Vinyl was meant to have died decades ago, but has instead roared back to prominence. Duncan Greive walks through its long, strange history in New Zealand.

I used to have a dealer at a flat in Newton. A friend and I would go round in the evening and nervously buzz at the gate to a set of 90s townhouses. Once inside, he’d bring out the goods, and we’d settle into his couch for a couple of hours sampling what he had available. 

It was the early 2000s, and this dude had the best connection to fresh Jamaican dancehall 7”s of anyone we knew. It was near the peak of the genre’s biggest chart impacts, when Sean Paul, Elephant Man and Vybz Kartel had major crossover moments, and the sound profoundly influenced everyone from Rihanna to Lil Jon. 

But if you wanted to know what was happening in Kingston, this dude and his shoeboxes was the only way. The music didn’t exist on CD or the internet – these poorly pressed, paper-sleeved curios were the only door into this music we loved. That’s one of the things which kept vinyl alive as a medium and a culture in the 90s and 00s. For some music, scenes, labels and artists there was just no other way to stay connected. 

For the mainstream though, vinyl was a barely remembered curiosity – all but dead, killed by the CD, of interest only to society’s fringe and clogging up corners of op shops. The future was digital, first in downloads (music was free, regardless of what that cost musicians), then in streaming. In the background, something was brewing. Starting with Record Store Day in 2008, there was a small but perceptible uptick. 

Back from the dead

As the above chart shows, though, 2005 was the beginning of a scarcely believable growth curve, which saw what was assumed to be a defunct medium increase its sales almost 100-fold in the space of two decades. Vinyl appeared at JB Hifi, became a crucial part of every pop artist’s release plans, skyrocketed in price and availability (making it a rare Veblen good – one which increases in demand as it increases in price). Despite New Zealand’s last vinyl plant shutting down in 1987, recent years have seen two separate local manufacturers, Holiday Records and Stebbings, open their doors. 

How did this happen? Why did this cumbersome, expensive and questionably sustainable format come roaring back to relevance? That’s the question Charlotte Ryan set out to answer on The Long Play, a new four-part podcast from The Spinoff and Daylight, in partnership with Coffee Supreme, Holiday Records and Recorded Music New Zealand. It’s Ryan’s first big project since leaving her role as the beloved host of RNZ’s Music 101, and sees her telling the more than century-long history of vinyl in this country. We get the rise, fall and renewal, along with perspectives from all the constituencies involved in its revival. Young fans, DJs, bands, label owners and record stores, with me along for the ride.

The story that emerges is fascinating and very much of this era. It’s in part a reaction to the shrinking of culture down to binary code and phones becoming the centre of everything. There’s something about how fragile, cumbersome and truly physical vinyl is, in contrast to the apps and AI era, which is undeniably part of this story. 

Christoph El Truento is a DJ, artist and true believer in vinyl, and articulates its appeal well on The Long Play. “It feels like that should have been the peak of technology,” he tells us. “I still don’t understand how you can take audio and stamp it into a physical piece of plastic, and it’s like there inside that piece of plastic all of a sudden… That’s the height of human achievement, is what I feel. How did we do that? It’s magic.”

Within the story, what emerges is that our attachment to vinyl is also partly about what it forces us to do. Playing a record is deliberate, requires a physical action and requires an attention span longer than a Reel or TikTok. It can feel like an act of resistance to the way music can seem like just another form of user-generated content for the tech companies that define how we interact with the world now. 

It’s not uncomplicated. Most records are pressed on plastic, and the cost means many fans who would like to participate in the vinyl revival can’t begin to imagine how. And because every part of the chain is more expensive now, from manufacturing to shipping to distribution, those high prices often don’t automatically mean greater returns to artists and labels. 

While some argue that vinyl has superior sound to digital formats, there are just as many who believe the reverse, and more still who just can’t hear a difference. It’s also slightly strange to put so much energy and money into a technology which was surpassed for convenience in the 80s, and became almost anachronistic in the 00s. For some musicians and fans, vinyl is a sideshow – culture moves on, and for all its flaws, streaming represents where music lives and breathes right now.

Like magic

It might, even now, be a niche pursuit. As much as it’s grown, vinyl still represents a tiny share of recorded music revenues, and of listening. Many buyers don’t even own a record player, and buy it for the artwork, or as a collector’s item unto itself, with its utility beside the point. But for the tragics, the slightly mystical quality is precisely what makes it so compelling – and essentially unique for some of its biggest retailers. 

“We’re still selling albums that came out 60 years ago on the format they came out 60 years ago,” says JB Hi-Fi’s Karl Lock. “There’s nothing else in our business that’s like that. We sell new technology, the latest iPhones – but we’re selling this old, almost 100-year-old technology.”

We live in an ultra-optimised world, with many goods and services a few clicks or swipes away (if you have the money). Vinyl suggests a reverence for culture that is hard to sustain on social and streaming platforms. When it first arrived in Aotearoa, hundreds gathered to Christchurch in 1879 to hear the first gramophone to land on these shores. In decades to come we went through milestones like the first recorded music (waiata Māori in 1927), the first local label (TANZA – To Assist New Zealand Artists) and local hit (Pixie Williams’ Blue Smoke from 1949). 

The story of recorded music can be told in formats. Shellac gave way to vinyl, which gave way to CDs before downloaded mp3s reigned briefly ahead of streaming’s arrival. Of those, none lasted so long as records, which were the most popular form for decades. And while there has been a revival of all physical forms – teens priced out of vinyl are buying CDs, while even cassettes have their adherents – none has attracted the kind of devotion LPs generate. In The Long Play, Ryan speaks to young people who’ve dropped $150 on a 7” single, the generation of teenagers onboarded by Taylor Swift’s vinyl variations, as well as older collectors who suddenly find themselves surrounded.

All that surging demand – yet getting it made was a challenge for decades due to the lack of any local manufacturers. EMI’s legendary plant shut in the late 80s, with a rumour that part of it ended up in the Manukau harbour. A cottage industry persisted, with the Geraldine hand-cutting lathe records in tiny runs. But the end of EMI’s plant should have been the end of domestic vinyl pressing. 

And was, until Ben Wallace tried to get a record pressed for his tiny folk band. An indifferent response from an Australian plant led to him reaching out to a friend in lawyer Joel Woods, with the pair ultimately founding Holiday Records, which now produces thousands of LPs each week – both small runs for local artists and huge numbers for the biggest stars in pop. Demand has been so keen that Stebbings, one of the most revered names in New Zealand recording, started their own plant a few years later.

It’s a connection back to the foundational days of recording in this country, a tradition nearly a century old which looked to have moved forever into a digital realm not long ago. But this form – expensive, unwieldy and largely unchanged in a century – has a peculiar hold on the human imagination. That’s the story Charlotte Ryan set out to tell with The Long Play, with significant help from Daylight’s Charlie Godinet. 

It’s a four-part podcast which documents the rise, fall and revival of the format. And thanks to Holiday Records, it is itself pressed onto vinyl: one episode per side, distributed throughout an astounding 40 of Aotearoa’s record stores. And not just any vinyl – we used Holiday’s BioVinyl, with sustainable materials and a manufacturing process that minimises both waste and energy consumption. If you find a copy, it’s yours – they’ll be hidden away in their crates from this Saturday. 

Much like making records, it’s been a fiddly process, one which doesn’t quite make sense. But that’s essentially the point. Telling the story of these irrational objects, how they survived a near-death experience and the emotions they bring out in a small but somehow still growing group of devotees.