Is vinyl dead ?

As a owner of a record/cd store(thank God not my day job) I can say vinyl is not dead but is on life support. As far as sales goes, vinyl is probably less than 5 percent industry wide. It has become a niche market. Yes there are more lps available on vinyl than past years and yes analog is selling but compared to the digital market it is quite small. That said, I prefer vinyl over cd and still buy records but the future of music reproduction and music sales is digital. I think there will always be a vinyl(remember when it was just called records)market but it will grow smaller over the years. I still have folks walk into my store looking for 78s.

No one was given the choice between vinyl and cd. On the retail side once cds came out the distributors(read labels) would no longer take returns on vinyl. In other words if you bought X copies of vinyl they were yours. On the other side if you bought cds and didn't sell them you could return them for credit. You can see why retailers had no choice but to get rid of vinyl and stock cds.