Why the Vinyl Revival May Broaden the Tastes of Our Younger Music Listeners

Shôn Ellerton, February 6, 2026
Today’s young music listeners live in a very narrow tunnel of music choice because of streaming services algorithms. The re-emergence of vinyl may change all that.

Have you ever tried to introduce today’s new young generation into listening to songs by popular artists which are not their number one hits?

For example, take the hit track by The Police, Every Breath You Take, or Starship’s We Built This City and Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now, or Simple Mind’s big hit, Don’t You (Forget About Me).

All of these tracks dwarf the number of all their other tracks in terms of listens on popular platforms like Spotify and Tidal. And this is a great pity, because it leaves out so many other great tracks that hardly get explored by the new streaming generation.

These days, instead of discovery by accident, it is discovery by algorithm.

For example, the great prog-rock group, Yes, in which their most popular track in number of listens on Spotify is Owner of a Lonely Heart. Seriously, this is an utter travesty. To equate Yes with that song? But, I suppose it’s simple and radio-friendly and doesn’t require one’s undivided attention to take in a genuine masterpiece. A true Yes fan would probably put Close to the Edge at the top but with around 9 million listens compared to nearly 400 million for Owner of a Lonely Heart, it is a depressing statistic.

Now, this all came about because there’s a lot of 80s stuff going on these days. A big 80s revival of sorts. Just the other weekend, our local council put up a free-to-enter 80s music family day at one of our public parks. I happen to love music from every decade, but what makes the 80s stand out with respect to our new young generation is that it really stands out in terms of harmony and musicality. They’re insanely hummable and easy to remember unlike the more experimental 90s, famous for its grunge, industrial and electronica music. Anything after the 2000s, apart from the exotic, the esoteric, alternative, or ‘proper’ electronica, is, in general, tiresome and boring. Endless tracks of boys and girls groups using voice samplers trying to be hip re-using melodies that were cast in the experimental age of the electronic 90s. Cringe, cringe, cringe!

Spotify and other audio streaming services have literally killed off the concept album. Remember the days before streaming services in which albums were rated rather than songs?

Here’s an example.

Remember that 80s group, Tears for Fears?

From various Reddit feeds and popular forums of Tears for Fears fans, when it comes to what Tears for Fears albums are the best, it usually turns out to be their 1989 album, The Seeds Of Love. However, when it comes to streaming services, it’s a different kettle of fish. Ask most who randomly stream 80s stuff on Spotify to play a Tears for Fears track, it will undoubtedly be Everybody Wants to Rule the World.

I bet you every time!

The most boring thing you can do is to search up Spotify and ask for a playlist of best 80s tracks. And yes, you will be force-fed all these same tracks over and over again. If you look at what artist is coming up, you know what will be played. The same old line-up of number one hits.

And this is just one grand example of how having too much choice limits us on what we play.

A ten-year-old back in the 80s will know so much more about music than a ten-year-old today. This is not the fault of the ten-year-old, but rather the fault of human nature wanting to be affixed to something that we already know, like or trust.

Through algorithms!

I was bought up in the 80s and I had my little turntable which I proudly had in my bedroom. However, I had, perhaps a few LPs, and nothing else. Some of my other friends had a music player or something else to play music on, and when they came over to visit me, they brought their music with them. Moreover, my mother had quite a nice collection of LPs and I, not having anything else to play, had to try them all out. Turned out that most of them were really great records.

Discovery by accident!

But today, kids don’t have a chance to have this new wave of exploration. They simply don’t. They’re tied to the popularist votes of the hit songs of the day, which further exacerbates the problem because these songs get yet more votes for being popular. Not voted because they’re the best song done by the artist, but only voted for because they’re often the only song by the artist which they know. The statistics pile up very quickly like a snowball rolling down a hill getting bigger. The one most popular song quickly rises and yet, anything else down the pecking order is far left behind.

Paradoxically, our endless choice of music on streaming services is counterproductive to finding new stuff to listen to if one relies on popular playlists and following the algorithms set by the streaming platforms. Many never ask the question,

‘Hmm, what other songs does this group play?’ or

‘I wonder what listening to the whole album is like?’

In my younger years, we did not have the cursed luxury of limitless streaming services. If you liked a particular track and you wanted to own it, you bought the record from your local shop. But being limited to what you can play as dictated by the size of your record collection and not wanting to waste money on a piece of vinyl without knowing what else is on it, you will listen to the entire album. And, quite often, there’s other material on that record which may be as good or even better than the one you heard off the radio. But alas, there are those occasional duds where all the other tracks are crap.

However, there might be a change in the air.

One can’t help noticing an uptake in our young generation getting into vinyl. It is surprising to see high street shops like JB Hi-Fi in Australia doing really well with vinyl sales. Naturally, we’ve always had boutique vinyl shops selling new and used vinyl, but to see the re-emergence of vinyl in mainstream chain stores is almost bizarre. And it’s mainly young people spending alarming amounts of money on vinyl, some records selling at more than one-hundred bucks a pop. Granted, today’s new vinyl is of very high quality instead of some of the rubbish we had back in the 90s when sourcing quality vinyl was difficult to come by. In the 90s, the Czech Republic and France made the most vinyl which comprised less than two percent of all music sales.

Vinyl almost died during the 90s but audiophiles and DJs kept the pulse beating until its revival during the last twenty years.

Equally surprising is to see the sales of turntables in mainstream shops like JB Hi-Fi. They’re not particularly great turntables, but they’re turntables all the same. I certainly wouldn’t want to subject a new bit of vinyl worth a hundred bucks to a low-grade stylus. However, Technics, famous for its DJ-standard direct-drive turntables have introduced an amazing range of direct-drive turntables, the SLP-1210GR for example, which now rival some of the best belt-driven turntables to date.

I think this is truly fascinating stuff.

But to get back on to my point of how we select the best music, getting back into records may broaden the music tastes of our younger generation. Perhaps, they want to experience something that, somehow, became lost to them. Something, their parents had but not them.

Back in my day, vinyl collecting was the only sensible option for getting high-quality music, but today’s lossless high-resolution audio files had changed all that. The true audiophile with the right equipment will arguably state that the quality from vinyl is not as good. It’s flawed on so many counts. But equally so, there is nothing very tactile about an electronic file, and neither is it collectable.

I’m very curious to see what happens in the next ten years or so.

Will vinyl keep getting more popular, or are we just seeing a sort of Vinyl 2.0 fad?

But a more interesting question is this.

If vinyl continues to grow and more young people are listening to their records rather than through paid subscription services for material they can never own, what will the statistics look like for what is played the most in Spotify?

Will we have the most popular track of a group remain as a far overachiever in terms of listens relative to the next popular down the list?

What will our playlists sound like?

Will we have more variety?

Instead of getting the usual one track played by a group, for example, Every Breath You Take by the Police, perhaps, we might get several others instead.

On the whole, the vinyl revival is a good thing. It’s not for me, however. My vinyl collecting days are over unless I stumble on some bit of used vinyl which I’m after selling at a good price. But what it may do is open up the horizons of today’s younger listeners by enticing them to listen to something not delivered to them through an algorithm. To explore by accidental discovery what else is on that very expensive piece of vinyl.