Analog revolution

   A certain nostalgia accompanies the vinyl LP. As many collectors will attest, there's nothing better than the extensive liner notes that you don't get from the iTunes store. We live in a digital era, but for an outlet as powerful and cathartic as music, you need something tangible. You need to hold the songs in your hand.
   Once pronounced a dead format like the 8-track or the Betamax, vinyl never went away. It's been living in thrift shops and specialty stores, bouncing from merch table to merch table at seedy venues and shipped in cardboard boxes around the world to giddy collectors. It's usually snatched up by connoisseurs with collections worth more than their homes or by wide-eyed teenagers who don't even own a record player.
    Thanks to more bands releasing various pressings of albums in multiple colors and packaging, vinyl has seen a recent resurgence in popularity. Though it's nice to own your favorite LP in every color of the rainbow, it doesn't come cheap to the bands dishing them out.   
   "A band having a vinyl version of their album is a luxury, but they can't necessarily afford it. Vinyl is expensive, the overhead is high and the markup is low, so it's more risky for a label to release an LP," said Brent Lakes, owner of Broken Circles, a vinyl-only record label.
   Dedicated fans see the purchase of LPs as supporting their favorite artists, and others see it as a way to justify filesharing.
   "I could either spend $12 and support the band and its label by buying an LP and having a really cool product, or I could steal it for free on the Internet," Lakes said.
   That $12 investment could pay off in the long run. Strapped for cash? Sell your vinyl. Some records fetch hundreds of dollars online, but not all of them are sold by fans with empty wallets.
   "People have found massive ways to profit from the movement and continue to do so. We call them ‘Flippers' and they take advantage of grabbing up limited copy pre-orders from in-demand bands and then immediately upon receiving them, post them on eBay for the quick turn around," Mitch Mauer, a veteran collector, said.
   It's easy for Flippers to score multiple pre-orders online, but bands on tour have taken to selling limited quantities at shows, and restricting sales to one per person. Hardcore sextet Set Your Goals sold copies of This Will be the Death of Us at their recent summer tour with only two rules: one per person and none sold until the end of the last song. The blue marble LPs sold out in less than five minutes every night they were available.
   Vinyl is timeless. It's like a black and white film, a good red lipstick, a well-fitted suit or a perfectly aged scotch.  And, sometimes, the older it is, the better.
   With kids today taking an interest in anything vaguely retro and the people who have always been retro continuing their highly addictive habit of collecting vinyl, it seems that the dead format has been resurrected. Maybe it's not a second coming, but it's definitely here to spice things up for a while.
     In the sense of being a common media format, vinyl will never make a comeback. Records are a pain to deal with and it's easier to load songs onto an MP3 player. Vinyl's 15 minutes may be up, but it isn't dead. As long as there are people who feel the way millions of other have felt about music, vinyl's time in the spotlight isn't over just yet.