Sony’s Vinyl Comeback After Nearly 30 Years
It’s back in demand.
In 1929, the American Record corporation—the company that, after a long chain of mergers and acquisitions, would eventually become Sony Music Entertainment—put out its first record.
Sixty* years after that, having reached the top of the industry, Sony quietly stopped printing records altogether. It was time to evolve, and to leave vinyl behind in favor of their shiny, relatively new invention, the CD.
Earlier today—nearly thirty years later—they took it back. As Agence France-Presse reports, Sony Music Entertainment just announced that they’re going to start making records again, starting next March.
Sony are to begin producing vinyl again amid surging demand, almost 30 years after abandoning the format https://t.co/clE33AL0KZ pic.twitter.com/sU4VtU8F0u
— theQuietus (@theQuietus) June 29, 2017
Vinyl is making an undisputed comeback: as Forbes reported in April, sales are set to clear $1 billion this year, for the first time all millennium. Fans wax poetic about wax’s sound quality, and the physicality of interacting with an object rather than pressing a button.
New Sony discs will spin out of a factory southwest of Tokyo. They’ll include classic Japanese pop albums, as well as contemporary chart-toppers.
But first, the company needs to do some hiring—they are “scrambling to find older engineers familiar with how to make records,” AFP writes.
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*Correction: This post previously stated that Sony stopped producing vinyl “seventy years” after 1929—it was actually sixty years later, in 1989.
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