Dave Castleman has devoted most of his life to the record industry—selling records, not making them. He started working at vinyl shops in 1976, spending his formative years with Plastic Fantastic and eventually becoming its vice president. For 40 years, countless Main Line music fans filled out their collections with new and used vinyl from the beloved Bryn Mawr retailer, which later went by the name Gold Million Records and finally closed its doors in 2018.
By then, Castleman had his own shop. And while he sees his almost 50 years in the business as a noble pursuit, it hasn’t been without its struggles. In the 1990s, compact discs—with their durability and crystal-clear sound—supplanted vinyl as the mode of choice for music consumers. LP sections shrunk drastically in size and disappeared altogether in most shops.
But Castleman never lost hope, even in the lean years. He and business partner Mike Notaro opened the original Shady Dog Record & Disc Exchange in Narberth in 1993. “We had vinyl even then,” says Castleman. “When we get the right stuff, the collectors have always been there.”
It wasn’t just consumers buying into CD technology that snuffed out vinyl. Back in the ’80s, major-label distributors stopped providing credit when retailers returned their unsold inventory. So shop owners—especially the chains—would only order titles they knew would sell and started stocking more CDs and cassettes (remember those?). Meanwhile, record companies also eliminated many vinyl titles from production and distribution, prompting the closure of pressing plants. Experts rightly saw this as a deliberate strategy to sway consumers to a more profitable format. In 1990, a vinyl LP cost $8-$10, while a CD retailed for $15-$16. You do the math.
Nowadays, those CD racks don’t get a lot of attention at Shady Dog’s current location in Berwyn. Castleman is surrounded by new and used vinyl—more than he knows what to do with. It’s in bins, on shelves, in piles, in shipping boxes opened and unopened. It’s everywhere. “When we were in Wayne, a couple of stores went out of business, and we bought their LP bins,” Castleman recalls. “Mike and I said, ‘You know what? Screw it. We have enough vinyl now that we can put vinyl in the shop.’ That was 2003 to 2005—and even then, we could see that it was increasing by just a smidge.”
Though vinyl sales in the United States had been steadily increasing since 2007, Castleman didn’t see the first significant spike in demand at his shop until 2014. The revival has peaked in the 2020s, with Taylor Swift leading the charge. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, revenue from record sales was $1.2 billion in 2022. That year, vinyl albums outsold CDs for the first time since 1987. Meanwhile, there’s been a huge increase in the production and sale of turntables, and rehabbed vintage stereo equipment has also become a thing.
Interestingly, the popularity of streaming services has contributed to the vinyl comeback, as many listeners seek out music on vinyl after discovering it on Spotify or Apple Music. “So many younger people are downloading stuff, and the ones who are a little more serious about it are looking for the original hard copies of stuff,” Castleman says. “For the older people, it’s like, ‘Now I can get back into this again. This is what I grew up with.’ So there’s an allegiance there.”
Despite all of these positives, records still only account for about 8% of overall music sales—but that’s plenty of market share for the little guys. “I’m not sure I ever had any premonition that vinyl was making a comeback,” says Adam Matone, who opened MaTones Music in Collegeville in 2016. “While I was cutting my teeth at other shops, the idea of opening my own just wouldn’t leave me be. I looked at my friends running successful shops and just decided to go for it.”
“Interestingly, the popularity of streaming services has contributed to the vinyl comeback, as many listeners seek out music on vinyl after discovering it on Spotify or Apple Music.”
Matone says his youngest customers are in grade school. “I hope this comeback doesn’t stop any time soon,” he says. “The shop is almost a 50-50 split between new and used vinyl. There are well over 10,000 records in here, and every day I’m racking my brain trying to figure out how to put out more.”
Where does Matone source his inventory? “The short answer is anywhere I can. Over the years, I’ve gotten a pretty good reputation for paying fairly and being honest with people,” he notes. “In the beginning, I was really hitting the pavement and seeking out collections. But now, for the most part, people come to me. I still go out and make house calls for larger collections. I’ve been very fortunate to have the opportunity to purchase some wild collections over the years, and I hope it keeps up. We’re buying every day of the week.”
And serious vinyl collectors are willing to pay top dollar for coveted finds. “The highest price for an LP I remember getting was $1,400 for an original Khan Jamal Infinity LP,” says Pat Feeney, whose Main Street Records has been a fixture in Manayunk for 33 years. “He was a jazz vibes player from Philadelphia who co-founded Sounds of Liberation and also played with the Sun Ra Arkestra.”
And when it comes right down to it, vinyl’s true beauty is in its tangibility. “The tactile aspect is huge,” says Castleman. “I realize it’s a pain in the ass when you’ve got to get up and flip it after 20 minutes. But in a way, that ritual is kind of the fun … And the artwork—that’s a lost art. In a world where things are less and less real, records couldn’t be more real in that way. They represent a time when people thought things were more real.”
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