Why I Still Buy Records

I bought my first vinyl record in 2003, from a thrift store in Melbourne, for eighty cents. It was a scratched copy of Fleetwood Mac Rumours that was, by any reasonable assessment, unplayable. I took it home anyway, put it on my mother’s old turntable, and listened through the pops and scratches of “The Chain” three times in a row. I was fifteen years old. I did not know, yet, that I was about to spend the next twenty-three years of my life buying and listening to records.

I want to write, for once, a personal essay rather than a critical piece. I am going to try to explain why I still buy records in 2026, what I think the practice does for me, and why I am not going to stop.

What the practice is

I buy, on average, three or four records a month. The records come from specific sources: the new-releases rack at the Rose Bay record shop, the used-LP section at the Elizabeth Street op-shops, the Record Store Day drops when they are worth showing up for, specific online orders when something I want is not otherwise available. My listening setup is modest (a mid-range Rega turntable, an integrated amp, a pair of bookshelf speakers in my living room). The setup is not an audiophile setup. The setup is good enough that the records sound, to me, specifically the way I want music to sound.

The records do not replace streaming. I pay for Apple Music. I use it daily. I listen to most of the music I consume through streaming. The records are, specifically, additional to the streaming rather than a replacement for it.

What the practice does

I am not going to make the audiophile argument. The audiophile argument, as commonly made, is that vinyl records sound better than digital formats. This is, for most people with most records on most equipment, not actually true. A well-mastered CD or a high-quality digital file will reproduce music more accurately than a record will. The specific warmth and dynamics vinyl is often credited with are, in most cases, artifacts of the format’s specific compressions and distortions rather than fidelity to the original recording.

The audiophile argument is the wrong argument. Here is what the practice actually does for me.

It forces specific listening. A vinyl record, unlike a streaming playlist, cannot be easily skipped through. I can lift the needle and move it, but the specific physical act of doing so creates friction. The default behaviour, when I put on a record, is to listen to the whole side. This is not a small thing. It means I encounter the specific sequence the artist intended, including the deep cuts I might skip in a streaming context, including the slower tracks, including the specific transitions.

It slows the consumption. A record plays for roughly twenty minutes per side. After each side, I have to get up, turn the record over or change it. This creates a specific pause in the listening experience that streaming does not create. In the pause, I can look at the sleeve, think about what I have just heard, decide whether to continue. The pause is a feature, not a bug.

It decouples music from the algorithm. When I listen to records, I am listening to records I have specifically chosen. I am not being served recommendations, suggested playlists, or algorithmic continuations. The specific acquisition of a record, which usually involves a specific financial commitment and a specific physical transport home, is already a selection process. The music I own on vinyl is, almost by definition, the music I have cared enough about to own.

It preserves the album artwork. A 12-inch LP sleeve is roughly the correct size for album artwork to be legible. Streaming thumbnails are not. I have spent specific hours looking at specific album sleeves (Peter Saville’s Joy Division covers, Malcolm Garrett’s Buzzcocks work, the specific typography of Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks) in a way that streaming does not permit.

It gives the music a location. The records live in my apartment, on a specific shelf in the living room. They take up physical space. They accumulate dust. They require occasional cleaning. They are, in the specific way that streaming files cannot be, things I own. This has a specific effect on my relationship to the music. The music is not, to me, a cloud service. It is a collection of objects that I have chosen to live with.

Why I do not think this is nostalgia

Some critics of the vinyl revival have characterised the practice as nostalgia for a pre-digital music economy. This characterisation is, I think, incomplete. There are nostalgia elements in vinyl collecting, certainly. The specific smell of an old record sleeve, the physical ritual of dropping the needle, the aesthetic of the gatefold LP, these are all connected to a specific earlier moment in music-consumption history.

But the vinyl revival is not, primarily, a nostalgia practice. The median vinyl buyer in 2026 is in their twenties. They did not grow up with vinyl. They are not returning to a format they once knew. They are adopting a format they were never displaced from.

What they are adopting, I think, is the specific set of practices I have tried to describe above. The forced listening. The slowed consumption. The algorithmic decoupling. The physical-object relationship with music. These are not nostalgic features. They are responses to the specific structural features of streaming that younger listeners have found, on reflection, unsatisfying.

What streaming does well, that vinyl does not

I should be honest about the other direction. Streaming has specific virtues that records do not.

Discovery. I find new music on streaming that I would not encounter in a record shop. My Spotify (and now Apple Music) discovery algorithms have led me to specific artists I would not otherwise know.

Portability. I cannot carry a record to the gym. I can carry my phone.

Breadth. Streaming gives me access to roughly every major-label recording ever made. My record collection, large as it has become, is a small fraction of what streaming offers.

Convenience. Playing a record requires physical effort. Streaming requires a tap on a screen.

These are real advantages, and I use them daily. I am not an ideologue. I am a person who uses both forms for different purposes, and the purposes do not overlap as much as people usually assume.

What I want other people to do

I want people to buy five records a year. Not more, not as a new collecting hobby, just five records a year for the next five years. Buy records of albums you genuinely love, records you want to live with, records you want to hear in the specific way records make you hear them.

Not because vinyl is better. Not because streaming is bad. But because the practice of owning specific music, in specific physical form, changes your relationship to that music in ways I think are, on balance, worth having.

The music will still be on your phone. You will not lose anything by owning it twice. You will gain something specific, in the specific moments you choose to listen to the record rather than to the stream, that the stream cannot deliver.

Start with Rumours, if you like. That is where I started. It still sounds, on the scratched cheap copy I bought twenty-three years ago, like the specific record that got me started on the practice. I cannot recommend a better place to begin.