Randy’s Records Helping Customer Spin Tunes For Decades

SALT LAKE CITY, Utah – The sales of vinyl records has skyrocketed since the mid-2000s.

In 1993, records were effectively dead, with only about 300,000 of them being sold per year. This year, though, that number will pass 17 million.

The trend keeps growing — especially with the younger generation.

The folks at Randy’s Records, 157 E. 900 South, have been helping customers spin tunes for more than four decades, but it was slow going in the vinyl department during the period when artists decided digital was the wave of the future.

That future is now stamped with a staple of the past.

“People have really latched back onto physical media,” said Jared Soper of Randy’s Records. “Of course people are still steaming stuff on their phone, but there’s nothing quite like having the physical thing and connecting with it and actually listening to it physically.”

Soper said Randy’s Records gets brand-new vinyl from current artists into the store every day. They also pout out approximately 80 used records to thumb through as well.

It’s a small business success story in Salt Lake City showing that, despite streaming technology that dominates media, people long for a physical connection — even with music.

Record sales now make up 20% of all album sales, although that number drops to 3% when you consider most music consumers buy one song at a time — if they buy at all.