50 Fun Facts About Vinyl Records

How many separate grooves does a stylus follow across each side of a typical vinyl LP, from edge to label?

One continuous spiral runs from the rim to the label, so a needle set down at the edge can play the whole side without being moved.

Which 2021 Paul Thomas Anderson film borrows its title from an old slang nickname for a vinyl record?

Licorice Pizza was a Los Angeles record shop chain, named after an expression that likens an LP to the colour of licorice and the shape of a pizza.

Which band hid looping gibberish in the run-out groove of a 1967 album, so it plays until the needle is lifted?

The Beatles closed Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band with the loop, straight after a 15-kilohertz tone that John Lennon suggested adding to annoy dogs.

Which pair of NASA probes, launched in 1977, each carry a gold-plated record of Earth's music and greetings?

Voyager 1 and 2 each carry the copper disc, which is meant to be played at 16⅔ rpm and travels with its own stylus and playing instructions drawn on the cover.

The word album for a music collection comes from bound sets of 78 rpm discs that resembled books of what?

Photographs gave the format its name: by about 1910, shops sold bound books of empty sleeves so buyers could file several three-minute discs together.

Which brittle resin, secreted by an insect, were most 78 rpm records pressed from before vinyl replaced it?

Shellac is scraped from trees where the female lac bug leaves it, and at least 50,000 of the insects are needed to yield a single kilogram.

Which annual music award's trophy is a small gilded model of an early horn-speaker record player?

The Grammys take their name from the gramophone: organisers first planned to call the prizes the Gramophone Awards, then ran a mail-in contest for something shorter.

Which format did vinyl albums outsell in the United States in 2022, for the first time since 1987?

Compact discs sold about 33 million copies that year against more than 40 million vinyl albums, as revenue from records grew for a sixteenth year running.

Which Rolling Stones album's original vinyl sleeve, conceived by Andy Warhol, featured a real working zipper?

Sticky Fingers unzipped to reveal a pair of white briefs, but the zip was costly to produce and damaged the vinyl record tucked inside.

Which DJ technique is Grand Wizzard Theodore widely credited with inventing while his mother was telling him off?

Scratching began, by his account, when he held a record still to hear his mother's scolding and found himself rubbing it back and forth under the needle.

Which plastic, better known from plumbing pipes and cable insulation, are vinyl records pressed from?

PVC, short for polyvinyl chloride, is where the word vinyl comes from, and it let grooves sit more than twice as close together as the older brittle discs allowed.

At which speed, in rpm, does a standard 12-inch vinyl LP spin, a figure first used for film soundtrack discs?

33⅓ rpm was first used in 1926 on the 16-inch Vitaphone discs that carried sound for early talking pictures, two decades before the LP reached shops.

Which term do collectors use for the lesser-known second track on a vinyl single?

B-side tracks have sometimes proved more successful than the songs they backed, and a double A-side is a single on which neither face is treated as secondary.

Which Beatle's copy of the White Album, stamped with serial number 0000001, sold for $790,000 in 2015?

Ringo Starr's copy set a world record at auction; every sleeve carried its own stamped serial number, and the first four went to members of the band.

Which 1970s dance genre made the 12-inch single popular, giving club DJs longer and louder mixes?

Disco needed the room: giving one song a whole side let engineers space the grooves wider, which allows louder levels and a broader dynamic range.

Which gemstone, polished to a tiny point, typically forms the tip of a modern turntable stylus?

Diamond became the standard tip after decades of single-use steel needles, which the abrasive old discs quickly wore down to fit the groove.

Which storage position does the Library of Congress recommend for vinyl records to keep them in good shape?

Upright on edge is the rule for discs, and the same guidance asks for sturdy dividers every few inches to support the whole face of each sleeve.

Which 2000 John Cusack film, based on a Nick Hornby novel, is set in a Chicago record shop called Championship Vinyl?

High Fidelity moved the story from London to Chicago, yet Hornby said it sometimes felt like a film in which John Cusack reads his book.

What do the letters EP stand for on a record that holds more music than a single but less than an album?

Extended play releases usually run 15 to 30 minutes, and they have long been popular with punk and indie bands because they are cheaper and quicker to make.

Which American label unveiled the long-playing record at a New York hotel press conference in June 1948?

Columbia showed off the LP at the Waldorf-Astoria after its engineers were set the target of at least 20 minutes a side, where a 10-inch 78 held about three.

Which company answered the LP in 1949 by launching the 7-inch 45 rpm single with its large centre hole?

RCA Victor was unwilling to license its rival's system, and the two-year standoff between the formats became known as the War of the Speeds.

Which German-born inventor created the flat disc record and the gramophone, rivalling Thomas Edison's phonograph?

Emile Berliner, who founded the United States Gramophone Company in 1894, had earlier invented a telephone transmitter that was one of the first microphones.

Which style of LP sleeve, popular from the mid-1960s, opens like a book to show artwork or lyrics inside?

Gatefold sleeves fold shut to the size of a standard cover, and progressive rock made them famous with sprawling paintings by artists such as Roger Dean.

Which direct-drive turntable, introduced in 1972, became the standard deck for hip hop and club DJs?

Technics SL-1200 decks kept turning at the correct speed even while a DJ wiggled the record by hand, because the motor drives the platter directly.

Which founder of Third Man Records paid $300,000 at auction for a disc from Elvis Presley's first recording session?

Jack White bought the 1953 disc of My Happiness, and two years after the sale his label opened the first record pressing plant in Detroit since 1965.

