Zac Ziegler: I'm Zac Ziegler, and you're listening to Oregon Rainmakers from KLCC. On this edition, I talk with Greg Sutherland, owner of Eugene's House of Records.
When I moved to Eugene about a year ago, my family packed most of our stuff into containers or a trailer. The lone exceptions were precious cargo. I had one car trip with my dogs, and another with a handful of musical instruments I didn't sell off and my slightly trimmed-down vinyl record collection.
For many people over 40, physical media were more than just a collection of books, music or movies. They were a means of self-expression. What sat on our shelves said something about us. Physical media began to die off as iPods and e-readers entered our lives, but it's now coming back. 2025 was the first billion-dollar year for new vinyl in five decades, and streaming subscriptions accounted for about half of all money spent on music. So what does the return of records, CDs and even cassette tapes mean? I stopped by a Eugene staple to find out.
House of Records has been around since 1971 and has called a converted home on 13th Avenue home since 1973. In 1986, a young man by the name of Greg Sutherland began working in the shop. He became the manager about 20 years later and the owner a few years ago. We start by talking about the switch from vinyl to CDs in his early days.
Greg Sutherland: When I started in 1986, we had about 10 CDs. They were all used. There was either one Phil Collins or a bunch of Windham Hill CDs, and there was a Residents double CD that I quickly became fascinated with. The store was all vinyl except for those 10 CDs, which were behind the counter. By 1989, I was already working on setting up an entirely new stock with CDs instead of vinyl. They were still printing vinyl up until about 1990, though not very many. In 1988 and '89 is when artists started having just CDs and cassettes. For a while, there were three formats: cassettes, CDs and vinyl, all selling equally. Then vinyl kind of disappeared as far as us ordering new vinyl. We still did, but not nearly as much. The whole store got switched over from vinyl to CD between 1990 and 1993. The '90s were the golden age. We made so much money because CDs were so expensive and everybody was switching over.
Then in 1999 came the iPod, and that just stopped business cold. We went five straight years where we made less money each year than the year before. We just thought there wouldn't be any physical media because everybody was going to be listening on their iPods. What ended up happening is that people quickly discovered that iPods were easy to lose and sounded terrible, and that listening to music in earbuds is not the same as listening to music on a nice stereo system with good room sound and good speakers.
Around 2005 or 2006, coincidentally or not, that's when the resurgence of vinyl started. It was just a trickle at first, but by 2006 or 2007, we could tell something was going on. The first Record Store Day came, I think, in 2008.
Ziegler: Yeah, I actually looked that up just a bit ago so that I'd have it fresh in my brain.
Sutherland: We didn't participate in the first Record Store Day. We just thought it was a quick fad. There were only 35 releases, but the next year so many people were asking about certain releases that we just had to do it, and we've done it every year since.
Ziegler: Coincidentally, that was about the time I was starting to work in college radio, and I remember that resurgence of vinyl. People actually, all the DJs, thought it was so cool when people started sending albums in again and we put turntables back in the booth. Was the crowd primarily the audio geeks? Were you getting people who were DJing and spinning stuff? Who was that key demographic when vinyl started to come back, and has it changed since?
Sutherland: The DJs and the audiophiles never left vinyl. All through the '90s, we sold vinyl, just not as much. We sold a lot of hip-hop and techno and house vinyl to DJs. We still sold classic rock and things like that, and jazz and blues and all the other things. But from about 1990 to 2005, so 15 years, basically a generation, all those people just skipped vinyl.
Then in 2006 and 2007, what I noticed was that most of the people who were buying vinyl were young. I still get older people who come in and say, 'You guys still sell records?' They just haven't kept up with the fact that it's been 20 years since records came back. They don't know that because they consume their music in a different way and got rid of their vinyl in the '80s or '90s.
