Vinyl isn’t coming back. It’s over, man

I can remember, about 40 years ago, my parents’ generation experiencing a surge in spirits when it looked as if young people were cutting their hair short again. The long nightmare that began when The Beatles went barmy looked to be coming to a close. That nice Mr Rotten would never send an MBE back to Queen Elizabeth.

Fat old gits love to believe the world is about to re-embrace the cultural fads of their youth. Just consider all those reports about the "return of vinyl". Heck, you're reading one right now. If you tweak this lever here, and pump that handle there, you can recalibrate your measuring machine to prove that – quoting the influential Pitchfork website – "Vinyl Sales Made More Money Than Free Streams Last Year".

This doesn't mean vinyl is more profitable than all streaming, of course. Unfulfilled grey men buying 180-gram reissues of Pretzel Logic are not generating more revenue than all those people signing up to Spotify Premium. It merely means such sales exceed the advertising income from the free services. Vinyl sales in the US rose 32 per cent, to take $416 million in 2015, while total revenue from streaming soared 29 per cent, to $2.4 billion.

Gatefold sleeves

Still, that’s something. Right? We are on our way back to a world of gatefold sleeves that, when splayed before three-bar fires, provide an ideal surface for the arrangement of prohibited herbs.

Didn't we read that Tesco is now stocking vinyl? Didn't Golden Discs report that vinyl sales increased by 500 per cent last year? It did. That's enough to be going on with.

Vinyl never entirely went away, of course. The 12-inch single remained at the heart of hip-hop culture. Mysterious “white labels” were treasured icons for DJs who relished the challenge of manipulating recordings by hand. There was always a mysterious section at the back of music shops where eccentrics could buy contemporaneous records on the endangered format.

But, by the end of the last century, the less-than-compact disc had been edged into the shadows by its shiny, neat successor. Now music as object has been superseded by inconsequential software.

Those of us old enough to remember life before the CD still secretly expect another format shift, but the technology does seem to have reached an ultimate destination.

The LP was more versatile and more portable than the 78rpm disc. The CD was more versatile and more portable than the LP. But nothing is more portable than, well, nothing. The ability to access virtually any track anywhere constitutes a degree of versatility unimagined by science-fiction authors. The inevitable improvement in sound quality is unlikely to involve the invention of any new pieces of flat plastic.

It is, therefore, hardly surprising that nostalgia for one form of recorded sound has kicked up a gear. We've gone beyond nostalgia and achieved full-on fetishisation. The current TV series, produced by Martin Scorsese, on the music industry in the 1970s could only be called Vinyl.

Consider what happens when a record is played in a contemporary movie (often before a moment of seduction). The inevitable shot of stylus descending towards groove is followed by a puzzling sound I don't remember hearing before 1998. A warm click bleeds into a comforting crackle. The noise no more accurately represents the ancient aural reality than The Adventures of Robin Hood represented the realities of 12th-century England.

Romance is stoked

The romance is stoked by awareness that the LP emerged in parallel with an unprecedentedly fecund period in popular music. The album sleeves produced, from the 1950s, by Blue Note for the era’s great jazz artists remain among the

[ most beautiful design artefacts ]

of the last century.

By the 1970s the album had become a cultural signifier. Excuses were found to stand at bus stops conspicuously clutching (if you were one sort of person) Live at the Witch Trials, by The Fall, or (if you were another) Tarkus, by Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Your mum may not let you dress like Poly Styrene, but you could brandish a copy of her Germfree Adolescents with relative impunity.

Forget about it. Those times aren't coming back. Some young people are buying vinyl, but they're the wrong young people. Take a glance at Noah Baumbach's recent comedy While We're Young. While the middle-aged folk squint at iTunes a downtown hipster, in the impeccably hipster form of Adam Brody, plays everything on wide black plastic. Vinyl is, to that lot, like vintage black bicycles, drinks served in jam jars and trilbies worn at an ironic angle. These things are interesting because they will never again be in the mainstream.

It’s over, man.