Over the past decade, pop has gone from a fringe seller at record shops to one of their bestselling genres
WITH HIS INSTAGRAM posts of old Thrasher magazine covers, flyers of seminal post-hardcore group Jawbox, and pictures with Neko Case, Matt Jencik is not your stereotypical Taylor Swift target. The 50-year-old, long-haired, bespectacled longtime buyer for Chicago’s legendary Reckless Records admits he’d probably be listening to Van Halen at home. But in records stores like Reckless and around the country, things have changed drastically.
“I never in my wildest dreams thought I’d have to think about Taylor Swift [vinyl] as much as I do now,” Jencik, who’s worked at the store for more than two decades, says with a warm chuckle. “I have to hustle so hard to get that stuff because it always sells out really fast, it’s hard to find, and people want it. If we don’t have it, it’s a problem. It’s changed how I approach my job.”
Jencik is one of many record store reps nationwide who’ve seen a similar shift over the past several years. As a Rolling Stone analysis of the 100 bestselling vinyl albums of each year since 2012 shows, pop is taking over from rock as the medium’s dominant genre. As vinyl has once again become a mainstream listening and collectible format, vinyl buyers are getting increasingly younger, several owners say, and the most popular albums have shifted from the indie rock and classic rock catalog albums that defined vinyl’s resurgence in the past decade to mainstream pop records from the likes of Swift, Olivia Rodrigo, and Lana Del Rey.
Reckless has long carried some level of pop music, but Jencik says he’d never seen it so prominent as in recent years. “There’s always been ebbs and flows for what we’re selling, but I don’t remember a time where our whole store was just different because of it,” Jencik says. “It makes it seem like it’s shifted our identity. People think that’s the store we are now, but we’re still an indie-leaning shop. But we’re selling thousands of copies of these [mainstream pop] records. By far, the majority of what we sell now is this major label stuff. And what are we going to do? Just not do that? It’s not like we made a concerted effort to change what we sell; it’s just what people keep asking us for.”
Matt Vaughan, the longtime owner of Seattle’s famed Easy Street Records, has a similar perspective. When he opened his store in the late 1980s, it became a mecca for hard rock, particularly with the city’s burgeoning grunge scene that gave birth to legends like Nirvana and Pearl Jam. That’s still in the store’s DNA, Vaughan says, and reflected in some of his top-selling records of 2023. (Pearl Jam, former Seattle rock group the Rockfords, and Duff McKagan are all in the store’s top five.) But just as prominent were four Swift records, Gracie Abrams’ Good Riddance (Number Six), Rodrigo’s Sour (Number Eight), and the Barbie soundtrack at 14.
“We’re following the trends; sometimes the best leaders are the best followers,” Vaughan says. “We saw a lot more kids in their teens and twenties coming in. Pop was the minority five years ago, and we put our arms around it because we liked those customers and a lot of the music too. That minority became the majority. And these fans are buying a copy of [Pearl Jam’s 1991 debut album] Ten and DMX at the same time too. They’re more open-minded than we give them credit for.”
Vaughan says he recalled the first inklings of the shift with Del Rey’s second album, Born to Die, over a decade ago. But since the pandemic, he says, it’s become much more apparent. “I started to really notice the shift more with release parties,” he says. “There was a time where there were really low turnouts, [and] those parties were just forgotten. Now, we’re over capacity, understaffed, and ill-prepared when we have one for a kid like Omar Apollo, and the line’s around the block. What’s happening?”
For Matt Mona, who’s owned and operated Ka-Chunk Records in Annapolis, Maryland, since 2011, the change has been clear. In his first year of operation, the Black Keys, Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes, and Neutral Milk Hotel were some of his bestsellers. Last year, however, Swift took up six slots, while Phoebe Bridgers and boygenius — decidedly rock but with significant pophead appeal — had three spots.
Other notable albums on Mona’s Top 20 included music that went viral on TikTok such as Steve Lacy’s Gemini Rights and pop-leaning hip-hop records like Mac Miller’s Swimming and Tyler, the Creator’s Igor. (More randomly, Mona’s top seller was Minecraft Volume Alpha, a soundtrack from the popular video game.)
“Pop music was like box office poison when I first brought it into the store years ago,” Mona says. During our 30-minute phone call, he rang up customers on Panic! at the Disco’s Death of a Bachelor alongside Katy Perry, boygenius, and Lorde. “I just could not sell pop; I couldn’t get it off the shelf. I still have all those indie-rock records I like to sell like Dinosaur Jr. and the Wipers, but the sheer amount of pop music has just increased and increased.”
Rock is still vinyl’s biggest genre — at least for now — but its hold continues to slip as the shift toward pop becomes more apparent. On the year-end Top 100 vinyl chart from Luminate, the music data platform that powers the Billboard charts, Swift alone made up half of the Top 10 in 2023, while Rodrigo’s Guts took sixth and Del Rey took the eighth and tenth slots for last year’s Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd and 2012’s Born to Die. (Travis Scott’s Utopia took fourth, while Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours was the lone rock album in the Top 10 at Number Nine.)
