Vinyl records, paper books, glossy magazines — all should be long dead, but they're refusing to go away and even showing some surprising growth. It's probably safe to assume that people will always consume content in some kind of physical shell — not just because we instinctively attach more value to physical goods than to digital ones, but because there will always be demand for independence from the huge corporations that push digital content on us.
According to the Recording Industry Association of America, vinyl album sales grew 12.9 percent in dollar terms to $224 million and 6 percent in unit terms to 8.6 million in the first half of 2019, compared with the first six months of 2018. Compact disc sales held steady, and if the current dynamic holds, old-fashioned records will overtake CDs soon, offsetting the decline in other physical music sales. Streaming revenue grew faster for obvious reasons: It's cheaper and more convenient. But people are clearly not about to give up a technology that hasn't changed much since the 1960s.
In 2018, hardcover book sales in the United States increased by 6.9 percent, paperback sales went up 1.1 percent and e-book sales dropped 3.6 percent. The number of print magazine titles published in the U.S. rose to 7,218 from 7,176, according to the Association of Magazine Media. That's more magazines than the U.S. had in 2009. For all the havoc the digital revolution is wreaking on newsrooms, people are still starting new titles — and 96 percent of the magazine industry's subscription revenue still came from the print editions, with digital providing the rest.