The remarkable resurgence of vinyl has been one of the biggest stories in the music industry of the past few years. The once-dead format has seen exponential sales growth, with 5.3m records being sold in the UK in 2021 – the highest volume since 1990, roughly when CD sales began to outpace other formats – and record sales in the US up 15.6% year-on-year in the first few weeks of 2023. This Saturday’s Record Store Day will see the usual yearly clamour for limited vinyl editions, with over 400 records by the likes of the 1975, Taylor Swift, Ellie Goulding and more set to go on sale.
Keen to make the most of a seemingly steady revenue stream, labels have begun increasing production on limited and deluxe repressings of popular albums. Anniversary reissues – once only common to recently remastered records, or albums several decades old – are now becoming popular for releases that are just five years old, such as Cardi B’s Invasion of Privacy, Phoebe Bridgers’ Stranger in the Alps, Lucy Dacus’ Historian and Idles’ Brutalism. They’ve all been repressed in coloured formats or with alternate sleeves in the past two years, often at a slightly increased price point to standard black discs.
It’s in keeping with a frantically shortening nostalgia cycle that’s seen frenzied media coverage of supposed emo and “indie sleaze” revivals and music publications churning out cheap anniversary content – although these repressings seemingly offer little to the consumer other than a coloured disc. But Hannah Carlen and Ali Murphy – marketing directors for heavy-hitting indie conglomerate Secretly Group, which released Bridgers’ album – insist that fifth anniversary pressings allow artists to “give new fans something, and say ‘you’re welcome here too – you don’t have to be a day one fan’,” says Carlen.
Bridgers’ album hadn’t been repressed on coloured vinyl – demand for which vastly outstrips black vinyl – since 2019. In the intervening years, she broke through to the mainstream with her second album Punisher and found a swathe of new fans thanks to collaborations with Taylor Swift, SZA and Paul McCartney. Last year, it was rereleased in a run of 10,000 “galaxy-coloured” records. An anniversary “acknowledges that there’s been a lot of new fans over that span of time, and maybe they haven’t gotten access to something special, or when they’ve looked for it on eBay it’s $200,” says Carlen. (Original coloured pressings of Stranger have sold for upwards of £600 on the vinyl resale website Discogs.) “We don’t want to relegate people to a crazy inflated secondhand market.”
Lawrence Montgomery, managing director of Rough Trade record shops, concurs: anniversary pressings with alternate covers or vinyl colours, he says, are in tune with “demand from customers for unique vinyl pressings”.
“I think it’s about the reaction to streaming and digital consumerism,” he says. “Streaming is really good for vinyl sales because people can discover artists much more easily than they could in the past – when you then want to buy something to reaffirm your love of an artist, you want something more special.” During Covid, he says, many consumers began to use money they would have once spent on gig tickets on vinyl; at the same time, collectors have become “very savvy about finding what the best variant in the market is”.
In a crowded market, a limited edition repressing can also help a record get noticed by music shops with limited stock space. With a different barcode and catalogue number to a standard repressing, distributors can resolicit it for distribution. “The timeline of a record has changed so drastically,” says Ali Murphy. “Twenty years used to be the span of time in which people were celebrating a record, and now it’s got so much shorter, not only due to the quickness of everything coming out.”
For millennial music fans, the boom in anniversary content may feel like an exploitation of their recent youth. But Montgomery says that a younger contingent of fans is rivalling audiophiles and DJs as a significant market for vinyl, thanks to pop artists like Taylor Swift and Lana Del Rey, who turn their albums into collectibles through the release of multiple alternate album covers or disc colours, and #VinylTok, a TikTok tag that creators use to showcase their collections and obsess over special editions. “We’ve done really well this year with Boygenius, Lana Del Rey, Caroline Polachek, Taylor,” he says.
Although coloured vinyl reissues can combat the arguably overinflated secondhand market, some consumers have still perceived a sense of engineered scarcity with the most popular records. Ben Van Woerkom, a 26-year-old record collector from New Zealand, says that he’s felt fatigue seeing how many new variants and anniversary pressings are hitting the market. “I think we’re at a point where we’ll reach too [high a volume] of people talking about and obsessing over what’s best and what’s new,” he says. “People will give up on vinyl altogether – it’ll just implode. I’ve been feeling pretty pessimistic about it. I’m spending too much money trying to get the ‘ultimate collection’, or whatever.”
He points to Charli XCX’s fifth anniversary pressing of her 2017 album Pop 2 as one example of a record that was “really hard to find because it’s only been pressed once”, but which is now being rereleased at a premium. “You clearly didn’t press enough in the original pressing, right? Or it was before people were collecting vinyl as aggressively, and there wasn’t VinylTok? The more I see VinylTok, the more I see people [buying multiple pressings], the more I’m seeing things I want that are sold out or that I would have to pay an inflated price for.”
Given the backups at vinyl pressing plants, do these reissues threaten to crowd out newer products? Carlen says that although Secretly is investing more in catalogue, “we’re doing everything we can to support new releases” and that “the vinyl and physical element of this are always part of a larger plan. I don’t want to get tunnel vision [focusing on] vinyl colours.”
Where, I ask, does it stop – will we be seeing one-year anniversary pressings soon? Murphy laughs, considering the blockages at pressing factories: “I don’t even know how we’d make it in time.”
