Vinyl: The Full Experience

Hello friends! My name is Taryn, one of Billy’s new interns this spring, and I’m here to tell you that vinyl is back in a big way!

As humans we are constantly craving new experiences and different ways to feel and connect with our world. Whether you’re doing this through exercise, trying a new dish at your favorite restaurant, dancing at a club, or thrusting yourself into a mosh pit at a concert, it all comes down to the experience and the emotions that stem from them. When you think about it, why do we love the things we do?

For me, I try to cultivate new experiences with music. Going to concerts featuring bands both big and small are how I engage with music, the world, and with myself. Unfortunately, it’s not possible for me to attend every concert imaginable even though I wish I could. I’m a college kid on a budget with an internship, job, and extracurriculars that often supersede my concert-going availability. Nothing recreates the rich vibrations and textured sounds quite like being in front of a live band-you know, the full experience. Or at least that’s what I thought until I got a record player.

True, with records there is no live band in front of you, no crowd except the one you can imagine behind closed eyelids, but there is an experience with records beyond any other. Now I’m no techie, just a passionate music lover. Trust me when I say if quality and ambience are what you’re missing from playing music through $10 headphones plugged in to your whatever-you-call-it, that listening to music as it was intended (in-full) is the way to go. What do I mean by in-full? The complete record, no skipping or flip-flopping around, playing an album from Side A to Side B, like people used to.

Part of the experience of playing vinyl records deals with the process of selecting the album you want to hear, removing it from the sleeve, placing it on the plate, and waiting for the needle to rotate over onto the spinning record. Hear that? The sound bleeding from the speakers, filling the room with music previously heard through shoddy headphones while you were walking downtown, to class, or on the El? Music that can now be shared in your room with others, or experienced on your own has grown in magnitude, and richness.

I know that we can all listen to music from streaming sites on our computers, through Bluetooth speakers, or on our phones, but I think it’s nice to break the cycle and return to something old that has become something new again. Vinyl sales have grown exponentially in recent years, requiring record companies to order more vinyl presses. I think this rising trend signifies our desire as consumers to experience music in different ways than we have recently, and a certain air of nostalgia for the past. It’s hard to remember a time without MP3’s, and vinyl’s reemergence represents a new way to engage and immerse ourselves with music. If you’ve never listened to records before, give it a shot you’ve got nothing to lose and everything to experience!