The vinyl record was, for most of the era of digital music, a curiosity that refused to disappear. The format that was supposed to have been made obsolete by the compact disc, and then by the download, and then by the stream, survived each of its successors, and in the last several years it has done more than survive. It has grown, to the point where the presses that make records cannot keep up with the demand for them, and the backlog at the factories that press them has become itself a story. The vinyl revival has stopped being a novelty. It has become an industry, and the reasons it became one are worth understanding because they say something about how a generation has decided to listen.

The easy explanation — that vinyl sounds better — is the one the enthusiasts offer and the one the evidence does not quite support. The record produces a sound that is different from the digital file, in ways that some listeners prefer and others cannot distinguish, and the difference is real but small. The revival is not, on the whole, an audiophile phenomenon. It is something else, and the something else has more to do with the relationship between the listener and the music than with the technical qualities of the medium that carries it.

The object that the stream cannot provide

What the record offers, that the stream does not, is a physical relationship with the music it contains. A record must be taken from a shelf, placed on a turntable, and attended to while it plays, and the attending is the part that matters. The listener who commits to a record has committed to an album, in sequence, for the duration of its side, and the commitment is a kind of attention that the infinite shuffle of the streaming library does not ask for and rarely receives. The revival is, at its heart, a reaction against the plenty that the stream made possible, and the listeners who returned to the record did so because the plenty had begun to feel like a kind of poverty.

The artifact matters, too, in a way that the streaming era made difficult to appreciate. A record is a thing that can be owned, displayed, given, and inherited, and the ownership of it is a relationship that the subscription cannot replicate. The listeners who bought records in the revival were buying, in part, the right to possess the music they loved, in a medium that would not vanish when a licensing deal expired or a platform changed its mind. The stream made music accessible. The record made it durable, and the durability turned out to be worth paying for in a way the industry had stopped expecting.

The industry that grew to meet it

The factories that press records were, until recently, the bottleneck of the revival, and the bottleneck has become a business. The presses that survived the era of the compact disc did so on a trickle of demand, and the surge of the revival caught them unprepared. The wait for a record at the height of the backlog was measured in months, and the artists who wanted their records pressed found themselves in a queue behind the catalogs of the dead, which the revival had made newly profitable to reissue. The capacity has expanded, slowly, to meet the demand, and the expansion has rebuilt an industry that had been left for dead.

The economics of the revival are, for the artists, the most encouraging part of it. A record pays its performer more than a stream does, by several orders of magnitude, and the artists who can sell their music on vinyl have found in it a revenue source that the streaming era had otherwise eliminated. The musicians who could not afford to tour, and could not survive on the fractions the stream paid, found in the record a way to keep making music, and the revival that began as nostalgia has become, for a generation of independent artists, a livelihood.

The format that refused to die

The vinyl revival is not a return to the past, and the listeners who participate in it are not, for the most part, rejecting the present. They stream, and they buy records, and the two coexist in a way that the either-or framing of the format wars never allowed. The record is not replacing the stream. It is complementing it, and the complement is the thing the stream could not provide — a physical, durable, attended relationship with the music that the infinite library made rare. The format that was supposed to die became the one that grew, because the listeners who returned to it were buying something the stream had made scarce, and the scarcity turned out to be worth more than the plenty that replaced it.