The Business of Vinyl — From Napster to Spotify to the Listening Bar Revival
By Rafi Mercer
The record business was once a matter of weight. Pallets of vinyl arriving at Virgin Megastores, sleeves sliding into racks, the sheer physicality of music filling entire floors. In those years, I lived with records as product, as culture, as atmosphere. The air was thick with them, the sleeves smelt of ink and card, the stores buzzed with the latest imports from Blue Note or ECM. Buying was a ritual and an economy all at once — every copy carried value, every album had to justify its space. Music was a business of scarcity, of choice, of depth.
That solidity began to dissolve in the late 1990s. Napster appeared, and suddenly music became immaterial. Compressed into MP3s, traded across shaky connections, shared for free. What looked like liberation was also collapse. The value system of music buckled under the weight of access. Scarcity became abundance, ownership became streaming, the business of records became a business of files. I watched as entire supply chains hollowed out — pressing plants closed, distributors folded, stores thinned. The culture of listening shifted from albums to playlists, from immersion to skimming. The vinyl LP, once a staple, became a curiosity.
Spotify cemented this shift. It turned the ocean of access into a model, built not on sales but on subscriptions. For the listener, it was convenience perfected: any song, any time, anywhere. For the business, it was scale. Billions of plays, revenue measured not in albums but in fractions of pennies. And for artists, it was a paradox — music more widely heard than ever, yet rarely paid for at a level that sustained careers. The value of listening shrank in economic terms, even as the volume of listening exploded. The industry adapted, but something essential had been lost: the sense of music as weight, as craft, as object.
Yet even as streaming became dominant, vinyl refused to die. It lingered in back rooms, in independent shops, in the hands of collectors who refused to let go. Slowly, it grew again. A generation raised on intangible files discovered the pleasure of sleeves, of liner notes, of the ritual of lowering a stylus. Sales ticked upward, then surged. Today, vinyl is not a niche but a global industry once more, pressed in plants that struggle to keep up with demand, sold in supermarkets as well as boutiques, celebrated not only by nostalgia but by discovery.
The paradox is clear: in an era of 5G, where sound can be streamed in lossless high fidelity instantly, people are turning back to a medium that requires time, patience, and physical care. We have the technology to deliver perfection to our phones, and yet we still buy records that scratch, warp, and demand our attention. The reason is simple: vinyl carries weight. It slows us down. It restores value to listening. It is not about efficiency but about experience. In that way, vinyl sits close to the ethos of the listening bar, where patience is part of the ritual and silence frames the sound.
I think often about the Japanese kissa, those cafés turned shrines to jazz, where imported vinyl was shared communally in the 1950s and 60s. Their philosophy lingers in today’s bars from Tokyo to Paris, where whole albums are played front to back, where selectors guide the evening like curators. Vinyl thrives in these spaces because it is not fragmented. It is lived with. One side, then another, no skipping, no shuffling, no dilution.
The listening bar culture is part of vinyl’s resurgence. In London, in Berlin, in New York, people are rediscovering what it means to hear an album in its entirety, curated by someone else, in a room tuned for sound. These bars are not retro experiments but forward signals: proof that people are hungry for depth, for silence, for music as ritual. They remind us that listening is not about instant gratification but about surrender. And they thrive at the same moment vinyl thrives, because both offer what streaming cannot: presence.
The business of vinyl today is booming, yet held back by its own physicality. Pressing plants are oversubscribed, bottlenecked by demand. Supply chains strain under the weight of renewed appetite. Independent labels struggle to get slots, as majors press deluxe reissues in vast numbers. Shipping costs rise, turntables are slow to manufacture, raw materials are finite. The industry is caught between abundance of demand and scarcity of supply. Unlike digital, vinyl cannot be scaled at the speed of code. It grows slowly, pressed into wax, stacked onto pallets, carried into stores. And perhaps that slowness is not a weakness but its strength.
For all the optimism around 5G and lossless streams, for all the perfection of portable high fidelity, it is still vinyl that carries cultural cachet. The numbers tell the story: year after year, sales climb. Young listeners who never lived through the original LP era now build collections. Artists release not only digital files but records pressed in limited runs, knowing that their fans crave something tangible. Vinyl is not just product; it is proof. Proof of devotion, proof of ownership, proof of listening. It sits naturally alongside our album essays, which encourage people to slow down and treat records as complete works rather than background fragments.
When I think back to those Virgin floors in the 1990s, to the weight of records arriving in bulk, I realise how much the business of music has always been about more than sound. It has been about ritual, about objects, about the spaces that frame listening. Napster and Spotify stripped that away, reducing music to access. But vinyl and the listening bar remind us that culture thrives not in abundance but in focus. The business of records today is not only about profit margins or pressing plants; it is about restoring meaning to the act of listening.
The challenge is whether the industry can keep up. Demand surges, but capacity lags. Pressing plants reopen, but slowly. Investment trickles in, but not at the scale needed to satisfy global appetite. For now, scarcity remains. Albums are delayed, runs sell out, collectors chase. The business is booming, but it is booming against constraint. Vinyl may be everywhere, but it is not yet free-flowing.
Perhaps that is exactly why it matters. In a world where sound can be summoned instantly, vinyl forces us to wait. In a culture where music is consumed and discarded, a record insists on permanence. In an industry where streams are counted by the billion, vinyl sales remind us of the individual transaction, the moment of choice, the act of carrying weight home. The business of vinyl is booming because it is not frictionless. It is booming because it resists speed.
And as listening bars multiply, as communities gather around whole albums rather than fragmented tracks, the business finds new energy. Records are not only bought but lived with, shared in public, heard in rooms where strangers listen together. They are not only products but passports into experience. A whisky might be poured to accompany the needle drop, connecting the act of listening to the kind of ritual we’ve explored in our whiskies for listening series — drinks and sounds paired to slow us down and heighten attention. This is what vinyl does best: it connects us not only to music but to the moment around it.
Vinyl is not just an artefact of nostalgia. It is a slow revolution. It is the sound of music regaining weight. It is the reminder that technology may advance, but culture still craves presence, ritual, and object. The business is booming not because vinyl competes with digital, but because it offers something digital cannot. And though it is held back by its very physicality, perhaps that is what makes it thrive. The world does not need more speed. It needs more depth. Vinyl delivers that, one groove at a time.
For more from Tracks & Tales, subscribe here.
