“There’s no money in the music business.” But that’s not stopping local artists.

A glowing smile crosses Charlie Glasspool’s face as he looks at the striking, oil-painted cover of his latest album, 3C84’s Myrtle in the Forest, and speaks about his decision to release it on vinyl. “There’s something very special about this project,” he says. “I wanted to have a piece of art. It’s really quite magical to listen to it in this format.”

It remains a tenuous and uncertain time to be making and selling music as an independent artist. Digital streaming services dominate the market, driving down prices and shifting listeners’ inclinations away from owning any music at all.

But in a small act of resistance to digital streaming’s hegemony, the vinyl revival continues apace, with records having overtaken CDs as the second most popular format for music sales in Canada. 

“City to city and community to community, it depends,” says Bennett Bedoukian, who has experience as a touring musician, booker, and employee at Peterborough’s only independent record store, Bluestreak Records. 

Artists may sell mostly one format in one city, mostly another (or nothing at all) in the next town over, Bedoukian said. In Peterborough, “for many of the shows I book, if people will buy things, it will mostly be vinyl.”

Indeed, in 2024, there were at least 12 new vinyl releases from Peterborough and area artists, from the noisy punk rock of Cross Dog’s All Hard Feelings, to the hot-rod rockabilly of Nicholas Campbell’s Gonna Have a Ball Tonight, to the ambient industrial sounds of Garbageface offshoot Gnostic Front’s All War is Spiritual War.

Artists come to the format for a variety of reasons. There is, of course, the audio fidelity: audiophiles wax rhapsodic about the uniquely warm and organic sonic qualities of vinyl, particularly when compared to the variable audio quality of digital streaming.

A record is also an opportunity for songwriters to present a unified artistic statement and a singular, directed experience for the listener. The 27 tracks of Glasspool’s Myrtle in the Forest were sequenced with “a sense of flow, an organic feel to it” inspired by Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, Glasspool said. That experience would be ruined by a shuffle button.

Meanwhile, Calvin Bakelaar wrote the tracks on his debut record, VANCAMP’s Diner Coffee, specifically for the album and considers them a unified thematic statement, reflecting on his own upbringing in a small southern Ontario town.

Bakelaar also speaks to the “intentionality” of vinyl. “You’re intentionally choosing to purchase the album, not just stream it to try it out. You intentionally choose to flip to the B-side to listen to the rest of the album, because you’re enjoying it.” 

In the ephemeral digital era, there is power in the decision to give a part of your home over to a physical object, perhaps setting up a dedicated space for a turntable and record collection.

A minor miracle

But despite the attraction of the medium, it’s a minor miracle these records exist at all, given the economic barriers independent artists face in producing them. That Peterborough-area musicians collectively released 12 vinyl records last year is a testament to the health of the local scene and artists’ commitment to their craft.

“There’s no money in the music business,” Bedoukian said bluntly. So, if an artist releases their music on vinyl, “it’s only going to be because [they] care about it immensely, and [they] want to show people that [they] care about it.”

While several local artists mention that their supporters specifically requested music on vinyl, and they’ve achieved (modest) sales, the economics of local music, and especially local vinyl, remain deeply precarious. 

The low prices streaming giants have conditioned listeners to expect simply can’t cover the costs inherent to album production — studio time, mixing, mastering, and paying session musicians, not to mention the sweat equity of the countless hours that go into songwriting.

Pressing vinyl piles on even more expenses. A significant portion of the cost comes from creating the metal master plate, from which all copies of the record will be stamped. The metal master is permanent, meaning that the cost per unit goes down the more copies are produced. But for an independent musician doing a meagre run of 100 or 200 copies (assuming the pressing plant is willing to fill an order that small), the cost can run as high as $18 per unit.

At Bluestreak, new vinyl records often retail in the $40-50 range, but some local musicians still sell their albums for $20. “I’m losing money,” one artist admitted. “There’s money on the table, but I’m ok with that, because I want my music to be accessible.”

Sometimes, grants can help an artist get closer to breaking even. The Electric City Culture Council’s Grants for Individual Artists program, for example, funded VANCAMP’s Diner Coffee record.

To support local artists, Bluestreak doesn’t take a cut when selling their records. “We sell them and give the money right back to the artists,” Bedoukian said. “If you as a local musician are putting out a record, you tell people to come here to buy it, and hopefully they’ll buy something else while they’re here, as well.”

Despite all the challenges, vinyl retains a certain romantic mystique for artists. For Bakelaar, Diner Coffee represents the culmination of a lifelong goal: “When I was a kid, I was like, I want to write a song. And if I can write a song, then I’m going to write an album. And if I’m going to put an album out, I’m going to put it out on vinyl. Whether or not people buy it, I just wanted to see the thing I created in an actual physical form.”

This article was updated on February 20, 2025, to include Kelly McMichael’s record, After the Sting of It. (And to increase the count of records from 10 to 11!)

This article was updated on February 27, 2025, to include The Shape of Home: Songs In Search of Al Purdy. (And to increase the count of records from 11 to 12!)