On a sunny Saturday earlier this year, I was bin diving at one of my favorite record shops, Vintage Vinyl in St. Louis, Missouri, when I witnessed something that seems to be happening more and more lately. The place was packed with women.
The longer I stayed, the more crowded the store got. In fact, the store clerk and I were the only men in the joint. At one point, I was elbow to elbow with two women in their 20s who each had designs on one of my favorite sections, 1970s reggae. One was pulling out Toots and the Maytals records, while the other was browsing the liner notes on a Jimmy Cliff album.
Across the isle was a 40-something mother with her teenaged daughters. They kept yelling at each other from different parts of the store, "We don’t have this Police record yet!" and "Is this Amy Winehouse decent?" St. Louis is a strange place, you might think. Well, it turns out that this scene isn’t so unusual. A few weeks later, I was at Love Garden Sounds in Lawrence, Kansas, where I met the store’s longtime record buyer/assessor, Katie Ashmore.
Ashmore is justifiably proud of the meticulous record-rating system she’s developed and cares deeply about helping each customer find the highest-quality vinyl at a fair price. After more than a decade in the business, Ashmore has watched the number of women who seriously care about records steadily grow. One of Love Garden’s owners, Laura Lorson, is so convinced that women are an important part of the market that she and her husband and co-owner Kelly Corcoran make sure the store is always staffed with women and that store associates drop the condescending boy’s-club attitude so wickedly portrayed by Jack Black in the movie High Fidelity.
Clearly, the record-store landscape is shifting, and maybe it’s time to reexamine assumptions about the demographics of who actually cares about sound quality. According to a number of research reports, 46% of the people who bought vinyl in 2017 were women. Let that sink in for a minute. That means nearly half of the more than 14 million people who are currently part of the great vinyl resurgence are not men.
In strictly economic terms, that’s a considerable slice of the pie for audio retailers to leave on the table. Yet, that’s exactly what some continue to do, the audio industry never being particularly inviting to female buyers. Maybe, with #timesup, the audio industry needs to get woke and take women a tad more seriously. Women like Erin, a former student of mine who reads equipment reviews. She just bought a pair of Oppo M1 headphones and is looking at an AudioQuest DragonFly digital converter for her iPhone 8. My friend Steve the Architect has a twenty-something daughter who just asked for what she called a "respectable" turntable for her birthday and regularly shares her latest record finds with the old man.
For those who are skeptical about all of this, you’d
be right in saying I was crazy if I claimed that crowds of women are panting to buy
$30,000 turntables or that many are dying to get their hands on yet another reissue of Kind
of Blue. Few of the women I've spoken to fetishize audio equipment. But they do love
music that sounds realistic and engaging; the equipment is simply a means to that end.
Maybe there’s a lesson there for the rest of us. |
