Boussoles à la page Vinyl revival Swept aside by digital, LP records are international reissues and specific releases, like Motown’s first now back in the groove and on-trend,recordings. “What might once have been seen as a fashion fad with vintage discoveries and rereleases.has now become a huge phenomenon,” he confirms. “Vinyl now represents 17 percent of Universal’s turnover (14 percent of the global market), and there’s even been a jump in sales in rap, It was initially an anachronistic phenomenon, which then turned a type of music that people listen to much more via streaming.” into a social phenomenon. The vinyl long-playing record, or LP, For French singer Étienne Daho, who signed with Universal and may have virtually disappeared in the 1990s, but it’s now a domes- buys a lot of vinyl records, it would be unthinkable to neglect tic trophy that people display in their living rooms, alongside this format when bringing out an album today: “I learned about brand new turntables or record players that have also been res- music by listening to vinyl records and I was very sad when they cued from the attic. This object from another era, seen as fragile, disappeared. Some of my albums did not come out as LPs at the awkwardly large, impractical and obsolete when CDs were dom- time, and whenever I’ve been able to I’ve had them rereleased. inating the market, has paradoxically returned in a big way at a Today people have an emotional, almost physical relationship time when music is becoming intangible through downloads and streaming. It might originally have looked like an act of resistance on the part of a handful of people nostalgic for a physical format in the face of the onslaught of digital media, but it has now been embraced by large numbers of people from every generation, with more than 3.2 million records sold in France in 2017. Customers in the record shops that have flourished all over the world include true music lovers who are attached to the vinyl sound—warmer, more precise and less clinical than that of CDs, not to mention Poster des MP3s—as well as young people whose only experience of singles Yardbirds, datant and LPs is through the dusty record collections of their parents. de 1967. A Yardbirds Audio imprint The major music companies were wary of this poster from 1967. revival at first, because it was initiated by independent labels and record stores. They finally realized the extent of this wave and started to release large portions of their catalogs on vinyl, followed by large retail outlets, which transformed their music departments to showcase this format that had miraculously returned from oblivion. Universal Music France even ended up hiring a true vinyl enthusiast, Julien Heissler, to deal with both 80 knarF ynoT otohp ,spilihP - nedewS ,tsnoK - civokuD iraP otohp ,ecnarF cisuM lasrevinU ,nigriV ,puorG cisuM yrucreM 7102 ©