Leader comment: Why record number of people are buying vinyl records

People queue outside a record shop. Rex/Shutterstock

That moment of anticipation in the beautiful, crackly crunch of the stylus touching down; the near-ritual care taken in handling '“ fingertips and only on the edges; the great canvass for art that is the album sleeve.

Once it seemed the tangible pleasures of vinyl records were very much in the past, the future of sound was assuredly online. Or so we thought.

The resurgance of vinyl sales is challenging assumptions that the march of progress always goes forward. Some say the sound quality of analogue is better than the zeroes and ones of digital, others struggle to tell the difference.

But the trend is perhaps more an indication that there’s something about the wider experience that we like.

A record gently persuades you to listen to the whole album, skipping ahead to the next track being more difficult than a simple press of a virtual button.

It is, in modern parlance, a ‘curated’ experience with songs that lack immediate appeal able to grow on the listener.

By contrast, the online world provides myriad often disjointed experiences and those that attract the most attention are not always the most worthy of it.