“Vinyl Record” or just “Record”?

I use the terms “vinyl records” and “records” interchangeably on both my YouTube channel and in my writing, and I will occasionally receive a comment or inquiry from a viewer or reader as to why. Sometimes, viewers or readers will deliver the question more as a statement, saying “they are records, not vinyl records” or “We didn’t call them vinyl records back then, so why call them that now?”. The ‘back then” in the latter comment refers to any time before the year 2000. I’ll use 2000 as the dividing point because it’s an even number (and, unbelievably, almost a quarter century ago) and works well with my explanation. This is the first time I’ve addressed why, so from this point forward, I’ll direct the commenter and inquiry to this post. Feel free to do the same if you’re reading this.

There are two reasons I use “vinyl record” more often than simply “record”. The first is one familiar with anyone who writes to publish and wishes their writing to be seen – SEO. For those unfamiliar with the term, whom I have to assume are also the ones who cringe at the addition of “vinyl” to “record”, it means Search Engine Optimization. I’m not going to get into the strategies behind the use of SEO here as that belongs somewhere else and not on a site about “vinyl records” (see what I did there?). In a nutshell, it’s so search engines like Google and Bing and AI-driven engines like Perplexity can link searches to the proper articles. YouTube (owned by Google) works the same way. A user will type a search term, and the engine will connect the user with the results relative to the term. In this case, “vinyl records”. More searches for “records” add the clarifier “vinyl” than not.

This leads me to the second reason I often use the same clarifier. Folks born after 2000, or around there, did not live in a world where records meant “vinyl records”. The majority of that population receives music delivered digitally. They may have been exposed to CDs when they were young, but most of the music they listen to comes from subscription services or even YouTube. It’s why when my daughter was five years old, she asked why I had a black CD in a frame on the wall. She had never seen a 45.

For those of us over a certain age, we listened to records, cassettes, CDs, or 8-track tapes. It went without saying what a record was. 

When I created this website and YouTube channel, I landed on the name “The Joy of Vinyl” as a play on “The Joy of Cooking” (remember that book?). I added “Records” to the logo and the channel name to avoid being mistaken for a vinyl fetish site. I could have called it “The Joy of Records”, but that wouldn’t be succinct enough. When a young artist announces the release of a record today, they are not talking about a vinyl record (although some do). For them, records are a group of songs released digitally to be consumed in whatever format the listener prefers,

For me, it’s vinyl. And I find joy in that.