Keeping music alive one record at a time

Photos and story by: Milo Whitman

Bruno Dealmeida rifles through a stack of vinyl records. He selects Ray Charles’ “Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music” from the pile. He pulls the record from its sleeve and centers it on the turntable’s peg before gently setting it down. He takes a bottle of cleaning solution and sprays it around the record generously, making sure to get every groove. He turns the table on and drops a cylindrical arm onto the record as it spins. The arm has a long slit with felt on either side so that it doesn’t scratch the record. The arm is part of a VPI cleaning machine, essentially a vacuum that will suck the dust, debris and excess cleaning solution from the record.

Dealmeida takes the record from the turntable and holds it up at eye level. He rotates it side to side, up and down, noticing a few signs of damage. He returns the record to its sleeve and puts a price tag on the top-right corner. He writes “wear/condition” under the $4 tag. He will clean dozens of other records today, but only a few will get this premium cleaning – this is usually reserved for the rare or high-quality records, while others just get sprayed and hand-dried with a rag, but something about this record spoke to him. “Is it even worth it? It’s a $4 record,” Dealmeida asked himself. “My gut said ‘clean it on the machine, dude.’ I want the person who gets this to have the best possible, cleanest play for this album.”

Dealmeida, 50, has been an employee at Aladdin’s Antiques and Records on Holly Street in Bellingham, Washington for 14 years and has collected vinyl for most of his life. In high school, Dealmeida and a friend would go to a bookstore that had records in the back of the shop. “How awesome it would be to go back there,” he said. “I wish I could jump in a time machine.”

Just after he graduated high school, Dealmeida developed a love for film music. It was this growing passion for movie scores that made him want to collect more and more vinyl. “[It was] particularly my love for a composer named John Barry – that’s what got me hunting, collecting, and spending money that I can’t believe I was spending in the early 90s when vinyl was dead.”

He recalls going to record stores in Los Angeles, around that time and being taken aback by the number of records they’d have available. “They were like warehouses. They made Aladdin’s look small,” Dealmeida said. One store in particular “was like a warehouse with shelves up to the ceiling [with] thousands and thousands of records.”

His excitement for vinyl didn’t persist forever though, and Dealmeida has no loyalty to any specific format of music. Similar to many others at that time, he turned to CDs. He was listening to a lot of electronic music that wasn’t available on vinyl. But in the early 2000s, the internet reignited his desire to collect vinyl. Dealmeida recalls the internet enabled him to buy records that he couldn’t find at local stores, citing examples of film scores that were exclusively printed in England.

While the internet was helping Dealmeida bolster his collection, others started switching to streaming. Streaming was, and still is, cheaper and more accessible, but this hasn’t stopped vinyl’s resurgence. Vinyl record sales have grown for 17 consecutive years, according to the Recording Industry Association of America’s 2023 end-of-year statistics. In 2022, vinyl records outsold CDs for the first time since 1987, a record that was broken again in 2023.

Cory Blackwood, owner of Ritual Records on the corner of East Magnolia Street and Railroad Avenue in Bellingham, has been a collector for much of his life. Blackwood stopped buying physical media for a while because of the convenience of streaming, but he felt that it lacked authenticity. “I just felt less of a connection to the music. You can tell Apple or Spotify or whatever to put on a certain album, and you can hear it, but a lot of that experience is removed,” Blackwood said. “I was missing that.”

“I think people like the touch and the feel of physical media. I always loved seeing the artwork, having to open it, having to actually put the record on – it's one of the reasons the name of the store is Ritual Records,” Blackwood said, “there's a ritual to putting on the music. You kind of have to sit in that room. When it ends, you got to flip it over, all that. I think a lot of people are kind of drawn to that, whether they're fully conscious of it or not. There's just more to the experience than hitting play on your phone.”

Blackwood has observed that younger generations seem to be leading the resurgence of vinyl, though they’re not the only ones. “I’m in my 40s. There’s a lot of people my age or older that are buying records all the time, but I do see a lot of college kids coming in to buy music,” Blackwood said. “And then I see kids like my 13-year-old daughter coming in and buying records too. So yeah, it’s definitely blowing up.”

Blackwood cites artist compensation as another reason that vinyl and physical media are seeing a comeback. Spotify pays artists $0.003-$0.005 per stream, according to a Ditto Music study from December, 2023.