I think the kids who first started getting into vinyl realized: wow, this sounds a lot different than MP3 codecs and iPods. A vinyl record has depth, warmth and a three-dimensional quality that MP3s and iPods and even CDs don't have. Most of that music is compressed, highly compressed, so that it fits on a file. What that does is flatten out the music and knock out some of the highs and lows that you would normally hear, or maybe even sense. Some music can be felt but not heard, and that gets wiped out with digital media, in my mind.
So I think that some of these kids thought, wow, this sounds really different, and they started listening to vinyl. Then maybe a buddy came over and listened to a record with them. Who knows, maybe they did A/B tests, comparing the vinyl sound with the same exact recording side by side, and figured it out. Then maybe that buddy started buying vinyl. It just becomes a chain of occurrences where more people hear it. Word of mouth, as always, is important.
To get all the way back to your question: I think it's mainly younger people who got into vinyl and brought it back into the consciousness. Now another generation has come along, and they love vinyl too, even though they didn't grow up with it. Neither of these two generations grew up with vinyl records in their homes, so it's a very nostalgic thing to them. I think it's an incredibly romantic story. I wouldn't have ever predicted in the '90s and early 2000s that 20 years later we'd be selling mostly vinyl.
Ziegler: What do you think it is? These days people can just pay their Spotify monthly subscription and have access to this massive trove of music. What makes them come into a store and drop $30 on a vinyl record? Or maybe we're getting into other, cheaper means like CDs and even cassettes, which are becoming a thing again. What is it that makes people circle back around? Is it all about quality, or do you think there's something else to it?
Sutherland: My co-worker Ian insists that a lot of these kids are buying records for the covers and that they don't even open them. They take them home and put them up on their walls. Honestly, $30 or even $35 or $40 for a vinyl record seems like a lot of money, but for an art piece you put on your wall, that's actually cheap.
Ziegler: And if you think back to that time, on The Tonight Show or Late Night or whatever program, when the musical guests came up, they were always holding up the vinyl. There is something about that physical size that's nice and easy to see.
Sutherland: I think the whole hunters-and-collectors thing about human beings is really showing up here. People like to collect things and have a little bit of something, whether it's books, art or music. A record is unique in that it combines so much. You have the audio aspect, and you can listen to it over and over again. When you buy a vinyl record, it's yours forever. But then there's also the visual aspect of a record, and a kind of literary aspect. If you buy an old jazz or blues record and turn it to the back cover, there's a bunch of liner notes that teach you about the artist and the recordings. And then there's the tactile experience of holding the record in your hand, putting it on the turntable, lifting the needle. There's a hand-eye coordination thing there. It's a ceremony.
Also, records have a side two, where an artist has to think: how do I want to start this? It's a new beginning, a new sequence. CDs, it seemed like people just threw a bunch of tracks at the medium and stuck them on a disc, and then you're listening to something for 40 minutes straight or more. CDs can hold 80 minutes of music, and a lot of artists took advantage of that and added more material, which from a collecting standpoint is cool. But let's say you buy a Hank Williams CD with 28 cuts on it. By the time you're done, it's kind of mind-numbing. He's one of the greatest artists of all time, but his songs can tend to sound the same if you listen to 28 of them in a row. Whereas when they were originally released, most of his songs came out on 78s that were only two tracks.
There's also the whole thing about compression that we don't talk about as much. It's a little bit difficult on the human ears. There's an edginess to a compressed CD or file, and there's even a term for this: digital fatigue. It kind of wears you out.
Ziegler: Yeah, I remember Neil Young talking a lot about that when he was doing the tours for his Pono player, about digital fatigue and just how things sounded harsh on his ears. Him talking about it evidently worked well enough that I bought one of those.
Sutherland: Neil Young has an amazing essay, I don't know if it's still online, about digital music and what it does to you physically and why it sounds the way it does. It's amazing. I read it way back in the '90s. Even then he was crusading against it.
