Many thought old-fashioned records had gone the way of the dinosaur, but they refuse to die

It's a Sunday afternoon and Yang Haisong seems to be in a chipper mood. Under a blazing sun on a warm day in Beijing he sits on the side of a road smoking a cigarette. Yang, a founding member of the Chinese rock band P. K. 14 and its lead vocalist, is taking a break from activities in Free Sound, a record store in which he has been talking to fans about the band's seventh studio album, What We Talk About When We Talk About His Name.

Yang hails from Nanjing, Jiangsu province, and it was there that P.K. 14 was formed nearly 22 years ago before going on to become one of the most influential rock bands in China's indie rock scene.

"I love record stores," Yang, 46, says. "Of course listening to music online through streaming services is incredibly convenient, but when I hold cassette tapes or vinyls in my hands I feel this connection with the music."

The band's latest album, released on Oct 14, 2018, was recorded in Berlin, and in addition to being streamed online, it was distributed on record and cassette.

"For me this record shop felt like the right place to present the album to the public," Yang says.

Yang was talking a couple of weeks before Record Store Day, an event that a group of record store owners and employees in the United States established in 2007 aimed at highlighting the importance of record shops to the music industry.

The first Record Store Day took place on April 19, 2008 and is celebrated by record stores around the globe. This year's event takes place on Saturday.

Yang, also a producer and chief executive of Maybe Mars, one of the largest independent record labels in China - and whose founding in Beijing coincided with that of Record Store Day - announced that to mark the day this year the company would hold a live show in the capital on April 21 featuring three indie rock bands: Lonely Leary, Muzzy Mum and Streets Kill Strange Animals.

Three days before the show the record label will release a compilation of vinyls featuring the three bands' latest singles, and P.K 14 will contribute two singles to the compilation.

When Yang gets to Free Sound his fans are waiting in a basement room whose walls are adorned with concert postures featuring well-known Chinese rockers such as Dou Wei and Ma Tiao.

The fans have done well to find Free Sound, for it is a shoebox of a shop tucked away in a small alley in downtown Beijing. And those who do find it will quickly be disabused of the quaint notion that old-style phonographic recordings have gone the way of the dinosaur.

Instead the 100-square-meter shop prides itself on being an independent distributor of vinyl records and other musical recordings.

In the basement Yang greets his fans, who have already bought the new album, either as vinyls or cassettes.

"I am impressed by the cover design of the new album," says a round-faced young man with black-framed glasses. "It's usually the first reason for me to buy an album."

The experimental cover design of P.K 14's latest album is a departure from its previous use of paintings or photographs and was completed by the band's drummer, Jonathan Leijonhufvud, along with two other designers and YVMIN Studio, a Beijing outfit that handled the 3D visual aspects. Playing with the illusion and contrast of true and false, the cover is a 3D rendering layered on top of an image. The two overlap, adding dynamism to the experiment, reflecting the way the band's 11 new songs are structured.

On the importance of record covers, Yang sees eye to eye with his fan.

"I buy a lot of albums, and it is the design of the covers that catches my eye first," Yang tells the fan. "Apart from the quality of the sound on the record, these things are pieces of art."

In the two-hour meeting, they listen to the new vinyl and talk about their affection for physical records.

"I recall the summer of 1993 when I was 20 years old," Yang says. "I bought cassette tapes of the Chinese rock band Tang Dynasty and the rock singer-songwriter Cui Jian. The songs coming from these spinning tapes stunned me and I wanted to make music like them. That's why I still stock and support the physical format. It's something for me to keep and something to hand down to my kids."

For Wang Zhuohui, owner of Free Sound, Yang's arrival is one of a series of events to celebrate Record Store Day.

Wang's shop does its bit for Record Store Day by staging live performances, fan meetings and exclusive releases. Record Store Day is a way to help keep a dying industry alive, Wang says. For him one big attraction of record stores is that unlike social media where everything is delivered at the push of a button, they offer a place people can visit and communicate with like-minded souls face to face.

The Beijing native, who quit his job in the hospitality industry and opened the shop 17 years ago, says seeing people in the shop, no matter they are looking for something in particular or simply browsing, is a delight. Over 16 years Free Sound has sold about 300,000 records, he says.

