I first became familiar with Veronica Skrimsjö’s work in a December 2023 episode of the Women in Vinyl podcast. That conversation, exploring diversification of vinyl culture and gender stereotypes in record collecting, would have been recorded around the time she completed her most recent book, The Vinyl Revival, Gender, and Collecting Aesthetics, which is the focus of this review. Skrimsjö frames vinyl collecting as involving ‘active, creative consumption’. Collectors don’t just buy records – they seek, select, and curate them; they construct them as collections through practices of organization and display; and they sometimes turn their collecting practices into forms of artistic expression as evidenced by the veritable explosion of highly stylized content on Instagram and other social media platforms. In short, collecting is both a material and aesthetic pursuit.

Skrimsjö also argues that record collecting is a gendered social practice. Popular culture has long portrayed vinyl collectors as obsessive technology fetishists, completists, catalogue experts, rock and jazz genre enthusiasts, and scarcity chasers – the socially awkward white male captured in the ‘High Fidelity stereotype’ (see Shuker, Reference Shuker2004). Though it is a partially fictionalized construct, this stereotype has proven quite durable and generated material consequences in the form of gatekeeping practices that marginalize women, queer, and gender non-conforming collectors. Not only are these collectors rarely, if ever, visible in media representations, but in the real world they often face skepticism about their knowledge and experience barriers to participation in vinyl communities, both offline and in social media spaces. It is their voices and experiences that Skrimsjö centres in her book.

Part of the Routledge Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series, The Vinyl Revival, Gender, and Collecting Aesthetics targets both academic and popular audiences. As such, it engages critical theory and popular culture scholarship, though with a light touch, considering questions such as: Is vinyl’s dominant signifier sound, image, or touch? What defines a collector? How do collecting and fandom intersect? Is collecting a form of commodity fetishism? Despite the theoretically rich nature of these questions, and the temptations they present to go deep into the academic literature, the book remains highly accessible and approachable for all readers. Its empirical texture comes from Skrimsjö’s autoethnographic accounts of her own record-collecting activities, and her interviews with women and women-presenting DJs, record store managers, and collectors. A notable strength is its geographic lens: rather than focusing on dominant global media culture hubs like London or New York, Skrimsjö turns to Liverpool in the UK and Gothenburg in Sweden.

The book’s structure makes its argument clear. Chapters on listening, fandom, and social media establish its discursive terrain, while ‘Voices in Vinyl: Unpacking Gender Narratives’ grounds its claims in a handful of ethnographic portraits. We meet Winnie, Liv, and Everly, managers of independent record shops, and collectors Cora, Selma, and Billie, whose experiences reveal how gender inequities intersect with gatekeeping and various claims to authority. Other chapters examine the material infrastructures of the vinyl revival: Record Store Day is presented as an exemplar of social ritual in service of market capitalism; the Vertigo label’s swirl era, which ran from 1969 until 1973, is included as a case study of authenticity, scarcity, and rarity; the Barton Collection is presented as a case of status, authority and cultural capital; and Bengans, a well-known Gothenburg record store and destination for Nordic collectors, is presented as a positive case study for inclusivity owing to its gender diverse staffing, broad availability of multiple artists and genres, and its open, spacious, and carefully curated physical layout (p. 96).

Methodologically, Skrimsjö combines industry data with autoethnography and long-term engagement with collectors recruited via social media. She is transparent about her insider status as a member of the community she studies. This affords researchers opportunities to gain closer access to the lifeworlds of their participants and to bring their own experiential lens to the phenomenon they are seeking to understand and explain. At the same time, it creates challenges of analytical distance, and so I would have been interested to read more about the reflexive strategies she used to navigate tensions between her participant and analyst roles. Skrimsjö’s focus on collectors who prioritize content generation on social media also yields valuable insights into how identity and taste are performed publicly: ‘social media allows vinyl enthusiasts to display the records as if they were clothing … where the record forms part of your attire via aesthetic and visual composition’ (p. 33). Yet privileging these participants risks overemphasizing performativity at the expense of other questions. What records do they cherish and why? How do tactile qualities, paratexts, or other material factors shape their engagement? Though Skrimsjö notes that each person’s ‘record collection is a microcosm’ (p. 84) that helps us understand their tastes, collecting practices, and biographies, these questions still linger in these ethnographic cases.

As noted, the geographic lens is a major asset of the book. Bengans foregrounds Gothenburg’s standing in Nordic vinyl culture, while Liverpool – home to The Beatles, the Merseybeat era, and a UNESCO City of Music – offers a counterpoint to London’s dominance as the central node in UK music history and media culture scholarship. Site-specific studies matter because they reveal how local histories, regional identities and retail ecologies shape inclusivity and taste-making. Skrimsjö’s storytelling here is very good and makes the case for both cities as attractive destinations for vinyl tourism – though I also take her point that ‘[t]ravelling to a record shop can potentially make it more special than normally because it becomes an event’ (p. 94). The chapter ‘Popular Music as Cultural Heritage’ examines DIY and ‘Do-It-Together’ practices, framing community archiving and collective action as counters to exclusionary narratives.

As a scholar writing a book about record stores, I found the sections on Record Store Day and retail culture particularly interesting. In what I hope is a positive signal, several shop owners and managers I’ve interviewed across Canada (many of them Boomer, Gen-X, and Millennial-aged men) express acute awareness of the ‘High Fidelity stereotype’ and deliberately strive to create more inclusive spaces for women, LGBTQ+, and collectors from other equity-deserving groups, through a combination of staffing decisions, design and layout choices, and the genres or artists they curate for display. For some, this is a simple business decision – creating an inclusive record store environment is good for sales; for others it reflects their ethical commitments to equity and diversity. Regardless, as the data reported in the book makes clear, a new generation of collectors is already reshaping the vinyl music industry and its communities. Generation Z, ‘the group most likely to have bought a (new) vinyl record in the past twelve months’ (p. 59), have different values and interests in vinyl than their parents and grandparents did, are less likely to own a turntable, and are more likely to engage in ‘extra-musical consumption’ (acquiring vinyl albums for art and display).

Overall, The Vinyl Revival, Gender and Collecting Aesthetics is a highly accessible and enjoyable read that deepens our understanding of how gender and aesthetics shape record collecting culture and practice. It’s given me much to think and listen with.