Sony producing vinyls again

For nearly three decades, Sony's vinyl plant near Tokyo has been empty. However, the company is now to revive its factory in Japan, thanks to an increased interest in vinyl records, which has been a global trend in the past years. The first vinyls will leave the factory in March 2018, AFP reports.

The company has decided to make this step as there is only one vinyl record manufacturer in Japan at the moment – Toyocase, which hasn't been able to meet the great consumer demand for some time now. Another Japanese giant, Panasonic, revived the production of its Technics SL-1200 turntable a while ago, thanks to the great demand for vinyl records.

Sony stopped producing vinyl records back in 1989, as there was no longer a demand for the format. Consumers had fully switched to CDs by then, and Sony was the main “culprit” as one of the main players in the world market in developing and producing compact discs, which had also pushed aside another popular format – cassettes.

Until the late 80s, Japan was one of the biggest producers of vinyl records in the world. In the late 70s, for example, as many as 200 million records were produced in Japan annually.

Although no one expected it, vinyl has come back to life in the past years, whereas CDs have completely lost the battle, as the world has switched to digital music consumption, first through downloading and then through streaming.

As last year's reports show, while the sale of CDs, as well as digital downloads, is dropping dramatically, the demand for records is constantly increasing. Let us remind that 2016 was the best year for vinyl records in the past 25 years. In Great Britain alone, the sales reached their quarter-century peak, with three million records sold, whereas the number amounts to 13.1 million globally, a growth of 10% compared to 2015. It is estimated that the music industry will earn over a billion dollars from record sales alone in 2017.

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