If you’re thinking about picking up a turntable and grabbing some vinyl records for home use, you might experience sticker shock when you go to purchase some albums whether in person at a store or online.
Vinyl albums are more expensive than ever before, but why?
The main reasons that vinyl records are so expensive these days include the following:
- Limited supply
- Growing demand
- Huge back orders of old albums
- Supply chain issues
- COVID lockdowns
Let’s delve deeper into vinyl record pricing, manufacturing, availability and the incredible growth in popularity that this once discarded medium has experienced in the past decade.
Vinyl records were replaced by the Compact Disc (CD)
The Compact Disc (CD) was introduced to the world in 1982 and several years later, it had become the standard medium by which new albums were provisioned and sold to the public.
Given the compact nature of the CD, it was portable and could be taken on the go unlike a vinyl album which was really only playable at home on your record player. Car manufacturers replaced cassette decks with CD-players which helped to kill off cassette tapes.
But since vinyl albums were larger and prone to breaking if dropped, CDs were deemed to be superior to them too.
So the vinyl record spent several decades largely forgotten as a relic from the past. Record player manufacturers stopped producing them and records largely ceased to be manufactured as other mediums like the CD and eventually iTunes and other digital formats took over.
But beginning in 2006, the vinyl album began to rise from the ashes and make a comeback. Widely considered to have a superior sound to 8-track and cassette tapes, the belief had been that vinyl had been usurped by the Compact Disc due to its superiority over vinyl.
But audiophiles had long argued that vinyl produced a superior sound to even the CD and when you add in the nostalgia factor, the comeback of the vinyl record began in earnest.
So every year from 2006 until present day, the rebirth and increased popularity of vinyl records has developed not just in the United States but in other countries around the world, too.
The problem, as we’re about to see? While demand grew exponentially, supply did not.
Here are the main reasons why vinyl records – even old ones – have become so costly.
5 reasons why vinyl records are so expensive
Limited supply of vinyl records
Many vinyl record manufacturers went out of business or left the game decades ago. By the time the Compact Disc became the go-to music medium in the mid 1980s, the vinyl record and cassette tape had pretty much gone the way of the dodo bird and were extinct.
Even though the vinyl comeback began in 2006, it wasn’t until 2015 to present day that the real growth kicked in. Because of this, no new record manufacturers entered the market. The comeback was interesting and nostalgic but not yet big enough to get companies excited to enter the market.
While several new record manufacturing companies did enter the market, because the vinyl market had been so tiny for decades, it didn’t grow quickly enough to meet growing demand.
And when Apollo Masters – one of the two major global manufacturers of lacquer masters that are needed to press records – burned down, the supply of vinyl records took another hit.
As a result, vinyl albums prices went up.
Growing demand for vinyl records
Why are some vinyl records so expensive when they were released many years ago?
Growing demand for vinyl records means that the inventory that is available is already hard to come by so prices naturally go up.
Consider the thousands and thousands of classic albums that were released in the 1960s – 1980s alone when vinyl albums were in their heyday. Many of them are being re-released and many more box sets are being produced to ride the wave of nostalgia that exists.
On top of that, newer albums released in the 1990s to present day that were never made into vinyl are being released in vinyl form for the first time, too.
There simply isn’t enough vinyl capacity to go around.
So if you can find an old vinyl album online or in a store, chances are it’s much more expensive that it was when it first went on sale, perhaps several times more costly in fact.
The days of finding old vinyl albums in marked down bargain bins are long since gone and due to the imbalance between demand (high) and supply (relatively low), the price of albums has gone up.
Huge back orders of old albums existed
As mentioned above, many old classic rock and pop albums (among others) are being re-released in vinyl form decades after they were initially released.
Classic albums from artists like The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Bob Marley and Fleetwood Mac tend to be ones most requested and sold in vinyl form. This is the main format they were sold in when these albums were originally released too.
But many of these and other classics were already back ordered even before COVID or the above-mentioned fire.
Add that to the newer albums that have plans to be released as vinyl and you can see why the backlog exists.
So old stock albums that people still have in their collection are far more valuable today than they might have been even a year or two ago when the supply-demand imbalance was smaller than it is today.
Supply chain issues go back several years
Before the big fire at the Apollo Masters plant and the lack of record manufacturers actually pressing physical albums, a growing shortage of polyvinyl chloride was brewing due to the aforementioned increased demand in vinyl records.
What is polyvinyl chloride?
Also commonly known simply as PVC, it’s the major component used to produce vinyl albums. It’s a petroleum-based product, is difficult to recycle and isn’t particularly environmentally friendly.
And since it’s a petroleum-based product which means it needs oil to be produced, it’s dependent on the price of oil. While a barrel of oil amazingly went briefly to negative pricing early in 2020 due to COVID and the sudden global lockdown, oil prices have since rebounded and then some.
If predicted oil prices of $100 or more materialize, the price of PVC will also go up and thus, the price of vinyl records will too.
COVID caused order fulfillment times to grow immensely
In early 2020, the world literally came to a standstill for several months due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Entire countries locked down and business shuttered, some permanently, to help fight the COVID virus.
One side effect of this lockdown was that businesses cancelled orders, laid off staff, stopped ordering raw materials and were surprised when demand for many goods picked up later in 2020, much earlier than expected.
If anything, demand for items like albums increased since people were stuck at home, locked down in their own house, with little to do.
Since audiophiles couldn’t go to concerts or see live music of any kind throughout 2020, buying a turntable and vinyl albums seemed like a great alternative.
But as people continued to buy albums that were available, new orders piled up throughout the lockdowns and shipping times of vinyl increased accordingly.
And that’s why even during a year filled with COVID, vinyl album sales topped 27.5 million copies in the United States alone. The high level of demand throughout COVID times also contributed to the high cost, a cost that was paid 27.5 million times regardless.