Hey, it's Alan, and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing

history of new music early and ad-free on Amazon music, included with Prime. I remember it

very clearly. It was December 1999, and I was on the radio talking about what kind of electronics

were worth buying with Christmas money. And I can recall saying something like this.

Given what's happening with digital music and CDs, this might be the last year you'll have a

chance to buy a turntable. So, if you still listen to a lot of records and need something to

play them on, consider getting a new turntable because by next year, they could be all gone.

Seriously, that's where we were back then. CDs ruled and vinyl was ancient history. And while a few people had heard about MP3s,

we were still over a year from Apple introduced in the iTunes Music Store. So vinyl was done,

dead. People were dumping their collections on

used record stores, leaving them at the back door of thrift shops in the dead of night,

giving them away to gullible friends or just throwing them away. Fast forward 10 years.

The music industry is in a tailspin. CD sales are dropping week after week.

Piracy is eating into the sales that remain. And revenue from the sale of music is shrinking and

shrinking and shrinking to the point where they're half what they were in 2000. Everywhere you look,

it's negative growth. Well, almost everywhere. After bottoming out in 2006, a very

strange thing happened. Sales of vinyl records started to go up. In 2008, sales had doubled.

By 2011, they doubled again, and doubled yet again by 2013.

Something weird was going on.

A format that was supposed to have been dead and buried a decade ago was somehow undergoing a fascinating resurrection.

Okay, so it still represented a tiny fraction of the overall market,

but it was growing, and it was profitable. And most

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