Vinyl has had more lives than a cat. There’s almost weekly predictions of its imminent demise reported in the media, and yet – somehow – it remains. It has long been a favoured medium for audiophiles and lovers of cover art, now fans are cottoning on and a small but not insignificant percentage of DJs still play it. This is not to say that vinyl is the only format on which music should be listened to or used to DJ with, but the constant and repeated assertions that vinyl is kicking the bucket are simply not true. Global sales (not limited to dance music) and the opening and continued success of Vinyl Factory in Sydney are testimony to this. So, why the crossed wires?

The answer is simple. For a long time DJs had only one format on which to purchase and play their music. With the advent of mature digital technology those options leapt into the tens and twenties. Let’s face it, any professional needs the best tools for the job. For many professional DJs that is digital. So within the dance community – always close to the cutting edge of sound and technology – the move away from vinyl is massive. But at the same time, as mainstream music had made the leap to digital (ie – no physical format) anyone who wants to actually collect music, as opposed to amassing it, is rediscovering vinyl.

A more interesting question, though, is why do some DJs stick with vinyl, with its bumps and jumps and crackles and drunk losers spilling their drinks through irreplaceable crates? For a long time, vinyl worked as a method of quality control for the dance industry, as you simply could not put a bad quality piece of music and expect to have a running label tomorrow (we’re not talking genres here, but quality of music within genres). While digital technology and music has really upped the ante in terms of what serious producers and performers are able to achieve on stage, sadly, at the other – far larger – end of the spectrum it has most certainly had a negative effect. Both in skills in the booth and through education – or should we say edutainment – in front of it.

It’s no coincidence that an artist the caliber of Paradox – highly respected in drum & bass circles – flew to San Francisco to spend 22 hours straight beat digging. As a DJ if you want to play the vinyl that no one else has, it means you have to be passionate enough to spend the time and effort seeking it out. You can’t just subscribe to Beatport. How many digital ‘DJs’ now source their music and create their playlists from the same places with the same tunes? Digital has ushered in an era of kids downloading tunes off blogs and calling themselves DJs, being non-discerning in their endeavors just to say they got the new shit (and the new haircut) regardless of musical or sonic quality.

Unfortunately there seems to be a lot of misinformation bandied about on the subject. Screams of “Tiesto no longer a fan of ‘outdated’ vinyl“ tells the world that one of the scene’s largest identities has no love for the medium, but upon closer inspection the article in question goes on to say that it’s simply no longer his choice to use to DJ with. This is no surprise, as many DJs have been heading that way for some time. It raises another very interesting point; as vinyl seems to be less of the go-to for DJs for a myriad of very good reasons – traveling overseas with 25+ kilos of wax doesn’t leave much room for clean clothes, does it – on a larger scale there is a rather large move back to record stores. If you look at total digital sales in 2008, albums were at 65 million with vinyl sales at 1.5 million. This year vinyl sales have already exceeded last year by 25%, taking them to 2 million at the time of writing, with digital sales not yet reaching their 2008 totals. These numbers speak for themselves.

But this is a dance music website, so let’s have a look at an interesting trend that’s specifically relevant to your tastes. Broadly speaking (and generalising more than we should) dance can be broken into funk based and technology based music. So your technos and trances came from synthesizers and have always been pushing forward with the technology, while your funk based music – hip hop, dubstep, drum & bass, etc – have a deep cultural affinity to vinyl. The creative process for the latter is, and always has been, inextricably linked to vinyl.

We are the first to admit that new media offers huge potential, and for a working performer to ignore them would be ridiculous. It’s like a tradey opting for a hammer and nails when there’s a pneumatic nail gun available. Of course, the sheer volume of new ways to play music (when previously there was only one) means that the media pool also gets diluted. Vinyl has been a leader in culture development in underground music from the early inception of hip hop and rave, to dubstep and drum & bass in 2009 (and of course the pre-cursor to many of these, reggae). For the latter, dubplate culture has been a huge part of your stature as an artist and a direct reflection of not only yours, but your crews’ and your supporters’ skills. So only a rare few could have ‘dubs’ of certain people’s tunes, and the only time you’d be able to hear said tunes was when going out to hear certain DJs play them.

The immediacy (as with digital now) was still there to an extent, as a tune would be made that day and artists would go to the cutting house and cut their dubs to play that night. Although not as cheap or easy as hitting ‘burn’ on your computer, it still offered the audience a very immediate chance to hear the freshest music out of the studio. This immediacy is, of course, what has led many people into digital terrain. As discussed, this has its pros and cons at either end of the talent spectrum, and they are infinitely debatable. Topics mainly come back to the fact that as soon as music is out there, a blow or download site has it up for people to grab, at varying quality and without consent from the creator.

The fact is, from within the dance music community – and even more so from within genre based sections of that – vinyl does indeed look like it is ‘dying’. But this is a myopic view that fails to take into account the real figures in the global music industry as a whole, and also the fact that as music turns into a virtual utility – think, like water and electricity, as it comes down the internet tap – the natural urge of humans to collect and surround themselves with things that reflect their personality means that vinyl is actually the last physical format standing (spinning?) It’s a fact reflected in international sales figures of physical product; the only one not declining is vinyl.

To conclude, vinyl in the dance music/DJ community has experienced a huge demographic shift as alternatives have appeared, a trend now being mirrored in many other industries as digital technology changes behaviour (books, shopping, dating, the list goes on!) It’s apt that dance music is at the forefront of another revolution, but vinyl in the far larger global music market covering all genres is become hugely popular again. In a way, DJs carried the format for the 30 years we were lumbered with CDs, and now that music has left that anachronistic format behind – digital info on an analogue medium – the general public is catching up again. And they’re discovering that records are far better quality than CDs ever were.

Lefroy Verghese and Stephan Gyory run the recordstore.com.au.