delimiter, so I had to download an alternative called Notepad++.  Hah!  Like I said, not your fault, and I got there in the end.

Re: The White Stripes - there's a dangerous band to get a hankering for in terms of collecting.  My mouth was watering at their Great White Northern Lights boxset, it was absolutely stunning, but so so expensive.  Not in the collection as you can see!

Edit: I should have said thank you for the job well done on the help doc.

It seems all went well.  It skipped over two records because of some error on my part, but my spreadsheet wasn't bang up to date anyway. 

http://www.vinylresurgence.com/collections.php?uid=108

If I hadn't moved to the UK in '96 I would agree with your take on it, Josh.  Prior to that, my only experience with music on vinyl was old music (1980's or before).  It came as a really pleasant surprise to see that the habit had never really died amongst a certain clique over here though.  Maybe you could say the same for people who were into underground music in the US, too, but I didn't have any experience with that.

To put it in a nutshell, though by the mid-90's very little of most music sold here was on vinyl, a certain mindset amongst the record labels who were influenced by punk or post-punk just kept on pressing copies of new music on wax, and a few of the more popular releases on vinyl would be displayed at the chain stores, and most cities had at least one independent shop full of new music on vinyl (the mom and pop record shops hadn't yet really started being wiped out by this point).

Also at about this time, the Britpop movement was the single most influential sound in the UK, with lots of indie bands crossing over to the mainstream.  So it's telling that the one thing which really kickstarted my habit was buying the new Blur single (for 99 pence no less!) when it came out.  If I could buy the new stuff I loved on that format, I thought to myself........anyway, there was no looking back. 

tl;dr I think that the stronger commercial influence of punk and post-punk in Britain kept the vinyl flag waving just enough in the UK that I would say it never really died here.  There wasn't an era where a guy couldn't find most of his stuff on vinyl if he wanted to basically, provided his taste in music was in line with the tastes of the New Musical Express, Melody Maker and Q magazine.

Hello,

I'm a thirty five year old who grew up in San Diego, but has lived all of my adult life in the UK.  For as far back I can remember vinyl has held an appeal for me.  I'm a straight white male with a poor sense of humour and a terrible smoking habit.