Behind the glass doors of Urban Outfitters on Broadway, blue-haired employees wrap flan­nels around their waists and wear paint-speck­led shirts. Stashed between curling banisters near the middle of the store is a 30-foot high display where Dr. Dre hangs beside Abbey Road. Smooth Jazz, Classic Rock, Blues and Electronica: all genres have a place on the wall of the Urban Outfitters vinyl sec­tion. Beneath the display are even more record albums, wrapped in plastic and crammed into wooden shelves, selling for 35 dollars each. These shelves might look like a decoration that add to the store’s alternative am­biance, but it’s with displays like these that Urban Out­fitters has become the largest retail store seller of vinyl records in America.

In the fall of 2014, Urban Outfitter’s Chief Ad­ministrative Office Calvin Hollinger announced to Wall Street analysts that his company was the top seller of records in the world. In the U.S. alone, 9.2 million LP vinyl records were purchased in 2014, a 3.1 mil­lion increase from 2013 and a tenfold increase since 2005. Bloomberg discovered that technically, Amazon controls 12.3 percent of the market share and outsells Urban Outfitters, which is second with 8.1 percent. But Amazon is exclusively online, and for shoppers who want to pick up a vinyl record in person, Urban Outfit­ters has become the most popular spot.

I talked to Chris Cochrane, the manager at the New Haven branch of Urban Outfitters, about their record sales. “Corporate decided to bring in records a couple of years back. Selling vinyl must have sounded risky at first,” Cochran said. “People have been downloading music, legally and illegally for ages, but it’s been sur­prisingly big for us.” Though he declined to offer exact sales figures, he happily reminded me of Urban’s status as premier vinyl retailer in the country, describing the breadth of clientele that their vinyl section attracts.

“Super hip hop fans come in and pick up a Dr. Dre album. A little girl will come in and buy the new Taylor Swift. I sometimes see older guys coming in to browse the records. I once had a guy in his thirties come in looking for Metallica.”

Urban Outfitters was the 10th leading apparel re­tailer in the U.S. in 2013, but all of the top 10 best selling vinyl albums of 2014 can also be bought there. Urban Outfitters appears to have supplanted the tradi­tional American record store. In the summer of 2012, Cutler’s Record Shop, a New Haven institution since 1948, closed its doors, citing a bad economy and fall­ing CD sales. I told Cochrane about this. He wasn’t living in New Haven at the time of Cutler’s clothing, but suggests that Urban Outfitters has succeeded in vinyl sales by leveraging their reputation as a popular fashion retailer.

“Maybe being just a record store didn’t work,” he said. “The name of Urban Outfitters draws people in. People come for the clothes and the environment, and then they come in and see the display. Corporate’s done a really good job of attracting everyone to the store with their wide range of styles, and the records sell because they fit with the Urban brand.”

I SPOKE WITH YALE MUSIC PROFESSOR MICHAEL Veal about his experience with vinyl. As a music in­structor born during the age of records, his own con­nection to the medium is strong. However, he doubts records’ lasting power as anything but boutique. “I think that though records are experiencing a surge in popularity, they are going to remain a fashion acces­sory,” he said. “They are a cultural cache, they have hipster value. I don’t think a majority of the music con­suming public will return to records. People like myself never left them.”

With no authentic record stores left in New Haven, I visited one a few towns over in Orange, Conn. Merle’s Record Rack has been in business for 52 years, and Mike Papa, the store’s current owner, has been working there for 45. “I’ve never filled out a job application,” Papa told me. “I had my first job in high school work­ing at this record store. Then after I graduated college about thirty years ago, I bought the place.”

Merle’s felt like it had been stolen from the sev­enties. There were no gaudy displays—only humble troughs painted black and filled with gently used re­cord albums. Discount bins overflowed with two-dollar albums. Soft rock—not the heady electro-pop of Urban Outfitters—wafted from speakers. Other merchandise hung from the walls and sat stacked on tables: Beatles posters, 8-track players, incense sticks, Woodstock photographs, dream catchers and Gumby figurines. Merle’s doesn’t just sell records; it sells history.

As different as Merle’s and Urban may appear, both Cochrane and Papa agree that records are attracting many younger listeners. Papa, however, seems more mindful of the technology with which kids are con­suming their music. “A lot of kids come in looking to buy records these days,” Papa said, when I asked about his clientele. “The funny thing is that a lot of them are listening to it on a crappy little turntable that doesn’t give them the better sound, the full am­biance. They’re listening to it on little Crosley things that have one little speaker that doesn’t give you the true sound of the hi-fi stereo.”

Urban’s record display was surrounded by a vi­brant array of these Crosley turntables, some set in lacquered wood, others painted in the lurid colors of the sixties. Cochrane confirmed Papa’s impression, telling me that these Crosley players are popular with consumers. “A lot of kids are getting on board and buying record players,” he said. “Parents are buying record players for their kids at Christmas. Even I got one for Christmas,” he adds. “Our polaroid cameras have been really popular lately too. Well they’re not Polaroid brand; they’re Fujifilm instant cameras. Vin­tage items sell really well.”