"It started out as a dream for me and I feel so fortunate to have lived out that dream."

Wang, in his mid-40s, was introduced to music by his parents, who played vinyl records at home. One of his favorite singer-songwriters is the Chinese rock musician Cui Jian, and like many music lovers of his generation, Wang enjoyed going to record shops. Sound quality and nostalgia are what draws him to vinyls, he says.

For many people it has long appeared that traditional physical records such as vinyl and cassettes were on the edge of extinction in the face of online streaming brought by the internet revolution.

Between 2002 and 2005 in particular, the fall in sales of CDs and other types of musical recordings in China was precipitous, mostly as the result of piracy and online streaming, and the customer base for record shops evaporated as people stopped buying physical records.

And it is not just small independent record stores that have struggled to stay afloat.

In the 1990s China Record Group Co Ltd, the biggest and oldest record company in the country, sold about 10 million records, such as pop, folk, and classical music by Chinese singers and orchestras, says Hou Jun, the company's vice-president. In the early 2000s the number dropped to no more than 10,000 copies, and the huge change in the way music was consumed led to many Chinese record companies folding.

In the late 1990s China Record Group Co Ltd closed down its last vinyl production line because of the decline of the market for physical records.

However, last year, as the company celebrated the 110th anniversary of its founding, it launched a project to revive vinyl production. The company has imported a production line from Germany that marks the start of the company's vinyl production, and it has set up a vinyl records factory in Shanghai that has a complete production line.

"We are optimistic about the physical records market in China though it will take some time to recapture the glory years of the 1990s," Hou says. "The completion of the factory shows that China's vinyl record production, which originated in Shanghai in the 1920s, is ready to take off again in the same city."

According to Nielsen Music's sales report for 2018, 16.8 million vinyl records were sold in North America over the year, 15 percent more than the year before.

A vinyl revival in China started in 2005 and then in 2012, says Zheng Yu, a record shop owner in Beijing. The boom is the result of a commercial rediscovery and appreciation of vinyl records among collectors and record stores, he says.

"Life is improving all the time in China and some listeners have realized that the format gives off a better sound. It's not only old fans who grew up buying and listening to vinyl but younger listeners, too. They've grown up with the internet but see vinyls as a kind of tangible entertainment and as arresting works of art."

Unlike Wang, Zheng, 37, runs his record store, Fusion Music, outside the Eastern Fourth Ring Road. Despite the location, far from downtown, Fusion Music says it has a firm fan base with more than 80,000 vinyls in the two-story store.

Zheng, also a Beijing native, says his passion for record shops was kindled when he was a child. He graduated from the Communication University of China, majoring in English, in 2003, and opened his record store in the same year. He also runs a shop on the e-commerce platform Taobao and sells more than 1,000 albums a month, he says.

One week after the 2019 Record Store Day, an event bringing together local record store owners, including Wang and Zheng, will be held at Blue Note Beijing, the first branch in China of the renowned Blue Note Jazz Club in New York. The event will bring a vinyl market of a diversity of music genres from jazz, soul, hip-hop to rock, as well as lectures on vinyls targeting those aged under 15. Celebrating Record Store Day last year Blue Note Beijing's vinyl event attracted more than 400 people.

Camo Lin, a Taiwan designer who co-launched a Shenzhen-headquartered vinyl audio brand, HYM Originals, in 2015, says vinyl sales and turntable sales on Taobao were worth about 1 billion yuan ($148 million) last year.

"It shows that vinyl culture is back," says Lin, who graduated from Tainan University of Technology, with a master's degree from visual communication design department.

His company also works with Universal Music Group China to market vinyls for pop stars such as Jacky Cheung, Karen Mok and Faye Wong, aiming to popularize vinyls among young Chinese buyers.

Turntables are designed to appeal to a contemporary lifestyle that is simple and sustainable, Lin says.

His company opened a vinyl store, called 33-rpm, in Shenzhen on March 21, and he has ambitious plans to have outlets in about 200 Chinese cities within the next two years.

"When you look at convenience, portability, and all those things, vinyl doesn't make sense," he says. "But it is rooted in a passion or love for music. Some people buy vinyls but they don't necessarily listen to them. They're collecting these things like works of art."

chennan@chinadaily.com.cn