Ziegler: A quick note before we take a break: We couldn't find an essay by Young to this effect, but he was quoted expressing a similar view in The New Yorker in 1996, saying of digital recording, "It's the Dark Ages of music." We'll have a link to the article on our website. He also made that remark in the 2001 biography "Neil Young: Reflections in Broken Glass" by Sylvie Simmons.
A big thing for a lot of record stores these days is what you just mentioned: Record Store Day coming up. I wonder if part of what revived physical media is that as things go digital, there is so much less to collect. We have streaming services for movies and TV. How much do you think the appeal of cool little exclusives plays into it? It's almost like the audio equivalent of Funko Pop figurines.
Sutherland: Collecting is just a thing. I personally like the aesthetic of a wall of records. I like how that looks. It's inviting. It makes you want to go and check them out. Same with books. We have two separate ways of displaying our records in the store. One is tall shelves, library-style, where you see the records from the spines only. Then we have flip-style racks where you can flip through them and see the whole cover in front of you. Both are really effective ways to display records, and we take advantage of that.
Fred, who used to work here, had this great theory that the less you have in the racks, the more you sell, because people can browse more easily. As far as having something like that in your home, a wall of records or books or whatever, I like that aesthetic. I know I've lived with some women who don't, but...
Ziegler: My wife isn't 100% thrilled with my record collection. It has to stay in the low three- or four-hundreds because of that, but yeah.
Sutherland: Well, mine's in the low 3,000s, but my wife loves records too. She worked here for 15 years with me, and our stepdaughter works here now. So we all love records. She does not police my record collection, but she does tend to like it when I move things along.
Ziegler: As we're sitting here, you're dusting off some records that have obviously just come in. Looking at titles like Kool and the Gang sitting here, how much of physical media sales is used versus new?
Sutherland: It blends pretty well. I would say it's probably 60/40, new to used, but some days we sell more used and some days we sell more new. There is still a stigma attached to used records, especially for younger people, but it's also a nice, cheap way to pick up music. I also have to say that an older used copy can sound better than a new one. Let's say you bought an original pressing of Abbey Road. It's going to sound different than a new reissue because, unfortunately, they don't tell you this, but a lot of new records are digitally remastered.
Ziegler: They're not working from that master tape anymore. It's a FLAC file on a computer that gets fed into the equipment to etch the record.
Sutherland: That's right. Not all of them, but a great deal are that way. So you're basically buying records that sound like really good CDs, and that's not the worst thing in the world, but it does sound different if you put an original copy next to a brand-new reissue. Some people might be disappointed at what they hear.
Ziegler: I was very surprised to see cassettes come back around. I remember when I was in fourth or fifth grade and got my first Discman, I was ready to toss out all of my cassettes at that moment. Did you have that same surprise seeing people gravitate back toward cassettes, or did you see it differently?
Sutherland: I'm surprised. The cassette thing has actually been going on for a while, though. There was a little label called Burger Records, back in the early to mid-2010s, mainly punk and indie rock, and they emphasized cassettes over LPs and CDs. Lots of kids bought these cassettes. They were cheap and extremely portable, even more so than CDs, and they're cute. I think a lot of kids just liked them. And there's that nostalgia factor: wow, this is something my grandparents used to listen to.
Let's not forget the mixtape, either. That was a very big deal in the '70s and '80s, maybe a little bit in the '90s, and now people do it with CDs or Spotify playlists. I think cassettes sound pretty good, honestly. They're warm. Some are a little bass-heavy, and if you don't store them correctly or they get too hot they can sound a little warbly, but I'm shocked at how long some of mine have lasted and still sound good. It's just another format, and people seem to be digging it.
Ziegler: Thanks for chatting about how physical media have managed to re-emerge in our lives, and for talking with all of us who are getting our bookshelves filled back up with these things.
Sutherland: Sure. Thanks for having me.
Ziegler: That was Greg Sutherland, the owner of House of Records in Eugene. This has been Oregon Rainmakers from KLCC. I'm Zac Ziegler. Thanks for listening.
