Back in the ‘70s, if you wanted to own music, you bought LPs or 45s. In the ’90s, if you wanted to own music, you bought CDs or cassettes. There were no other ways to do it. Now we have options. You can decide not to own music at all but still listen to whatever you want through a variety of streaming services. You can download audio files in MP3, WAV, or FLAC formats. You can buy CDs for your car and also rip the files to your computer. You can buy vinyl. Or all of the above. The decision to purchase LPs now is an aesthetic choice as much, if not more, than a sound preference. As Pitchfork’s Mark Richardson noted in his piece “Does Vinyl Really Sound Better?”, “Listening to an LP involves a lot more than remastering and sound sources. There’s the act of putting a record on, there is the comforting surface noise, there is the fact that LPs are beautiful objects and CDs have always looked like plastic office supplies. So enjoying what an LP has to offer is in no way contingent on convincing yourself that they necessarily sound better than CDs.”

So if it’s less about sound, then vinyl is a badge as much as a format—a way listeners can self-identify as true music fans. And when assessing the current state of vinyl, perhaps the harbinger of its eventual decline or plateau is the durability of that badge status: If enough music fans decide vinyl’s perceived authenticity has been compromised, will it become a hollow gimmick? And if vinyl fatigue sets in, will consumers be satisfied to stream or download? If they still crave something physical, will they revert to CDs? Or cassettes?

“Vinyl was a physical format that defied the baskets of CDs that you’d see at the mall or in record stores, but now you go into Urban Outfitters and there’s a whole wall of vinyl… it’s become co-opted,” says Beeler at Asthmatic Kitty. “It’s something that belonged to the independent music industry for a long time, but it no longer does. It feels like cassettes are now what vinyl was 10 years ago.”

The numbers don’t show cassettes catching on widely just yet, and CDs still outsell vinyl by a hefty margin. But the so-called vinyl resurgence isn’t a brief blip. According to Nielsen’s mid-year report, album sales are down 14.9 percent in the first six months of 2014, but vinyl sales are up 40 percent, to 4 million units. If things continue at the same rate (and they likely will), vinyl sales could reach a record-high 8 million units by year’s end—2 million more than last year. Despite the growing pains that come with high demand and fixed production, the resurgence is still surging.

“There’s clearly a ceiling on this market,” Secretly’s Blandford says. “But we haven’t found it yet.”