Start spinning

Be yourself; Everyone else is already taken.
— Oscar Wilde.

The spike in vinyl album sales in 2014 can be attributed to the sale of rock records. Three quarters of all vinyl albums sold that year were from the rock genre. The best-selling titles included releases from The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and several classic recordings by heritage artists such as Oasis.

In response to the continued increase in demand for vinyl, the Official Charts Company launched the UK’s first ever weekly Official Vinyl Charts in 2015. LP sales in 2015 reached a 21-year high to 2.1 million units.

Bowie was the biggest-selling vinyl artist of 2016. Five of Bowie’s albums posthumously featured in the top 30 best-sellers. Blackstar was last year’s most popular vinyl recording, selling twice as many copies as the previous year’s vinyl best-seller, Adele’s 25.

2015 was the first time that vinyl album sales surpassed digital download sales. In week 48 of 2016, the record industry made £2.4 million from record sales while downloads took in 2.1 million.

Since 2015 vinyl sales have continued to increase year on year – the vinyl revival may have been fuelled by the hipster scene, but the continuing growth of record sales, suggests that it is more than just a passing trend. Vinyl buying is no longer restricted to baby-boomers for whom the analogue format affords nostalgia. A new generation of engaged music fans value the tangibility of the record, which offers them a retreat from the passive experience of streaming and downloading. Vinyl’s rising popularity, particularly in the digital age, has confirmed the format’s timelessness.

So fire up that turntable and start spinning…let’s go.

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
Because it will help you focus you own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
What topics do you think you’ll write about?
Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.

My First Blog Post

Start spinning

Introduce Yourself (Example Post)