How Indy area record stores handle the vinyl variant craze

Different versions of the same music album, known as vinyl variants, are gaining in popularity among fans.
Some collectors don’t even have record players; they just appreciate the album’s aesthetics.
The popularity of vinyl variants has contributed to a resurgence in independent record stores.

The latest Demi Lovato album, Jenna Agresta decided, was the perfect pick to christen her new record player.

Agresta, 30, recently made the trek from the Beech Grove area up to Broad Ripple’s Indy CD and Vinyl to make her first purchase after acquiring the player. But the Lovato album was not the first record Agresta ever bought: She already owned a handful of records from her favorite artists like Yungblud and mgk (headed to Ruoff next June), purchased long before she had any way to listen to them.

For shoppers like Agresta, whether the needle ever scratches the grooves is beside the point. Buying records isn’t as much a utilitarian purchase as it is an aesthetic one for these collectors: The appeal is in owning and exhibiting the records as a physical expression of fandom.

“If I like an artist, I’m going to get every single version of everything I can get,” Agresta said. “I literally just display it.”

Fans like Agresta are helping to drive a resurgence of physical record stores. For these diehards, supporting their favorite artists often translates into purchasing multiple copies of the same product. An explosion of vinyl “variants” — versions of an album with unique packaging, inserts, designs and other extras — has led fans to stock up on all possible iterations of an album.

Indy area record stores are striving to meet the increased demand as the hunt for the blue one, the sparkly one and the one with the special edition poster rages on.

Vinyl variants are far from a new phenomenon. When vinyl started to lose out in favor of CDs around the ‘80s and ‘90s, punk and metal bands would press records because it was a cheaper option. The bands would release different variants of these records on a whim, switching colors or art on each batch that individual stores received.

Then a few years ago bigger artists like Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo jumped on the trend. Now it’s customary for major names to produce multiple versions of a record for fans to collect. Music industry machinations are mostly to blame; a higher supply of albums means more sales, which translates into chart performance and popularity and plain old checks to cash. Alt rock duo Twenty One Pilots, for example, just scored a No. 1 album on the Billboard 200 with a boost from 21 vinyl variants available for purchase.

Labels drum up anticipation for these releases by distributing different variants to different retailers, keeping a tight lid on which version each store will carry. Swift’s camp, for example, will sell one version of her new album “The Life of a Showgirl” exclusively in Target and distribute anywhere between one and four of the album’s variants to independent record stores.

“They want kind of a flash point of serendipity and synchronicity for everybody to get the information at once,” Todd Robinson, who owns Luna Music on College Avenue, said. “It’s one or two more variables that we always have to factor in with, ‘When is this coming out and what version are we going to get?’”

The short notice is a tactic labels like Swift’s Universal Music Group are increasingly employing to keep the contents of big releases under wraps. That means sellers like Robinson and Patrick Burtch, co-owner of Square Cat Vinyl in Fountain Square, are kept out of the loop until the last possible moment to maintain the mystery.

Two weeks before the Oct. 3 drop of Swift’s newest album, Burtch didn’t have the link to order the most anticipated record of the year. Record labels usually send distribution information around three or four months before a release so independent stores like Square Cat have time to stock up, Burtch said, making Swift’s timeframe for “Showgirl” atypical.

“Her releases are, to be honest, kind of a pain,” Burtch said. “They don’t want a product in people’s hands before a release date.”

The hush-hush nature of big drops like Swift’s has made planning somewhat arduous for those who run independent record stores.

For one, record stores can’t tell customers which variant they’ll have in stock until labels release that information en masse. The stores also don’t know whether they can host a listening party (an in-store event that premieres a new record and usually sends attendees home with artist-issued goodies) until labels give the green light.

Often, Luna’s Robinson said, executives at the top debate the finer points until the last possible minute, trying to decide whether teal or mint green will make a bigger splash. That means stores like Luna receive information piecemeal, he said.

“You have this drip feed,” Robinson said. “Details, bits are all being locked down.”

Now that major artists have their eyes on vinyl, does that mean the medium is making a comeback? Yes, technically. Record sales have steadily climbed for the last 20 years thanks to the advent of event sales like Record Store Day and all the hoopla around variant drops. LP sales jumped from 1.3 million units in 2004 to 43.3 million units in 2024, per year-end reports from the Recording Industry Association of America.

But Andy Skinner sees a different kind of change. Skinner, who co-owns Indy CD and Vinyl in Broad Ripple with his wife, Annie, said he’s seen a shift in customer traffic over the past two decades, but the difference is not in volume. It’s in demographic.

The Skinners have owned Indy CD and Vinyl for 23 years, and they said that business has always been steady. But shoppers are skewing younger and more likely to be women these days, they said. First-time customers like Agresta usually visit a store in search of a new release from an artist they already know, but then they often become repeat customers who start to build a collection of classics.

Despite the mania surrounding new products from Swift and her modern contemporaries, Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumors” is consistently Indy CD and Vinyl’s top-selling record of the year. That album record is arguably chief among a canon of essential pressings that collectors almost always have in their catalogs, so both younger buyers and longtime record enthusiasts seek it out.

“A 16-year-old, female-identifying shopper (is) buying those exact same things, as well as Charli XCX and Taylor Swift,” Andy Skinner said. “The confluence of the internet and pop culture and technology comes right smack dab into analog collecting.”

Square Cat’s Burtch used to bristle at talk of younger customers only buying records for display, but now he doesn’t trouble himself with his customers’ motives. Maybe a shopper develops a habit, or maybe it’s their first and last time in the store; either way, that’s one more person purchasing physical media.

“That’s kind of the gateway drug into getting them into a record store,” Burtch said. “Maybe they’re just buying it as a collectible at first, ‘I’m just going to hang this on my wall’ or whatever, but there’s going to be some of those people that are eventually going to jump on.”

Contact IndyStar Pop Culture Reporter Heather Bushman at [email protected]. Follow her on X @hmb_1013.