First the Twinkie rears its sugary self. Now record albums are seeing a “vinyl revival.” Is the rebirth of the IBM Selectric typewriter next?

In Britain, vinyl sales ($3.02 million) – those petroleum-based discs that you hold gingerly by the edges – eclipsed digital music downloads ($2.6 million) for week 48 of this year.

The news came from Britain’s Entertainment Retailers Association, suggesting the surge could be due to the Christmas shopping season and a growing number of British retailers making shelf space for vinyl.

“This is yet further evidence of the ability of music fans to surprise us all,” ERA chief Kim Bayley said in a statement, which was reported by the British newspaper, The Independent.

“Few would have predicted that an album format, first invented in 1948 and based on stamping a groove into a piece of plastic, would now be outselling it in 2016,” the Independent reported.

Even Amazon.com has gotten in on the act, announcing the launch of Amazon Vinyl Lounge for the purists.

Is this trend taking the United States by storm? Don’t dust off the antique turntable just yet.

“We love that people are consuming music in all these different ways,” said Joshua Friedlander, senior vice president for strategic data analysis at the Recording Industry Association of America. But he added that, “It’s important to temper the enthusiasm by saying this (vinyl sales) is just a single digit slice of the market.”


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