Vinyl record sales in the US

It is a truth universally acknowledged that as more people have bought vinyl records in pursuit of analog authenticity, more people have also fallen for emails from Nigerian princes and fake Amazon shipping notifications. The correlation between phishing attacks and vinyl sales is 0.98 across eighteen years, which suggests either that vinyl collectors are uniquely gullible or that the same internet that enabled both trends has a sense of irony that borders on the malicious. We have sought warmth in our music and gotten scammed for our trouble.

Both trends are children of internet growth, though they sit on opposite sides of the moral spectrum. Vinyl sales grew from about 900,000 units in 2005 to over 43 million by 2022 as music lovers used the internet to discover, discuss, and purchase physical records—Discogs alone processes over 10 million transactions per year. Phishing attacks, meanwhile, grew from about 170,000 reported incidents to over 4.7 million as cybercriminals exploited the same expanding internet population with increasingly sophisticated lures. More people online means more potential record buyers and more potential phishing victims; the internet is a marketplace for both nostalgia and fraud, and business has been excellent in both departments.

Eighteen years of vinyl and phishing growing in parallel is a perfect summary of the internet age: a technology that simultaneously enables us to find rare Japanese pressings of Blue Train and lose our bank credentials to someone pretending to be FedEx. The same network powers both. The needle drops, the inbox fills, and the correlation means nothing except that growth is indiscriminate.