Music's Vinyl Revival Is Getting Ridiculous

Jason Heller loves vinyl albums, so much so that he accumulated 6,000 LPs at the height of collecting frenzy. He's done now, though, he writes in an essay headlined "Has the vinyl revival gone too far?" at AV Club. Consider that Kenny Rogers is coming out with a reissue of The Gambler from 1977 just in time for an industry-manufactured, holier-than-thou holiday of Record Store Day. "No one’s twisting anyone’s arm, and I’m not saying people are getting ripped off," writes Heller. "But when things like the deluxe Gambler reissue are being timed in anticipation of Record Store Day—this year’s falls on April 20—I can’t help but feel that the vinyl revival has jumped the shark."

Heller stopped collecting a few years ago because he was spending too much money on his habit. He also got honest with himself and realized he "wasn't an audiophile," as so many vinyl collectors label themselves. "Owning a decent turntable does not turn your ears into trembling flowers, unable to bear the bitmapped harshness of digital," he writes. "It began to dawn on me—me, someone who had preached the sanctity of vinyl from my record-store pulpit for so long—that I couldn’t really tell the difference" between vinyl and, say, an MP3. OK, maybe there "there was a slight difference, but it wasn’t enough to justify the huge portion of my income that I was spending on vinyl." Click to read the full column. (More music stories.)