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Vinyl: The Analogue Record in the Digital Age. By Dominic Bartmanski and Ian Woodward. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. ISBN 978-80857856616. $29.95
Dominic Bartmanski and Ian Woodward's Vinyl is not to be mistaken for Richard Osbourne's Vinyl: A History of the Analogue Record, published in 2012 by Ashgate. When I reviewed the Osbourne book for the ARSC Journal last year (vol. 45 no. 1 [Spring 2014], pp. 73-75), I noted that many sales of the new LPs priced from $30 on up were to younger buyers aged from late teens through early 30s who were unlikely to have bought an LP during the 1980s. I thought that Osbourne's history from the groove up, so to speak, would be helpful to those younger generations of LP collectors. Yet I wondered if there were more reasons for the current vinyl disc revival than the understandable need for a physical and well-crafted audio artifact.
Bartmanski and Woodward are academic sociologists, one living in Berlin, Germany, the other working at Griffith University in Australia. In accordance with their professional training, they explore in terms of society and culture the question of why vinyl records abide. In fact, their overall question was a very general one about European society. They had noted that boutiques and lifestyle retailers like Urban Outfitters were imitating on a small scale the vinyl LPs stores located in cities for club DJs and their music-collecting fans. If the retailers were imitating a trend, then were their models those urban vinyl stores? The authors' overall question then became, in their words (p.170), "the contemporary economy of vinyl culture at a certain time through a number of constitutive aspects driven by a focus that prioritizes the material qualities as a way of exploring its meaningful circulation within economies of music consumption and production." Or in plain English: what has been going on in the cities during the last 5 or 6 years to lead 20- to 50-year-old people to purchase vinyl LPs, instead of CDs, in stores and venues for retail, leisure,...