You rush home with it in your arms, then you begin to undress it. You slip it out of its jacket. Underneath, you find another, hidden layer, maybe just plain old white, maybe something more elegant, more intoxicating. Then, with the gentlest of touch, you tease it from this delicate undergarment and hold it naked in your hands. It’s jet black, it’s dark and mysterious; wonders lie within, and soon they’ll be revealed. You lay it down carefully. And then, with exactitude and expectancy, you rest a diamond on its body and let the jewel caress it to a song.

Records are sexy. They take something abstract and ethereal and make it tangible: like a lover, you can hold a song in your hands and trace its music with your fingers. We all feel a need to touch what we love, though this desire for physical intimacy with recorded sound may seem peculiar – perhaps even perverse – to some 21st-century listeners. But ever since my first trip to a record shop to spend my pocket money on the 1982 Scotland World Cup squad’s We Have a Dream 7” (we’ve all got to start somewhere), I’ve always sought my favourite sounds on vinyl. I’ve used CDs and cassettes too – my first Walkman and I were inseparable from the day Santa delivered it until its cogs wore out – but those formats were chosen for convenience rather than pleasure. Vinyl was always best. And I don’t mean the sound quality, I’ve never much cared for that. It was the object itself: the package, the artwork, the ritual – and its inherent eroticism – that kept me prowling record shops.

But times change. Everything evolves. And I’m a fraud and a hypocrite.

Most of my listening these days is done on the move. As someone who witnessed the birth of compact personal music systems, the ability to carry countless songs in my pocket – on a telephone! – can still fill me with wonder. And as a 44-year-old father of two in a tenement flat, my turntable is rarely switched on; my relationship with music at home is a mostly furtive one, with me at the computer in headphones after bedtime. I write this in April and I’ve only bought three records so far this year, all of which have been played once, while the accompanying MP3s have been enjoyed many times on various devices, so it may be time to re-evaluate my relationship with those sexy black discs I’ve been buying since childhood. Do I really need them now? Besides hardly being played, they take up too much space and cost too much money. And when most music is recorded and mastered digitally, should it really matter that the final fruits of this labour are heard through 140-year-old technology?



Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘When music is recorded and mastered digitally, does it matter that it is heard through 140-year-old technology?’ Photograph: David Sillitoe/The Guardian

Much has been made of vinyl’s recent resurgence, but the majority of LPs sold are reissues by recently returned, recently deceased or long ago disbanded heritage acts – 2016’s top 10 LPs included Amy Winehouse, the Stone Roses, the Beatles, Fleetwood Mac, Bob Marley, Nirvana and Prince – so this heralded revival seems inextricably linked with the endlessly thriving nostalgia market. Meanwhile, the annual Record Store Day release list spills over with repackaged major-label back catalogues guaranteed to sell to ardent completists. It’s no surprise that vinyl generates more income than declining digital sales when the average price of a bog-standard single LP has risen to £20, more than double the price of a download album and beyond the budget of many, especially the young. Records are luxury items, and while a small but healthy market exists for new music on vinyl, the dominant target demographic for LP sales is older listeners with an historical connection to the format and some spare cash. And that’s me.

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But I won’t live forever. We middle-aged consumers with our deviant desire to touch a song will be gone within decades, so will vinyl die with us? Looking at the current market, it’s hard to see how it can survive without us. The death of my generation and the continuing growth of streaming – and whatever new formats may lie ahead – could play a major part in its passing, certainly, but I wonder if something else is happening. Perhaps the physicality of old that I still yearn for has been replaced with a new, deeper corporeality: music is mainlined now. We mostly pump it straight into our bodies through plugs and wires; it’s stored with our secrets on personalised machines that mirror our souls; it’s plucked from the ether as easily as the air we breathe. Perhaps music has never felt so tangible, so real – so human – as it does now.

And does it really matter how we hear a song? Does the platform affect our response? No, it’s just a messenger. We hear first then choose the formats that best suit our needs and desires, sometimes for function, sometimes for love. And that’s why I still buy records. They are love made manifest. And maybe they’re more like sex than I thought: now that I’m a bit older, I might not get them as much I used to, but my passion burns undimmed. And besides, you can’t undress an MP3.