A high cost
Vitek Goyel, 38, game development professional

I think that I have started listening to more things that I hadn’t heard before, because buying has slowed down. There was a fire at a vinyl plant in California in early 2020 that created a huge global supply-chain bottleneck; the prices of vinyls went up by about 30 per cent during the pandemic. Earlier, I would keep buying new LPs and listening to them, but now I got a chance to go back and listen to what I already had. I’ve generally been buying vinyls directly from the labels or amazon.uk. There are sites like discogs.com and importcds.com, too, which sell records. There is also a vinyl sub-Reddit on reddit.com that is a helpful place to find new releases, but I think that enthusiasts were in a better place when people could congregate. There is a lot more hoarding going on right now and people have become more selfish. That community feeling isn’t there anymore. Earlier, I would enjoy going to Chor Bazaar and finding an LP for a band I hadn’t heard before, buying it for 50 bucks no matter how crappy the condition was. But the fun of doing that is kind of gone — the economics interrupted the fun of it.