IN THE FALL, I VISITED JORDAN BOUDREAU, MC ‘18, to listen to some records. His turntable is twice as old as he is: a Sears Solid State turntable with AM/FM radio, cassette player, and tape recording functionality. When he wants to relax to music, he forgoes his MP3 player, and turns to the old Sears player that he dug out of his attic.

“What do you want to hear?” he asked, gesturing towards his small library of roughly twenty albums. I pulled out an album with no art: just a pink cardboard sleeve missing a chunk in a corner. It was a Columbia Re­cords album, “Hawaiian Melodies, by Harry Owens and His Royal Hawai­ians.” I handed it to him. He took the album from me and crouched over the turntable. I watched as he pried open the sleeve, peeled apart the thin sheets that encased the vinyl, and carefully pulled out the disk by its edges. He lifted the needle on the turntable and slid the disk into place.

“The record player’s a bit broken, but it sounds fine.”

Jordan placed the record on the machine and it began to spin; the raised needle gently lowering into the vinyl’s grooves. At once, Owens’ rendition of “Princess Poo Poo Ly” drifted out of the speakers. The sound felt dampened and a faint crackling persisted throughout the song.

Afterwards, I talked to Sam Smith, TD ‘18, about why he liked records. “They make me feel fancy,” he said. “I’m being more honest here than I’d like to admit. I also like the little needle thing. There’s a whole big to do of put­ting on a record.” Listening to a record with Jor­dan had felt satisfyingly tedious. Unpeeling the sleeve, removing the record from the player: the movements looked more deliberate and natu­ral than tapping on a screen. Every action had some reaction: a sound or distortion. When a button is pushed, a wheel starts to spin; a needle drops.

Near the exit at Merle’s, Papa had hung framed news clippings from articles about Merle’s onto the wall. “Going Back in Time,” read one headline. “Nostalgia seekers treasure vinyl discs,” said another. The re­cord store and the modern fashion boutique seem to profit from the nos­talgic appeal that Professor Veal mentioned; the belief that “older is better.” Traditional record shops entice younger listeners with a “fancier” music experience. At Urban, vinyl records have become accessories to retro fashion.

SMITH’S FAVORITE RECORD ALBUMS ARE A MIX OF OLD AND NEW: a copy of Kanye West’s College Dropout that he bought from Urban, and his first edition copy of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors. His favorite album, however, is Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run, which he only has on MP3. “I’d love to have that album on vinyl,” he told me. He thinks it’s worth buying again just to hear it on a different media. “It sounds a little bet­ter,” he said. “Listening to vinyl is like watching a movie on 35mm film. It’s the same movie, but I don’t know, it feels more tangible. It might not be obvious, but the uncompressed version of a song is very large. When they edit down to MP3 they have to cut out a whole range of sounds that are theoretically outside your hearing range.”

According to Papa, a good record album doesn’t sound just a little better, it makes a big difference. Recently, both casual and professional listeners have been drawn to this vast difference in quality. “A lot of peo­ple that are going back to records are musicians. They can hear the high pitches and the low pitches.” He demonstrates by moving his hands in waves. “Imagine all that you hear through your earbuds as a flat line—in the business it’s called death line. When you listen to real analog audio taken from a vibration, it’s much higher and much lower. You can hear the waves. When you listen to a real record player with solid speakers, the sound comes at you in stereo. That’s what gives you the warm full acoustic sound.” Even within our range of perception, there are tangible musical qualities that are lost in the digital world of ones and zeros.

In addition to the decline in sound quality, Papa mourned the long-gone pastime of listening to a whole record album. “Back then, albums were developed to take you on a journey,” Papa said. “You pulled out a record, put on side one and played it through. Then you turned it over and you played that side through. You played the album from beginning to the end, then you did it again and again, and one more time when your friends came over. Nobody does that anymore, but I guess there weren’t a lot of things clamoring for your time back then. ”

Papa hesitates to bring in newer music to Merle’s because of the way people consume it today. “Artists build albums around single tracks now. I can’t bring in new stuff when three weeks from now everybody will have moved onto the next big thing. Back then when you bought a record, you owned it. You weren’t going to throw it away.”

Veal agrees. “Nowadays, people don’t want to spend so much of the entire album when they’re only going to listen to three or four songs,” he said. “If albums weren’t as long people might be more inclined to buy them in their entirety. Peoples attention spans are taxed to their limits by all the infor­mation that surrounds us.”

At Urban, however, modern sells. “We sell both old and new stuff,” Co­chran said. “Any current musician will also release albums in vinyl. A lot of kids have come in to buy Taylor Swift’s new album. Katy Perry was also another big seller. They never fly off the shelves immediately, but after a week or two of the digital release, the kids come in and pick them up.”

In 2014, music industry revenue saw a five percent decline from the previous year. Vinyl record sales, however, jumped 54 percent. Rock mu­sician Jack White led the surge, selling 86,700 copies of his new album Lazaretto last year with over 40,000 in the first week of its release. It was the best-selling vinyl album in 20 years.

At a time when it takes just seconds and the click of a button to listen to any music you’d like, it’s hard to make sense of the record craze. Sure, some listeners enjoy the extra effort that comes with a record while others hear the music differently. But records aren’t new. What’s new and ap­pealing is the bright packaging on the Urban Outfitters wall. While they’re hearkening back to another time, records are becoming an accessory to another brand on Broadway.