The physical media revival has brought with it some strange side effects, from production bottlenecks and extended wait times on new vinyl, to unexpected, novel tech developments, such as Bluetooth-enabled cassette players.
Perhaps the strangest byproduct of all, however, is a new kind of vinyl buyer: one who doesn’t even own a record player.
We recently covered a report that stated 30 per cent of Gen Z vinyl buyers didn’t own a turntable, while a 2023 report from Luminate found that, in the US, only 50 per cent of people who had bought a record (within a 12-month window) actually owned a turntable.
While we think buying vinyl and never listening to it is a forgivable sin, through a sceptical lens, you could put this consumer behaviour down to posturing. Some might even call it a waste of a physical music format that’s becoming ever more challenging to produce and facing emergent challenges, such as the creation of counterfeit records.
Who is buying vinyl?
But Scott Hagen, CEO of Victrola – a turntable manufacturer with over 100 years of experience – is no sceptic. He understands that Gen Z’s interest in vinyl has made the generation one of his company’s key consumer bases.
We haven’t yet fully reviewed any of Victrola’s products, but we couldn’t miss the chance to talk to the CEO of a company whose history goes all the way back to the days of the gramophone. These days, the company’s aesthetic is far from gaudy, making stylish, lifestyle-friendly record players, which incorporate modern features such as Bluetooth, wi-fi and Auracast into their designs.
Hagen explains that one of the first consumers Victrola considers when designing new products “is somebody that purchased vinyl, or someone who is considering buying a record player for the first time, and they think, ‘You know, this looks like a lot of fun’.
“Gen Z, or that age range – call it 18 to around 30 – is the fastest growing segment of vinyl purchasers,” says Hagen.
And indeed, recent research by Key Production – a physical media broker and manufacturing agency – showed that the proportion of people listening to music in physical formats was greatest among those aged 18-24. As an encouraging side note, the survey also found that 18-24-year-olds were the most willing of all age groups to spend more on their wax in the name of eco-friendly production.
“Simple set-up to get a quality solution”
But for Gen Z, who are the first generation fully native to mobile devices, getting into analogue audio comes with a few hurdles.
“There’s a bias that it’s very difficult to get a great sounding, great looking product that’s not hard or scary to set up,” says Hagen. “At Victrola, we love music, we love hi-fi and all the great, beautiful products that are out there. What we don’t love is scaring people with this hi-fi, snobbish ‘analogue has to be perfect’ mindset, because, frankly, that isn’t who the core audience purchasing vinyl today are – so, we want to take the fear away.”
As a solution, Hagen stresses that “simple set-up to get a quality solution” remains a key tenet in Victrola’s new designs.
An apt example is Victrola’s Automatic turntable, which features Bluetooth connectivity, fully automatic operation, and a continuous repeat function that lets you loop one side of a record without the need for manual resets. Such products offer a middle ground for those newly interested in vinyl, allowing them to engage with physical music without the complexity of a fully manual turntable and hi-fi separates.
According to Hagen, consumer expectations around audio quality have been steadily rising. “Frankly, there’s more music being consumed today, in all different ways, than there was 20 or 30 years ago.”
With persistent upgrades to the quality of on-the-go listening formats, such as affordable wireless headphones, portable music players and in-car audio systems, Hagen says that “the expected base-level quality of sound is significantly higher” than it was in vinyl’s heyday in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
In an effort to meet that need, Hagen says that he and the company “take learnings from higher-end products, then figure out how we can implement them in a way that other people haven’t, to provide an even better product”.
As an example of this approach, he points to vibration-elimination technology developed for the company’s new Soundstage soundbase. This is a compact speaker unit that sits beneath a record player to deliver sound – it’s a convenient, space-saving solution for those wanting a compact vinyl set-up, but also a move that has the potential to cause feedback and distortion.
“Previously, we came up against a bunch of barriers. Take the Eastwood (a turntable with built-in speakers), for example. There, we were able to keep an isolated front array of speakers and get a lot more output than we, or our competitors, had… But we hit a barrier at some point, where we could only make it go so loud without vibrating the thing off the table.”
The company went back to the drawing board, and eventually returned with Victrola’s down-firing symmetric drive woofer, which uses a dual-diaphragm design with opposing woofers that share the same voice coil to produce bass while cancelling unwanted low-frequency vibrations.
“Now we’re taking those learnings and, over the course of the next couple of years, bringing them back into our lower-line products,” says Hagen.
“The industry is behind vinyl”
His confidence in the stable growth of vinyl, he says, is based not only on the consumer response to the company’s products, but also the vested interests of musicians and the wider music industry in physical media.
“I would say the industry is behind [vinyl],” he says. “Ultimately, content availability and content support from the studios and production and the artists themselves is what's always driven the demand and the consumption of the content itself. And the studios and the artists are so behind this format.”
According to 2026 statistics from the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), UK vinyl sales jumped by 19.9 per cent, driving a third consecutive year of growth in physical music revenue.
Here at What Hi-Fi?, we are always pleased to see interest in physical media grow, and alongside the vinyl sales, we’ve seen turntables continue to grow from strength to strength across all price ranges, as you can see from our best turntables buying guide. Even as times change, we’ve encountered superb new turntables, from affordable Bluetooth-equipped models such as Sony’s PS-LX3BT and PS-LX5BT turntables, to more upmarket, purist offerings from Rega and Pro-Ject.
Of course, streaming remains the dominant financial source for the music industry as a whole, rising to a record level of £1.07 billion in the UK in 2025, but Hagen believes that vinyl occupies a unique and robust position.
“People aren't going to buy [vinyl] necessarily because they think it has better quality sound, or because they think it's more convenient,” he says. “People aren't going to buy it because they think it's the most affordable, either. People are buying it because it is the second version of them going to a concert, and it is an incredible way for them to celebrate what they love with their friends.”
Looking to the future of turntable manufacturing, Hagen does not believe that innovation will be driven by “the most recent Bluetooth chip, or adding the most up-to-date amplifiers or preamps that are out there.”
Instead, he thinks that keeping a close eye on the ways that home life changes and understanding which types of connectivity and features best “connect with the way people live” will be key to keeping future customers engaged.
“I think it’s really going to be about industrial design,” says Hagen. “[It will be about] having the best industrial designers that are most connected to the end consumer, and working with them to learn as much as possible.”
What do you think? How do you see turntables evolving in the near future? Are there any features you hope to see included in modern turntables? Let us know in the comments.
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