“It’s laughable. If you’re not, you know, Taylor Swift or something, you’re essentially making no money on that,” Blackwood said about streaming payout rates. He said that buying physical versions of an artist's music is “the easiest way to actually support the artists you like and allow them to continue making the music that you love and appreciate.”

Alec Strand, 59, is a Bellingham resident who studied music at Western Washington University and used to DJ weekly on KUGS, a radio show managed by Western students, using the name “Night Owl.” He now plays tuba in the North Cascade Concert Band. His interest in vinyl started early in his life. He grew up listening to his mother’s records, but his passion for reggae music and DJing inspired him to start collecting. Since then, he’s amassed a collection of around 1,500 vinyl records, which he stores in his garage. 

His garage has become the home of several relics, offering a glimpse into the past. In one corner sits a drum set surrounded by several tubas, all varying in age and condition. A music stand with pages of sheet music is planted alone near the middle of the room. A 20-year-old eMac computer lies dormant in another corner. Songs that aren’t available on iTunes anymore are installed on the eMac, justifying the space it takes up, but Strand is reluctant to use it too often for fear of it dying. To the left of the eMac, a TV is mounted to the wall with a Wii console connected. In another corner is a large wooden bookcase that holds much of his vinyl collection. His collection is vast, spanning centuries and featuring dozens of genres. Some of his rare records are worth hundreds. The shelves are packed full of records, all of which are protected by an extra plastic sleeve to protect the original cardboard sleeve from wear. The middle panel of the bookcase folds open to reveal a turntable and volume dials. On the ground in front of the bookcase are milk crates filled with records Strand takes to his occasional DJ gigs at Cabin Tavern in Bellingham.

Strand buys some popular, mainstream albums at the record stores in Bellingham, but vinyl’s recent increase in popularity has caused the “hunting” process to become crowded. This and the rising prices of records have led him to search for more obscure titles at thrift shops in the area. He says going to record stores and thrift shops is exciting, and the opportunity to find a record that fills a hole in his collection keeps him searching. He quotes the band Motorhead, saying “The Chase is Better Than the Catch,” though he doesn’t entirely agree. He knows collectors who play a record once and never again to preserve its quality, saying that can be “kind of annoying,” though he gets where they’re coming from. Ultimately, he wants to play the records he owns, even if it decreases their value.

Though Strand, Blackwood and Dealmeida share much of the same sentiment regarding music and vinyl, they all have differing opinions on what has become the most contentious question among collectors: Does vinyl sound better than digital formats? 

Blackwood says it does. He points to the “warmth” of vinyl’s sound that’s missing from digital. “[Vinyl] sounds and feels a little different. The way the sounds kind of blend together feels actually more organic.”

Strand prefers the sound of vinyl too, but he doesn’t know if he can tell a difference. “I know I like the feeling of a room that's full of music coming from a record. It's great to put a record on in a really nice room that's got a good turntable and set of speakers. So I always think that that sounds better than a CD. Even if it doesn't.”

Dealmeida thinks vinyl sounds different, but not better. He is less concerned with the format than he is with the music itself. “To me, it’s about the music. It’s about what we’re listening to and what we’re enjoying.”

Felicia Youngblood, an associate professor and musicology area coordinator at Western, feels that the “pops and cracks” add to the allure of vinyl. In 2017, Youngblood was getting her doctoral degree at Florida State University when her friend Haley Nutt, who was also studying at FSU and is now an instructor of musicology at Western, asked Youngblood to look after some of her belongings for a summer, including a record player. Youngblood fell in love with it. When Nutt collected her belongings and her record player, Youngblood couldn’t go without one. She started her own collection, citing “Purple Rain” by Prince and The Revolution as the first record she bought. “In true musicologist fashion,” Youngblood said, her collection has grown into a “little bit of everything.” 

Youngblood looks at physical media not so much from a preservation angle, but from a sustainability framework. “When I hear ‘preserve,’ I think ‘keep something exactly as it is, never let it change.’ But that in and of itself isn’t sustainable.” 

She says that music, like everything around us, is always changing. Records and physical media allow us to see a specific moment in time. “It's almost like a connection with former generations. [It] gives people a sense of self, a sense of history, cultural importance, when they're able to do these things that their parents [and] their grandparents were able to do.”

“I think that it's important to have a more comprehensive understanding of people and music throughout time and place,” Youngblood added. “Sustaining some of these things, like keeping vinyl records, allows us to better understand ourselves throughout time. It provides new doorways of understanding.”