Back in 2008, Record Store Day was launched as a hopeful holiday aiming to buck up struggling independent music retailers desperate to lure customers.
The situation was dire. The Tower Records chain had closed in 2006, and CD sales were shrinking. Vinyl was an outmoded format that barely amounted to a drop in a music industry bucket with a hole in it.
"The general consensus," said the day's co-founder Carrie Colitton, "was that record stores were dead."
Saturday's seventh annual Record Store Day featured more than 1200 retailers across the US selling limited-edition merchandise and hosting events.
The mum-and-dad music-store glass is half-full.
A big reason is that US sales of vinyl have increased sixfold since 2008. Last year, CDs, hurt by the growth in streaming internet services such as Spotify and Pandora, fell an additional 14.5 per cent. Digital sales declined for the first time since the advent of iTunes.
But vinyl increased 32 per cent - rising from 4.5 million units in 2012, to more than six million in 2013, according to Nielsen SoundScan.
Evidence of the vinyl renaissance is apparent throughout pop culture.
Coinciding with the revivival is the release of Eilon Paz's Dust & Grooves: Adventures in Record Collecting, a gorgeous coffee-table book that depicts 130 enthusiasts with their collections, including "King of 78s" Joe Bussard, and Frank Gossner, whom Paz accompanied on a record-hunting trip to Ghana.
Director Alex Steyermark's movie The 78 Project, which captures musicians such as Victoria Williams and Ben Vaughn making 78 rpm discs on a 1930s Presto recorder, premiered at the South By Southwest Film festival in March. In July, Amanda Petrusich's Do Not Sell at Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World's Rarest 78rpm Records will be published by Simon and Schuster.
Paz started the Dust & Grooves project as a website after he moved to Brooklyn from Israel in 2008 and spent most of his underemployed time crate-digging in stores.
Vinyl has become cool again "because of digital music," Paz said.
"The natural thing to say would be that the MP3 killed vinyl. But I think it's the opposite, actually. The lack of a physical, tangible medium brought vinyl back to the people.
"We don't change, really," adds Paz. "Times change, technology changes. But our basic need to hold, to feel things - vinyl lets you fulfill those needs."
It also sounds good. "The sonic quality of the vinyl format is so warm and full compared to all digital mediums," Big Rich Medina, a Philadelphia-based DJ, tells Paz in Dust & Grooves. "It's ridiculous. There is no reputable argument for that point."
"I think it's happened because of the anonymity of the digital age," said Grammy-winning producer Aaron Luis Levinson. He estimates his wide-ranging but salsa-centric collection at 6000 LPs and 1000 or so 78s. "Just as the slow-food movement has come back, and craft beer has come back, records have come back. People are once again prizing something of quality that has human scale and authenticity and personality to it."
As a diehard enthusiast, Levinson enjoyed the era of CD dominance "because all sorts of people were dumping amazing records. I had so much less competition. Now it's really hard to get good records. Everybody wants them."
Record Store Day isn't only about vinyl. There are also exclusive CD releases. Record Store Day's Colitton, who says most of the more than 200,000 people who follow Record Store Day on Facebook are in the 18-to-35 range, stresses that most LPs come with a download card for "digital convenience."
Vinyl made its comeback, Colitton thinks, because "it's a very physical, human way to interact with new music. It's a ritual, almost. You pick up the record. You probably clean it. It's like a Japanese tea ceremony.
"I love my phone, I love my headphones. But even for the young people who grew up with digital music, I don't think anyone wants to live their entire life in front of a screen."
