According to the Recording Industry Association of America, a trade organization representing the music industry, 2022 was the first year that vinyl outsold CDs since 1988, and sales overall increased by 20 percent from the previous year. The resurgence could be part of an overall return to simplicity, as typewriters, ’90s-’00s-era digital cameras, and board games have also seen a spike. But it could also be something beyond nostalgic appeal.
As media studies scholar Roy Shuker found in his survey of record collectors, there’s no one reason that people are drawn to vinyl albums, but “the thrill of the obsession, linked to accumulation and completism; at times a preoccupation with rarity and economic value; and a concern for cultural preservation” are some of the most commonly shared ones. But for a hobby with so many reasons propelling it, there’s one stereotype about it that persists—that most record collectors are men. Most of Skuker’s respondents agreed that record collecting is seen as “largely a male activity.” And if that’s true, why?
The answer may be in how stereo equipment was marketed originally.
Before World War I, there was nothing inherently masculine about recorded music, explains cultural historian Keir Keightley. But by the 1960s, “home audio sound reproduction equipment had hardened into masculinist technologies par excellence.” The high-fidelity stereo, soon to be known as “the hi-fi,” had become popular with the introduction of the long-playing records (LPs) in 1948. And while LPs weren’t marketed as masculine, hi-fis were. As Keightley notes, a 1953 Life magazine article explains that “[o]ne of the strangest facts about both [hi-fi] bugs and audiophiles is that they are almost exclusively male…women seldom like hi fidelity.”
Audio equipment manufacturers weren’t doing anything to refute that premise. They capitalized on the trend by selling hi-fi DIY kits so that men could assemble their own stereos. This spurred the adoption of component systems, so that “even the man who was not electronically skilled could participate by selecting the various components (turntable, tuner, amp, speakers, etc.) of a system,” Keightley writes.