Vinyl record sales in the US

It appears that Americans have developed a synchronized urge to both resurrect analogue music formats and publish their own novels at precisely the same rate, which suggests either that vinyl enthusiasts are also prolific authors of suspect merit, or that the universe enjoys a good joke about circular motion in more ways than one. The correlation coefficient of 0.967 is the kind of number that makes statisticians weep into their coffee, convinced they've finally cracked the code of human behavior, only to realize they've simply measured two separate instances of people spending money on things that make them feel less alone.

What's genuinely interesting here is that both phenomena track the same economic and cultural recovery arc since 2010—we're watching the aftermath of the recession play out simultaneously in millennial record shops and Amazon self-publishing dashboards. The 2010s saw rising disposable income among a specific demographic cohort (thirty-somethings with disposable income and nostalgia), the growth of niche cultural identity, and crucially, the technological infrastructure that made both activities suddenly frictionless—vinyl production ramped up as pressing plants came back online, while self-publishing platforms like Amazon KDP became genuinely viable. By 2023, you had roughly 2.3 million self-published titles released in a single year, a number roughly equivalent to the entire Library of Congress, while vinyl sales had climbed back to levels unseen since the 1980s.

The real pattern here isn't causation but rather two expressions of the same underlying human appetite: the desire to make something physical in an increasingly abstract world. We've correlated proof of concept with proof that we'll find correlation in almost anything if we squint hard enough. Both datasets are simply saying the same thing: people wanted to own things again.