when i was in highschool im the early 2010s old people on the internet complained about kids calling records “vinyls” and i always assumed this was a made up phenomenon. i suppose i’m still a young person (26), but even when i was a much younger person i never heard anyone seriously call them that. though maybe i just know the wrong young people.
in chinese the words for record (唱片) and vinyl (黑胶) are pretty consistently kept distinct. just as in the united states or anywhere else there is a big record collecting culture here, though i find it slightly interesting that that’s the case, since records were never really the primary musical format on the mainland, so all the old records are imported from elsewhere. a lot of the music stores i’ve visited have most of their floorspace devoted to records with just a few shelves in the back for CDs, which are what i’m more interested in browsing, since CDs seem to work better for finding older Chinese music i wouldn’t hear otherwise.
i know i’m going to the wrong places though, because none of them have a section for tapes, which from what i understand was the dominant format here in the 80s and 90s. so i’ll have to keep looking for a place with a big cassette collection.
Edit: though now that I think about it, China might actually be a decent place to go if your prinary goal is buying old Japanese records, since there are a whole lot of them here, and once plane tickets prices fully normalize to pre-pandemic levels, travelling to China and staying a few weeks is probably cheaper than going to Japan.