Which Bronx DJ pioneered hip hop in 1973 by using two copies of one record to stretch out its drum break?

DJ Kool Herc called the dancers who waited for those stretched-out breaks break-boys and break-girls, which is where b-boy and b-girl come from.

Which audio advance reached records in the late 1950s by cutting a separate channel into each wall of the groove?

Stereo sound in a single groove was conceived and patented by Alan Blumlein of EMI in 1931, more than 25 years before such discs went on general sale.

Which country's LP releases traditionally come with an obi, a paper strip folded around the sleeve?

Japan uses the same word for the sash tied around a kimono, and the strip lets shoppers see what an album contains; a second-hand record that still has its obi can be worth more.

Which singer-songwriter's unreleased tapes filled Great White Wonder, the 1969 LP seen as rock's first notable bootleg?

Bob Dylan had taped some of the songs with The Band in West Saugerties, New York, in 1967, and others in Minneapolis six years before that.

Which bandleader received the first literal gold record in 1942, for 1.2 million sales of Chattanooga Choo Choo?

Glenn Miller got the disc from his own label, because early gold records were publicity gestures by record companies; an industry-wide award scheme only began in 1958.

Which crooner's The Voice became the first pop album issued on the new long-playing format in 1948?

Frank Sinatra had first released it in 1946 as a set of four 78s holding eight songs, and some critics have called it the first concept album.

Which Italian tenor, who cut his first discs in Milan in 1902, became the first international recording star?

Enrico Caruso was paid 100 pounds for that first session and went on to make around 250 records, at a time when many opera singers dismissed the gramophone as a toy.

What was the name of the dog shown listening to a gramophone horn in the His Master's Voice trademark?

Nipper was born in Bristol in 1884 and had been dead for three years when his second owner, Francis Barraud, painted the famous picture in 1898.

Which online database and marketplace, started in 2000, do collectors use to catalogue and trade their records?

Discogs, short for discographies, was built by an Intel programmer as a database of electronic music before it opened up to every genre and format.

Which comedy troupe's 1973 LP was cut so that one side played different sketches depending on where the needle landed?

Monty Python's Matching Tie and Handkerchief is sometimes called a three-sided record, and which half you heard depended on where the stylus happened to land.

Which punk band's 1977 single on A&M was named the most collectable record ever by Record Collector?

Sex Pistols copies of God Save the Queen on that label are scarce because only a small number were pressed before the group signed to Virgin instead.

Which British club scene, centred on venues such as Wigan Casino, prized rare and overlooked American 45s?

Northern soul DJs hunted down limited pressings on labels such as Okeh and Ric-Tic, and the dancing grew out of Manchester's Twisted Wheel club.

Which rock star co-created the 2016 HBO drama Vinyl, about a 1970s record executive, with Martin Scorsese?

Mick Jagger shared the creator credit with Scorsese, Rich Cohen and Terence Winter, and the series starred Bobby Cannavale as label boss Richie Finestra.

Which creepy-crawly nickname is given to the small plastic insert that lets a large-hole 45 fit a thin spindle?

Spider is the collectors' name for the insert, whose first versions were solid zinc, hard to fit and almost impossible to remove without breaking the disc.

Which novelty record format sandwiches printed paper between clear plastic so artwork covers the playing surface?

Picture disc pressings have a long ancestry: around 1900, some discs already had the dog-and-gramophone trademark etched into the playing area to deter piracy.

Which thin type of record, pressed on a vinyl sheet, was often tucked into magazines and music instruction books?

Flexi disc records arrived commercially in 1962 as the Eva-tone Soundsheet, and hobbyist magazines later used them to hand out computer programs.

What do collectors call the ungrooved band between a record's last track and its label, where matrix numbers sit?

Dead wax often carries more than codes: cutting engineer George 'Porky' Peckham became known for etching messages into it.

Which machine tool, better known from wood and metal workshops, cuts the groove into a master disc?

Lathe cutting was once done into soft wax and later into a harder lacquer coating, which is why a freshly cut master is itself called a lacquer.

Which American trade body gives its name to the equalisation curve that records have followed since the 1950s?

RIAA equalisation cuts the bass and boosts the treble when a disc is made and reverses both on playback, which narrows the grooves and so lengthens playing time.

Which genre's sound systems pioneered the dubplate, a one-off acetate cut so that no rival could play the same tune?

Reggae crews took the idea further with dubplate specials, recorded with vocals that name the sound system and boast about it to win a clash.

Which country is home to GZ Media, the Loděnice plant known as the world's largest vinyl record manufacturer?

Czechia's GZ Media takes its initials from Gramofonové závody, which translates as Gramophone Record Factory.

Which country is home to Zero Freitas, a bus magnate whose hoard of millions of records is said to be the largest?

Brazil's best-known collector bought out the Record-Rama archive in 2013, a haul of around three million discs that took eight semi-trailers to move.

Which recording technique hides a message that only makes sense when the record is spun in reverse?

Backmasking alarmed some Christian groups in 1980s America, who staged record-burning protests and pushed for laws against the practice.

Which accessory lets a DJ hold a record still while the turntable platter keeps spinning beneath it?

Slipmat design is credited to hip hop pioneer Grandmaster Flash, who wanted to move a record backwards without too much drag or friction.

Which Bing Crosby recording, first released in an album of 78s in 1942, is the world's best-selling physical single?

White Christmas was recorded in just 18 minutes in May 1942, and his version alone has sold an estimated 50 million physical copies.