Vinyl record sales in the US

It turns out that Americans have been spending more on pet food and more on vinyl records with almost perfectly identical enthusiasm, as though there were a demographic—and there almost certainly is—that cannot walk past a record store or a pet boutique without opening their wallet. The correlation is 0.99 across eighteen years, which is the kind of number that makes you wonder if dogs have developed a taste for analog audio. They have not, but the data does not seem to care.

The story is 2020, which did extraordinary things to household spending. Americans adopted pets at unprecedented rates during lockdowns — pet food sales jumped accordingly — while those same housebound weekends drove a vinyl revival that had been bubbling for years into outright mainstream. Both are trace fossils of a year spent indoors with disposable income and nowhere to spend it.

Eighteen years of pet food and vinyl moving in lockstep is a portrait of a consumer culture that values authenticity—or at least the appearance of it—in everything from dinner bowls to turntables. The pets are eating better, the records are spinning again, and neither trend knows the other exists. The wallet, however, feels both.