Vinyl record sales in the US

It is a curious fact about the universe that the price of a pint in Manchester moves in almost perfect synchronization with the number of people willing to spend £25 on a format that sounds worse than its digital equivalent, and that we have somehow noticed this. One might imagine these two phenomena existed in entirely separate dimensions of human experience—one concerning the economics of British hospitality, the other a nostalgia-driven consumer choice made largely by people who were not alive when vinyl was actually necessary. Yet here they are, correlating at 0.956, which is to say they might as well be the same thing.

The most likely explanation is that both variables are passengers on the same economic vehicle. Between 2010 and 2023, disposable income in the UK and US grew in fits and starts—recovering from the financial crisis, accelerating through the 2010s, then lurching sideways during the pandemic—and both vinyl enthusiasts and pub-goers are, broadly speaking, people with money to spend on non-essentials. A pint of lager rose from about £3.50 to £5.50 in that period; vinyl sales climbed from roughly 2 million units to 5.2 million. Both are cultural goods that benefited from a kind of nostalgic revival, both tracked with general economic sentiment, and both were probably purchased by the same cohort of people old enough to remember the 1990s fondly but young enough to afford to act on it.

What this teaches us, if anything, is that human behavior tends to coordinate in ways that have nothing to do with causation and everything to do with responding to the same invisible hand. Somewhere, someone has noticed that the price of a Tesla correlates with the number of people named Derek, and they are probably right. The universe does not care what we correlate.