Every year since about 2015, someone writes a think piece declaring the vinyl revival is finally over. That we’ve all had our fun playing pretend with our parents’ format and it’s time to go back to Spotify where we belong. And every year, the numbers tell a different story.

The ARIA figures for 2025 showed vinyl sales in Australia grew another 8% year on year. That’s on top of steady growth for the better part of a decade. We’re not talking about a fad. We’re talking about a format that has proven, repeatedly, that it fills a need streaming simply can’t.

I’ve run this shop in Melbourne for over twenty years. I’ve seen the CD collapse, the download era, the streaming takeover, and the slow, stubborn return of vinyl. I have opinions about why it’s happening, and they’ve got nothing to do with nostalgia.

Streaming Made Music Disposable. Vinyl Makes It Physical Again.

Here’s the thing nobody in the tech world wants to hear: streaming is brilliant for access and terrible for connection. When you can play literally anything at any time, nothing feels special. There’s no commitment, no investment, no ritual.

Vinyl forces you to slow down. You pick an album. You put it on. You sit with it. You hear the surface noise, the slight warmth in the low end, the way the mastering is different from the digital version. You look at the cover art at full size instead of a thumbnail on your phone. You read the liner notes.

That experience isn’t a gimmick. It’s the reason people keep coming back.

Australian Labels Are Leading the Way

One of the things that makes me genuinely optimistic is the quality of Australian vinyl releases right now. Labels like Flightless Records continue to push boundaries with their pressings — coloured variants, gatefold sleeves, inserts that actually add to the experience. They understand that vinyl isn’t just a delivery mechanism. It’s a product.

Milk! Records has been doing incredible work with local artists. Hopscotch Records in Canberra is pressing some of the most interesting electronic music in the country on wax. Even smaller operations like Poison City are keeping the punk and hardcore vinyl pipeline alive and thriving.

And then there’s the reissue market. Australian jazz, post-punk, and psych records from the ’70s and ’80s are being lovingly reissued by labels that actually care about the audio quality. I had a customer last week pick up a Lobby Loyde reissue that sounded better than any pressing I’d heard of that album. That’s not nostalgia — that’s craft.

The Demographics Have Shifted

The narrative used to be that vinyl buyers were all blokes in their 40s and 50s chasing records they grew up with. That hasn’t been true for years. Our customer base skews younger than it did in 2018. A lot younger.

The biggest growth segment I see in the shop is people in their early 20s who grew up entirely in the streaming era and are actively choosing to buy vinyl as their primary way of engaging with music they care about. They’re not buying everything on vinyl — they still stream plenty. But the records they love? They want the physical object.

I had a 22-year-old come in last Saturday looking for Hiatus Kaiyote’s “Mood Valiant” on vinyl because she’d worn out her digital copy and wanted something she could hold. That’s not a trend. That’s a relationship with music.

It’s Not About Audio Quality

I need to be honest here because the audiophile crowd won’t like this: most people aren’t buying vinyl because it sounds better. In a controlled listening test, most people can’t reliably distinguish between a well-mastered vinyl pressing and a high-bitrate digital file. That’s fine. That was never really the point.

The point is the experience. The intentionality. The act of choosing to play something rather than letting an algorithm decide for you. Every time someone comes into the shop and asks me to recommend something, they’re making a choice that Spotify’s Discover Weekly can’t replicate. They’re trusting a human being who knows their taste, not a recommendation engine trained on aggregate listening data.

The Economics Are Getting Better

For years, the vinyl supply chain was the biggest bottleneck. Limited pressing plant capacity globally meant long wait times and high minimum orders. That’s slowly improving. New pressing plants have opened in Australia and New Zealand, and the existing ones have expanded capacity.

Costs are still higher than they were pre-2020 — PVC pricing hasn’t fully normalised — but the margins for independent stores have actually improved. Labels are doing more direct-to-store distribution, cutting out the middle layers that ate into everyone’s profit. I’m seeing better wholesale pricing on Australian releases than I was three years ago.

Where It Goes From Here

I don’t think vinyl will ever return to being the dominant format. It doesn’t need to. What it needs to be is sustainable — for pressing plants, for labels, for stores, and for artists.

Right now, it is. The customers are there. The product quality is high. The infrastructure is catching up. And the fundamental appeal — owning something physical in a world that’s increasingly intangible — isn’t going away.

Every time someone walks into my shop, flips through a crate, pulls out a record they’ve never heard of, and asks me about it, I’m reminded that this format isn’t surviving on momentum. It’s surviving because it offers something that nothing else does.

The algorithms don’t know that. But the people buying records do.