08/08/2026
It’s a muggy Thursday afternoon in late July and a group of teenage girls and boys are in my stiflingly warm record shop in the Malvern Hills poring over the latest Olivia Rodrigo LP.
They jab excitedly at the cover art depicting Rodrigo upside down on a swing before flicking through the new release racks, fi*****ng The Strokes and Gorillaz and thumbing a collective nose at the Rolling Stones and Angine de Poitrine, the fashionable Dadaist duo who wear giant polka dot noses and play frantic, stuttering guitars.
In the end the gang shuffle outside without a purchase, heading next door to the second-hand CDs which represent far greater value for money among a generation newly engaged by the lure of physical media and the idea of a broadly retro ‘analogue’ aesthetic.
Their custom is great news for me and my manager Russell who find ourselves more and more frequently welcoming polite and knowledgable young customers drawn to the enduring phenomenon of the vinyl record - not to mention the 40-odd-year-old compact disc and - perhaps most curiously and notably of all (drum roll)… the humble cassette tape!
Gen Z has saved us, we often remark, as we witness the ongoing upturn in under-25s shopping with us in a retail environment that until five or six years ago seemed destined to be overrun with wheezing old blokes like me (I’m 61).
We had often feared the demise of the independent record shop as a viable commercial reality, not least because before Covid our customer base consisted predominantly of - let’s be frank here - pleasant but often jaded older men, scarred by years of rifling through the same tired old stocks.
Surely, we thought, the odd Boomer occasionally popping in to upgrade their Jethro Tull collection would not be enough to sustain us as a serious going concern. But then suddenly things changed, and now a significant portion of the 7.6 million vinyl albums sold in 2025 (according to the British Phonographic Industry) are spinning on the turntables of music lovers born some time after 1997.
This cultural shift, fuelled by Gen Z’s partial rejection of the joylessly reductive nature of streaming, has led to a renewed push by labels and manufacturers to ramp up production in a UK industry now worth up to £196 million per year.
The focal point of this frenzied activity is the annual Record Store Day (RSD) event in April, spearheaded by the Entertainment Retailers Association, pulling in up to 300 of the UK’s estimated 500 record shops for a day of community, live music and hundreds of sometimes overpriced and underwhelming records.
It is a common moan among some newer artists that they cannot get their albums to market because the pressing plants are jammed up for months on end with dozens of fairly low-key titles being given a makeover for RSD. There seems to be a kernel of truth in this, as new release activity early in the calendar year appears to coalesce around the Big Day.
Gen Z’s impact on this year’s celebration was symbolised by the release of an LP by Labi Siffre, the 81-year-old British musician whose obscure 1972 song Cannock Chase - a gently pastoral nod to the West Midlands beauty spot - inspired the creation of more than 100,000 Tik Tok videos. This single instance tells you all you need to know about the contemporary music consumer and how they might be making their buying choices.
We are not complaining. Day after day teenage and early 20-somethings descend on our shop - a cramped former Victorian stable hidden at the end of an alley next to a posh Indian restaurant - and leaf through their favourite records.
Their choices reflect the consensus: Taylor Swift, Harry Styles and Olivia Dean for the pop kids; Fontaines DC, Geese and Wunderhorse for the indie cohort.
The ‘90s is vogueish, with a clamour for acts such as Sade, Jamiroquai and of course Oasis, while from rock’s golden age the untiring colossus that is Rumours by Fleetwood Mac continues to outpace all-comers.
But if one artist encapsulates the hopes, fears and cultural unease presented by Gen Z, it has to be Radiohead. 1997’s OK Computer - often called the Dark Side Of The Moon of the ‘90s by ageing Q-types - is by some distance our best selling long-player, young audiences aligning with its dystopian themes of paranoia, isolation and societal fracture.
Nearly 30 years on it is the album that seems to have unwittingly predicted the nature and scale of social media-fuelled dread, and like all the best records it is a friend you can rely on, keep with you, turn to in extremis.
Elsewhere hip hop, metal and alt. rock prove a heady enticement for our customers whose desires are constantly being sated by the ‘Big Three’ record companies - Universal, Warners and Sony.
The corporate giants are endlessly supplying industrial quantities of ‘limited run’ albums pressed on a rainbow of coloured vinyl and encompasssing all of the most significant rock and pop of the past 60 years.
It all begins and ends with The Beatles, certifiably the act that has proved most capable of transcending generations with its beloved catalogue of more than 200 songs being continually discovered anew. While other ‘heritage’ artists (Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Bruce Springsteen) begin to show signs of slippage, the Fabs’ allure remains so strong that a cleaned-up Rubber Soul from 1965 will likely be this year’s ‘Q4’ Christmas market leader.
At our shop in the foothills of the Malverns - Elgar country - we try to take it in our stride. Last year the Financial Times named our modest provincial outlet in its list of the world’s best record stores, alongside the doyens of vinyl retail in London, New York and a handful of European capitals (it was particularly gratifying for us to be recognised in the same vein as the established old guard of Soho’s Berwick St).
Guardian readers bestowed a similar honour on us some years earlier, describing Carnival as ‘more than just a record shop’ - words of affirmation that were very much embraced in what is, alongside bookselling, a notoriously tricky corner of the retail landscape.
The writer Pete Paphides described us as his ‘Platonic ideal of a record shop’; while endorsements from tastemakers such as Stewart Lee, Stuart Maconie, Broadcast and The Cinematic Orchestra have helped to cement our reputation. Meanwhile, in the confines of our courtyard or small acoustic space we have hosted acts as diverse as the avant-garde violist Alison Cotton and quintessentially English musician Stephen Duffy, a one-time Malvern citizen who wrote so tenderly about our bucolic home.
Following the FT story sales soared as hordes of music lovers from miles around beat a path to our door, curious to see what the fuss was about.
But even in the few months since our 15 minutes of media coverage the rules of the game have already begun to change.
You might be forgiven for thinking that to be a vinyl retailer in 2026 you must first be a performer - or more accurately a performative creature - and an actual record shop second.
With commerce now governed by social media, Instagram and Tik Tok are overburdened with cheeky chappies, flirty females and earnest studious types unleashing their stodgy commentaries on our in-store activities.
There’s the hustler in a hat; the bloke in a shed; the father-and-son shtick; and of course the girl in her un**es, all trying to proffer a new take on what is, in essence, a fairly unremarkable existence: we sell records (for goodness sake we’re not composing these musical treasures, just hawking them!)
So much of this content is inauthentic and drenched in artifice that we prefer to just get on with our backroom duties in the shadows and leave the jazz-hands stuff to our humblebragging brethren.
Chris Heard
